Macron has made a pig's ear of France's vaccine rollout. But don't expect an apology #Covid-19

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
26 February 2021 • 2:21pm

Listening to Emmanuel Macron yesterday night only a few hours after the Queen’s Zoom conference with NHS senior vaccine officers, was like stepping into Star Trek’s Mirror Universe. On one side of the Channel, at their desks, four civil servants, tired-looking and practical; and one aged lady giving advice and comfort in simple words and a clear voice.

On the other, a dramatically-lit, sharply-suited man, alone for a virtual press conference following an equally virtual “extraordinary” European Council, yet with all the usual staging and props — the French and EU flags, a raised podium with the tricolour and the Élysée logo, the elegant backdrop of the recently redecorated Élysée Palace.

In short, it looked as if, instead of one cameraman and a technical crew, Emmanuel Macron was still about to lecture the serried ranks of journalists accredited to the Presidency, describing a world that bore no relation to the experience of the ordinary French citizen for the past year.

“As you know, I favour the European approach,” he intoned. “It’s the only way to organise an effective vaccination campaign in Europe. And it is bearing fruit. We have been able to rely on several types of vaccines with different technologies so that all the Member States have been able to deploy their vaccination strategies in parallel since the end of December. It would,” he added, “have been pointless to go off in a scattered order…”

On and on droned M. Macron, who’s never been able to keep any of many his staged, scripted addresses to the nation under half an hour (with luck). He fulsomely thanked European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — the German politician the most criticised in Europe since the Treaty of Rome. He explained that yesterday and today, EU leaders had been working at “identifying production capacities” on the continent, in order to produce “vaccines and other health requirements” in “suitably converted sites”.

This was familiar to anyone used to the French quasi-Soviet obsession with top-down planning. (Emmanuel Macron has recently brought back that 1946 creation, the Commissariat au Plan, dreamt up by de Gaulle for France’s post-war reconstruction, and finally killed off by Jacques Chirac almost two decades ago; the first Commissaire au Plan was none other than Jean Monnet, one of the EU’s funding fathers, which explains a lot of the European project DNA). He mentioned export authorisations and controls, not only for vaccines, but also for their components; as well as more “transparency” on supply and contracts.

The target, never named, wasn’t hard to identify: Britain, who’d committed the cardinal sin of going it alone, securing a vaccine supply, and vaccinating 27% of her population when the EU lags at 6% (and France at 4%).

France, as it happens, is doing badly. New COVID cases now exceed 31,000 daily. Testing is finally accessible (it only took us 8 months to authorise the easy and painless saliva tests Germany and Greece, to name but two, have been using all this while), but tracing is still ineffective. The state-designed TousAntiCovid app has bugs that no amount of updating seems to cure, probably because, at one stage, you need human beings to analyse the data and provide answers. There still are no vaccination centres; and this month, a new roll-out was limited to GPs, entitled each to ten doses, which they had to account to dedicated pharmacists — getting any more required extra bureaucratic bumph.

Health Minister Olivier Véran, a doctor himself, finally got his jab publicly (displaying enviable pectorals) with the Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine last week, in an attempt to counter Macron’s public criticism of that same vaccine earlier this month, plucked out of one unsubstantiated German newspaper report. (The Oxford vaccine, despite new Scottish data over 400,000 people, is still reserved in France to the under-65s).

Yet Emmanuel Macron projects no doubt — and certainly isn’t about to apologise for anything, not even encouraging vaccine doubt in a country with the largest number of anti-vaxxers in Western Europe. (You never admit to a mistake in France, a Latin heritage country where the law of the gladiators at the Circus Maximus still applies: one knee in the sand, and the Emperor’s thumb goes down.) He is up for re-election next year; and before that, some time around the summer, are slotted regional elections he will lose: his ad-hoc movement, La République En Marche, may have a lot of MPs but has no grassroots.

Like the top mandarin he is, Macron believes enough swotting solves everything. In awe-struck accents, his advisers describe his recent passion for scientific articles — even in English! — on Covid. “He’s becoming an epidemiologist! He can correct the members of the Scientific Council on precise data!”, one told Le Parisien newspaper admiringly, unwittingly conjuring images of the Great Man lecturing mere doctors and academics on their domain, with no-one else around the table or on Skype daring to put an oar in. (It’s not done, in hierarchical France, to contradict the boss — ever.) His new knowledge was plastered all over his performance yesterday, as he threw about details of “second generation vaccines”, Interferon therapy and more.

What he really sounded like was Jerome K. Jerome’s narrator in “Three Men in a Boat”, after reading an entire medical dictionary, and believing himself suffering from ever single disease in the book, except Housemaid’s Knee. The French, themselves, feel they’re being treated like the dog Montmorency.

© Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 2021