The Senate approves the vaccine pass bill with several modifications

Published on : 01/13/2022 – 07:29 AM

The Senate, dominated by the right-wing opposition, voted on the night of Wednesday 12 to Thursday 13 January in first reading the bill strengthening the tools for managing the health crisis, which establishes the vaccine pass. This text, which plans to restrict access to places of culture but also to bars, restaurants and long-distance public transport to people vaccinated against Covid-19 or well cured, was however significantly modified by parliamentarians.

The vote for the whole of the text was obtained by 249 votes for and 63 against, under the chairmanship of Gérard Larcher (LR), at the end of two long days of peaceful debates, contrasting with the agitated climate which had surrounded its adoption the last week in the National Assembly.

Deputies and senators will meet early Thursday afternoon at the Palais Bourbon, to try to agree on a common version of the text in a joint committee (CMP).

In case of agreement, it will be submitted for final adoption to the vote of the Senate on Thursday and then of the Assembly on Friday. If the CMP fails, the bill will be re-read in both chambers, with the Assembly having the last word.

Once the bill has been adopted by Parliament, it will be necessary to be able to justify a vaccination status to access leisure activities, restaurants and bars, fairs or interregional public transport. A negative test will no longer suffice, except for access to health establishments and services.

Limitations of use

The Senate made several changes to the text that are not to the taste of the government. The vaccination pass could therefore only be imposed when the number of hospitalizations linked to Covid-19 would be greater than 10,000 patients nationally, and would automatically disappear below this threshold. The number of hospitalized patients is now nearly 24,000, according to figures from health authorities.

Senators have further limited the possibility of requiring the presentation of a vaccination pass to people over 18 years of age. Minors aged 12 to 17 would remain subject to the obligation to present a simple health pass.

They have removed the possibility for owners of bars, cafes and restaurants to verify the identity of the pass holder, in order to avoid fraud. They finally opposed administrative sanctions against companies not playing the telecommuting game or not applying protocols, in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Boasting “a significantly improved text”, the leader of LR senators, Bruno Retailleau, said that “sweeping away with the back of the hand” in CMP the contributions of the Senate “would be a bad choice”. “We are reaching out, but we will not do it at any cost,” he added.

“We want accountability, but we also want proportionality,” he said earlier. The text was voted by a majority of senators from the LR, centrist, PS, RDPI groups with a majority En Marche, RDSE with a radical majority and the whole of the Independents group. About twenty LR senators voted against and another twenty abstained.

“We have a responsibility in relation to a certain number of rumors or excesses which sometimes make us lose common sense”, underlined the centrist Françoise Gatel.

On the left, the socialist Jean-Pierre Sueur noted that the vaccination pass “approaches” the group’s position in favor of compulsory vaccination.

The CRCE groups with a communist and environmentalist majority voted against, the president of the CRCE group, Éliane Assassi, criticizing “a security logic”.

With AFP