It is a president in the habit of "Doctor Macron" who disembarked in Papeete on Saturday at 4:30 pm (4:30 am this Sunday in Paris) for a four-day visit to French Polynesia.
Between the anti-pass sanitary demonstrations in metropolitan France, the pandemic which is blazing everywhere with the Delta variant and the vaccination campaign which is slipping in Tahiti, the news of Covid-19 has caught up with the Head of State, who arrived from the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
As soon as we passed the customary welcome with the declamation of the “orero” - local oratory - by two teenagers, an 11-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, who warned him that “the Tahitian people have an attentive eye. to your actions, attentive ear to your words ”, Emmanuel Macron, wrapped in the ritual necklaces of flowers, spun towards the main hospital center of the archipelago.
Objective: to launch across the ocean a call for vaccination and for "the spirit of resistance, for unity in the face of this virus".
Previously, however, he had to wait a good twenty minutes before getting off the presidential Airbus, the time to obtain the results of the antigen tests carried out on the entire delegation by the health team on board.
VIDEO.
"We have a weapon that must be used, the vaccine": Emmanuel Macron responds to the refractory
"We have a scientific weapon that must be used, the vaccine," said the president in the middle of the circle of caregivers.
I want to send out a very strong message to call on everyone to be vaccinated because we see it in all latitudes: when we are vaccinated, we are protected and we hardly spread, in any case much less, the virus. ".
If he welcomed the fact that France is preparing to pass "probably in the next few hours the milestone of 40 million first-time vaccinated", that is to say several weeks ahead of schedule, he regretted that Tahiti and in the 118 islands and atolls of the Polynesian archipelago, "hundreds of thousands of doses remain unused".
In fact, less than 30% of Polynesians are already vaccinated.
"The virus does not give in to demonstrations"
To overcome fears and mistrust, he found an unexpected ally at the Papeete hospital: Jenny Opuu, who presents herself as a “traditional healer”.
Very popular here, this Polynesian initiated into traditional island medicine wears on her white coat a superb drawing of a shark, her "animal mascot", and magnetism and other techniques to soothe the sick.
The head of state is won over.
“I asked her if she was vaccinated, she said yes and that she convinced others to do so.
I count a lot on her and on those who open, alongside the scientific, Cartesian path, the path of practices, cultures, another dialogue, the language of the heart but also a kind of ancestral passage that respects itself. equally ".
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And the demonstrators who march against a health pass deemed to infringe on freedoms, do they respect them? Yes, he assures, adding that he "listens to them with great consideration", nevertheless lambasting those who plunge "into irrational mobilization, sometimes cynical, manipulative", and recalling ... that "the virus does not give in to demonstrations ". In his call from Papeete, Emmanuel Macron clearly stipulated his vision of freedom. "The freedom where I owe nothing to anyone does not exist," he says. It “is based on a sense of reciprocal duty: if tomorrow you infect your father, your mother or myself, I am a victim of your freedom while you had the possibility (…) to protect yourself and me (…) that's not freedom, it's called irresponsibility, egoism ”.
