Don’t believe the hype – why Emmanuel Macron’s vaccine strategy is a shambles

France was “the country of science, the Enlightenment and Louis Pasteur,” Emmanuel Macron said, when he announced that entry to restaurants and a range of other venues would become dependent on a “health passport”. The invocation of the valeurs of the Republic to justify public policy is very much Macron’s style. He relishes making interventions on the world stage in the grand style of French Republicanism. 

In a 2018 speech to Congress on the condition of the climate, Macron told US lawmakers: “I believe that against ignorance we have education. Against inequalities, development. Against cynicism, trust and good faith. Against fanaticism, culture. Against disease, medicine.”

In How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People, the academic Sudhir Hazareesingh sums up the characteristics of this style of politics: it is notable for “the appeal to reason and logic, with the issue under discussion being neatly framed into binary oppositions (conflict and harmony; self-interest and the common good; morality and power politics); the sense of articulating an age-old wisdom… and a confident optimism, underpinned by a belief in France’s cultural superiority.”

When he won the election in 2017, Macron benefited from a deep sense of pessimism in the French Hexagon – give someone, anyone, a go who wants to change the country’s failing social settlement, voters seemed to say. His most fervent supporters were graduates, especially expat graduates in the UK, who appreciate the dynamism of the London labour market and resent the stuffy corporate culture in Paris. His neo-Thatcherite offer to supercharge the French capital and wow high finance resonated.

But Macron is a born contrarian – he has mostly abandoned the original En Marche project and turned to the nativist right in a gambit to head off Le Pen. There is, of course, a certain kind of Englishman for whom French Presidents work as a kind of foil against the priggish, parochial rosbifs. 

In this respect, Macron does not resemble De Gaulle or one of the great leaders of France but Giscard D’Estaing – a weak president who achieved very little but who consistently wowed the Economist-reading class in England with his aloof style and philosopher-king demeanour.

Macron’s latest vaccination drive, justified in terms of destiny and Enlightenment, has been lauded as “courageous” by the veteran commentator John Lichfield. “The tortoise is threatening to overtake the hare,” he said, comparing the early speed of the UK vaccination drive with its slow finish. 

The journalist Kim Willsher responded: “France’s vaccine programme did get off to a slow start, but that was largely due to a shortage of vaccines. You can’t vaccinate people if you don’t get the promised vaccines.”

France’s Jupiterian President’s “courageous” new policy on vaccines attempts to solve a problem of his own making. When he trashed the AZ vaccine, calling it “quasi-ineffective” in the elderly – he also helped create a massive amount of distrust for this vaccine, both in Europe and in the developing world. Shiny new mRNA vaccines are extraordinary achievements (I’m double dosed with a vaccine developed by a German company, BioNTech and distributed by Pfizer). Still, they are near useless to countries with limited infrastructure.

The AZ vaccine was (and remains) close to perfect for the needs of vulnerable populations across the world – it can be stored in a regular fridge and is cheap. So much for the Macron’s Republican-inspired war against disease.

I also find it extraordinary that Macron is being credited with speeding up the vaccination effort – everywhere where mass vaccination has effectively finished, including Israel and Wales, after a speedy beginning, you inevitably slow down as you run out of people to vaccinate. 

That France is going through this process several months later is illustrative of a deep public policy failure. And the success in getting many more citizens to sign up for the vaccine is banal – if you were told that you couldn’t go to almost all shops, the cinema, any restaurant without going through with the procedure, of course, you’d sign up tout de suite. But at what cost? Public trust does not flourish in conditions of coercion; and there is precious little trust going around in France at present.

France is, of course, an extraordinary “country of science”. And yet, it is poorly served by this president, who has wasted the early optimism of his time in office and played a leading role in one of the most dramatic policy failures of the last decade. 

If only Francophile Brits could see the truth about Emmanuel Macron – a Giscard for our times, whose failures outnumber his achievements many times over.