“The worst is behind us”, for this 5th wave of the Covid epidemic, declared Wednesday evening the Minister of Health, who plans to lift the vaccine pass before July and announces a relaxation of the rules for obtaining this pass. . “Across the country, we have exceeded the peak of contaminations (…) We are reaching the peak of hospitalizations”, declared Olivier Véran on BFMTV. “We did the hardest part of this wave” and “the worst is behind us”.
Asked about the vaccination pass, which came into force at the end of January and whose lifting is enshrined in the law for next July, the minister declared: “The vaccination pass will have an end, and given the current epidemic dynamics, it is likely that this end be well before July. Unless there is bad news”. “When we have emptied the intensive care units, and made room for the patients who normally come under the resuscitation, when there will be no more rescheduled care in our country, and if there are no new variants in circulation at that time, the usefulness of the vaccination pass will be totally questionable. And we can withdraw it”, he detailed.
The Minister of Health has also announced a relaxation of the conditions for obtaining the vaccination pass. “Scientists tell us that to benefit from the pass, we must have been exposed at least three times, that our immune system has been targeted at least three times,” he said. “This stimulation can be an injection or an infection” and “at least you must have received a dose of vaccine”. Thus, “you will keep the benefit of the vaccination pass” if “you have had one injection and two infections, or two injections and one infection (whether the latter took place before the injections, between the two injections or after), or three injections “, said Olivier Véran. But people who have had only one dose of vaccine and a single infection must absolutely receive a second dose within four months after the previous exposure to the virus, detailed the minister.
300,000 infections with a false vaccination pass
In theory, they could also seek to be infected (and therefore have a total of three exposures to the virus) but this involves a health risk for the person. Olivier Véran recalled that 7 million people currently risk losing their vaccination pass on February 15 if they do not take a booster dose. And even taking into account people infected with Omicron, that would still be 4.7 million people, he insisted.
Finally, still in terms of vaccination passes, the Minister announced that 300,000 false vaccination passes had been detected and would be deactivated over the next few days (30,000 next week, etc.) According to Olivier Véran, “at least one French person on two” has had Covid since the start of the epidemic, which started almost two years ago. Regarding contamination by the Omicron variant, less dangerous than the previous variant but infinitely more contagious, the minister mentioned a figure of 15 million people affected.