How vaccine scepticism conquered the French mainstream

As the country’s vaccine rollout picks up pace, widespread scepticism risks leaving France with more vaccines than arms to put them in, writes Per Søreide Senstad

Parisian residents waiting to get the jab at a vaccination centre in the 13th arrondissement (Per Søreide Senstad)

Logan Fenandez, a nurse at the Adolphe de Rothschild Foundation Hospital in Paris, spends his days caring for Covid-19 patients in the hospital’s intensive care unit. While he and his colleagues are first-hand witnesses to the damage that the virus can do, many do not want to get vaccinated against it.

“There is a lot of scepticism, and it is hard to explain why,” Fernandez said. “Some of my colleagues think the coronavirus vaccines are dangerous, others fear potential side effects and prefer to wait.”

The views of Fernandez's co-workers are commonplace in France. A recent survey found that 25 per cent of French general practitioners were hesitant to either recommend Covid-19 vaccines to their patients, or be vaccinated themselves. Vaccine hesitancy is even more prevalent in the general population. In an Ipsos poll from December 2020, 23 per cent of Brits and 35 per cent of Germans said that they did not want the vaccine – in France, the number was 60 per cent.