Covid-19: barely adopted, the already obsolete vaccine pass against Omicron? – LCI

A controversy in the making? Definitively adopted by Parliament after long weeks of negotiations, the vaccination pass remains at the heart of the discussions. It was Éric Caumes who threw the pavement into the pond last Friday. “From an epidemiological, public health and medical point of view, the vaccination pass is clearly a mistake”, said the head of the infectious diseases department at Pitié-Salpêtrière on Europe 1. If this new mechanism “could conceive” during the previous epidemic wave driven by the Delta variant, more dangerous than the original virus, it became “inconceivable” with Omicron, he adds. “We can clearly see that the vaccine does not prevent the circulation of the virus in the general population, we see this every day”, he justifies, recalling that France had exceeded – for several days – the threshold of 300,000 daily contaminations.

Like him, other members of the scientific community are wondering about the advisability of deploying the vaccine pass now that the Omicron variant is the majority in the territory. “In terms of public health, the impact of the vaccination pass compared to the health pass seems moderate to me”, argues Professor Bertrand Guidet, head of the intensive care unit at Saint-Antoine hospital (AP-HP), on LCI. Same story on the side of Robert Sebbag. “At the time, I said that I was for a vaccination and not a health pass. We would have had a lot fewer deaths with the Delta”, begins the infectious disease specialist at Pitié-Salpêtrière on the LCI set. “The epidemiological situation today is no longer the same”, he says. And the doctor to specify: “Today, we filled up in terms of vaccination”. Omicron’s impact is minimal “in relation to the energy that is spent today and by the acceptability of the measure”.

Abroad too, and especially in Israel, the questions are multiplying. Asked by I24News, the director of the immunotherapy laboratory at Bar-Ilan University, Cyrille Cohen, estimated that the “green passport [l’équivalent du pass vaccinal en Israël, ndlr] becoming less and less important in this crisis lately”. “In a scenario where there are fewer differences in the level of contamination between vaccinated and non-vaccinated people, one could say that the green passport has a lesser role today in curbing contamination, protecting people from this epidemic”, underlines the researcher. “We must adapt or improve our position”.

Nevertheless, despite this reluctance, many scientists continue to advocate for the vaccine pass. This is, for example, the case of the epidemiologist Yves Buisson who described the adoption of the health pass as “very good decision, although too late”. Similarly, Pierre Squara, head of the intensive care unit at the Ambroise-Paré clinic in Neuilly, considers, on BFMTV, that “the vaccination pass is a little more efficient than the health pass”.

For his part, Philippe Amouyel sees the vaccination pass as a way of preparing for the future. “Today, we are still left with 4 to 5 million people who have not been vaccinated. We have to think about the future and get out of the succession of hospital waves. For that, we need to have the greatest possible vaccination or immune coverage”, highlights the epidemiologist and professor of public health at the Lille University Hospital. “This would make it possible to pass on an endemic virus”, he hopes.