Observations

The United Kingdom still leads the European Union

There are many ways of judging the relative performance of countries in their vaccination programmes. In some of these ways, the United Kingdom still leads France. For example, the share of the population that has been fully vaccinated (both doses) is currently 61.9% in the UK, compared to 57.2% in France.

Nevertheless, France has been playing catch-up since the early days when President Macron was famously rubbishing the United Kingdom’s world-beating performance. His negative comments led French people to become amongst the least likely in the EU to want to be vaccinated. It is worth mentioning that Monsieur Macron’s comments did not relate to vaccine safety.

In relation to the EU as a whole, the United Kingdom still leads the way by most measures. For example, the EU27 as a bloc still languishes well behind the UK on the share of its population partly or fully vaccinated. For the UK the percentage is over 71%, as we showed in our first chart above. For the EU27 the percentage is less than 64%.

What about the protests in the land of ‘La Liberte’?

Many readers will have read reports about the protests taking place each weekend in cities across France, against President Macron’s law. It is true that up to 250,000 people have been protesting – an extraordinary number for the month of August when parts of the South have been so warm and when many people across France are on holiday.

Despite this it seems unlikely that much will change, except perhaps for a continued decline in Monsieur Macron’s polling ratings. As for any future repeal of this new law, all we can say is that when civil liberties are eroded by governments on a ‘temporary’ basis, these have a nasty habit of becoming permanent.

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