For more than a year, attorneys for suspended caregivers have been struggling through a legal imbroglio and calling for a constitutional review of the August 5, 2021 law. So far, their requests have all been rejected. This inevitably raises questions.
By Alix Jouan
This week, a lawyer obtained the reinstatement of a suspended caregiver employed in private practice with back pay. Good, but this is only valid for one case, which will perhaps be used for others, without certainty. In the meantime, thousands of caregivers are still on the street in France, while all the other countries have reinstated their unvaccinated personnel and our hospitals suffer from a cruel lack of manpower. However, as we now know, vaccines do not prevent the virus from infecting or being transmitted to other people. What is the problem?
Emmanuel Macron, on a trip to Dijon on Friday, November 25, declared that the reinstatement of unvaccinated caregivers was not “a political choice” but a “scientific” decision. Really? Wouldn’t all this be political and just a presidential way to “piss off” this population of resistant Gauls?
Systematic blockades and rejections
The lawyers of suspended caregivers have in any case reason to seriously ask themselves the question, and us with. Indeed, for the umpteenth time, a priority question of constitutionality (QPC) concerning the law of August 5, 2021, filed with the Court of Appeal of Montpellier, has just been judged inadmissible. And it is not even the Court of Cassation that has pronounced itself, but the president of the Court of Appeal, whose role should have just been to transmit the QPC higher up…
The rejections are systematic…
Whatever the particular reasons invoked for this time, the overall impression is that the rejections are systematic and that the lawyers are faced with a blockade. No QPC, however relevant it may be, manages to find its way to the Constitutional Council so that the latter may verify the conformity of this famous law of August 5, 2021, in particular that of its articles 12 and 14 relating to the vaccination obligation of caregivers and their suspension without remuneration.
The lawyers remain determined, however, and other QPCs continue to be pleaded in various bars in France, in the hope that one of them will eventually be upheld. Miracles are always possible. To be continued…