Covid-19 vaccine health card fuels French protests

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French demonstrators took to the streets on the third consecutive Saturday to protest new restrictions on people who are not immune to Covid-19, a growing movement that threatens to complicate the country’s response to the coronavirus.

More than 204,000 protesters – many of whom denounced what they described as the “dictatorship of health” and carried French banners and flags reading “Freedom!” They staged a rally in cities across France, including Marseille and Lyon, according to estimates by the French Interior Ministry.

In Paris, where an estimated 14,000 people took part in four separate rallies, police mobilized 3,000 officers across the city. In the late afternoon, sporadic clashes erupted near the Place de la Bastille with policemen throwing tear gas canisters into the crowd.

The weekly protests present a new challenge to President Emmanuel Macron, who said in mid-July that a health permit would be necessary to enter places such as restaurants, as a way to avoid a new lockdown in the face of rapidly rising coronavirus cases. A health card is a code that can be scanned to prove that an individual has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, recovered from it within the previous six months or recently tested negative.

It took effect as the delta variable pushed the average number of new cases diagnosed per day in France nearly fourfold to more than 21,000. Hospital deaths each day from Covid-19 nearly doubled to an average of 33 in the past week. .

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