22 km from their home, ten days ago, Christian and Maria reached out and received their first injection.
Like… 20 million French people, the milestone was crossed this Saturday.
The President of the Republic announced it himself on his Twitter account in the afternoon.
From their living room in central France, however, the couple shared the same concerns for a long time: a serum developed too quickly, no hindsight, fear of serving as guinea pigs.
“We said to ourselves,
once we are vaccinated, what will happen?
We do not know what we are injected, how we can react.
It was the unknown, ”recalls this 62-year-old retired mechanic,“ a little overweight ”.
20 million: ✅ pic.twitter.com/tYQOdM4TPY
- Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) May 15, 2021
Around them, we are of the same opinion.
His friends relayed alarmist SMS chains to him.
And when a message from Health Insurance informs him that he is one of the “eligible audiences”, Christian hardly looks at him.
The vaccination will be without them.
But their opinions are changing.
Their son visits them less and less, fearing to infect them.
The fed up wins.
“We said to ourselves:
There is no reason why we should be deprived of seeing him,
” says Christian.
Maria, 57, abounds.
“We want a normal life!
The neighbors have even just been vaccinated.
This is the moment, the click operates.
" Why wait ?
I said:
Come on, I do it
”.
" Then me too !"
exclaims his wife.
"Just one dose is fine!"
"
In Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), Béatrice was also vaccinated "only to please my son and my daughter", she insists. The retiree with a lung condition caused outbursts of anguish and guilt to her children and grandchildren who continued to see her throughout the Covid year. "Still not really convinced of the effectiveness of the thing", she plans to continue to strictly apply all barrier gestures. "Ultra-priority", yet she waited for the pharmacy at the corner of her street to receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccines, "a single dose, that's fine!" »Jokes the retiree. Not even bad, in the Center as in Ile-de-France, hardly a pain in the arm, no side effects.
Christian and Maria immediately sent a proud SMS to their son. "I do not regret at all! said Christian. I am even in a hurry to have my second dose, so I will be even more protected. "
On social networks too, many French people admit "having changed their minds".
Warmly and virtually congratulated by doctors.
This is the case of @Streulette: "Without being anti-vaxx, we were not convinced but, finally, we have an appointment before next week ... Chéri worked in a cluster recently", she explains.
@MarieCoelMomp writes: "I am one of those people who refused the vaccine, but having escaped the Covid […] I get vaccinated on Saturday, I want to protect myself and protect others".
SauCailou, she "asked lots of questions to (her) general practitioner".
Reassured, she has already received her first dose.
"I went there jumping for joy," she writes with lots of parenthesis like so many happy smiles.
"People who had legitimate fears are gradually being appeased"
Of course, there will always be the die-hards, but from his medical office, Dr. Laurent Uzan notes that “the images of vaccinated Americans who can remove their masks are starting to have an effect. And then the stress comes down again, and this is quite normal with millions of people vaccinated around the world ”. Same story from Pascale, popularizer for the Vaccin France information site: “People who had legitimate fears are gradually being appeased. We must do pedagogy, she insists. Explain that RNA technology
(Editor's note: Pfizer and Moderna)
does not modify DNA and does not come out of the hat, researchers have been working on for years. "
Among the new converts to the usefulness of vaccination, there is a good contingent of pragmatists. "We still have some patients who say they come because they will need the health pass and therefore they no longer have a choice," says Clotilde Latarche, epidemiologist at the CHU Nancy. A more "snobbish" argument also explains part of the reversals, joke some doctors: while getting an appointment when you are under 50 is almost impossible, the dose is all the more desirable as it is not. can't get it.
