France’s vaccine rollout has had its difficulties in recent months. In early January, the Mail on Sunday reported the ‘French are at better at torching cars than giving Covid vaccinations’ after vandals burned 861 vehicles on New Year’s Eve – more than twice the number of people inoculated over the last five days of December. Subsequent efforts to address rampant vaccine hesitancy were not hindered by President Emmanuel Macron, who claimed the AstraZeneca vaccine was merely ‘quasi ineffective’ with one poll showing just 20 per cent of French voters had confidence in the jab in March.
Now though efforts have at last stepped up, with the country reaching a target of 10 million first doses a week ahead of its mid-April target. Unfortunately those welcome, if belated, figures were not enough for one member of Macron’s La République En Marche! Appearing on BFM TV on Monday night, French deputy Julien Borowczyk boasted that Paris was ahead of London in the number of citizens who had received a second dose of their vaccine and were thus ‘fully’ vaccinated. A totally false statement, as the journalist Philippe Corbé pointed out to him, with supporting figures:
We’re talking about vaccination statistics in France. So, we are at about 14 million first doses administered in France, 5.5 million second doses administered. I just searched for the UK figures, which were updated exactly one hour and 26 minutes ago; 33,752,000 first doses, 12,897,000 second doses. This means that in terms of second doses, they are about a million doses away from having administered the same number of first doses that we have administered. That is the situation in the UK. Those are the official statistics from one hour and 25 minutes ago.
Corbé continued: ‘Those are the figures we get every day, and we repeat them over and over, and they are regularly contested, but it is a fact’ despite a sheepish Borowczyk trying to interrupt and telling him to ‘calm down, relax.’ The segment ended with Corbé concluding:
You contested the figures. Three weeks ago we had administered around the same number of second doses. In three weeks we have fallen behind not only in terms of first doses, but also second doses. There you go, that is a fact.
Steerpike wonders what the French is for ‘mic drop’?
Comments