CONFINEMENT. As the coronavirus epidemic intensifies in France, is a radical measure such as containment a seriously possible option in 2022?
[Mis à jour le 7 janvier 2022 à 11h13] This is the word that causes the most concern: the confinement. After having closed the country twice for the first time in the spring of 2020 and then a little less harshly in the fall of the same year, could Emmanuel Macron once again introduce such a radical measure to curb the coronavirus epidemic in France, particularly in view of the outbreak of contaminations linked to the Delta and Omicron variants? If the question can be asked, the government has set a guideline that it intends to hold until the end to end the epidemic, based on the vaccination. In addition, even if a new wave can always be feared, the 5th surge of Covid in France could soon end: “beginning of the second half of January”, assures Alain Fischer, coordinator of the vaccine strategy. So, is containment a seriously considered option?
Containment in France in 2022?
The measure appears to be definitively excluded from the avenues envisaged by the executive. In an interview with readers of the Parisian, published Tuesday January 4, 2022, Emmanuel Macron assured that no new constraint would come into force at the end of the Sanitary Defense Council organized on Wednesday January 5: “The decisions were announced last week, so we must leave them to live”. In other words, no new turn of the screw is planned in the short term and that no additional constraints would weigh on the French in the coming days and weeks. Especially since no date of reassessment of the epidemic situation during a Health Defense Council has, for the time being, been communicated.
Above all, the Head of State reiterated the guideline he wishes to continue to hold with his government: “vaccination, vaccination, vaccination and vaccination pass”. A course that has already been repeated with a vengeance, with the clearly stated objective of placing constraints on people who have not yet received an injection, thus preventing them from accessing living spaces (restaurants, bars, etc. cinemas, transport, etc.). The President of the Republic was also very vindictive against them in the columns of the Parisian: “almost all people, more than 90%, adhered to it (to vaccination, editor’s note). a very small minority that is resistant. That one, how do you reduce it? We reduce it, sorry to say it, like that, by pissing it off even more. […] The unvaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And so, we will continue to do so, until the end. This is the strategy “.
Shocking remarks, which did not fail to react, but which clearly fix the turn taken by the executive in the management of a health crisis that goes on forever. Coercive measures no longer seem to be the order of the day. In the preamble to the Health Defense Council of December 27, Emmanuel Macron had already recalled the line of conduct he wanted to apply, according to comments reported by the Chained Duck: “the French are exhausted. Young people do not want to be cloistered. We must come to terms with the French spirit. The “enfermistes” summon us, with tribunes and declarations, to stop everything: social ties, work, leisure, the economy. There is no question of that. must ensure the health of the French, but also their morale “.
Can we confine the unvaccinated in France?
According to the figures, new infections and hospitalizations mainly affect people over 60 and unvaccinated people. This age group represents more than 75% of people hospitalized after contracting the Covid-19 and more than half of the patients treated in critical care. This is what prompted Emmanuel Macron to make the third dose of vaccine mandatory on pain of losing the health pass, within six months and five weeks after obtaining it. With the vaccination pass which will come into force (subject to its adoption by Parliament) from the beginning of the year, the message has passed: the unvaccinated will bear “all the weight” of the restrictions from 2022.
But the establishment in France of confinement only to the unvaccinated would encounter various legal obstacles. First, the country is no longer under the state of health emergency, the first condition for setting up containment or a curfew. Thus, it would first be necessary for Emmanuel Macron to decree a return to a state of health emergency and for Parliament to validate it. Moreover, even if this statute would be re-established, it does not grant all the rights. Specialist in constitutional law, Jean-Philippe Derosier had clarified to BFM TV in November: “I do not think that we can take differentiated measures according to the vaccination status, because the only differentiation that the state of health emergency allows is territorial.” It is for this reason that confinement of the elderly has never been established.
Even if François Saint-Bonnet, professor at the University Panthéon-Assas and specialist in the law of fundamental freedoms, estimated in Le Figaro that “if precise and objective epidemiological data are provided, I do not see what could stand in the way “and that” once medical recommendations have perfectly identified that the unvaccinated pose more risk at the collective level than others, nothing will prevent compliance with the Constitution “, the confinement of unvaccinated people in France should not therefore not be set up. All the more so a few months before the presidential election, in a context of major tensions that the country is already experiencing.