I secure my slot courtesy of Guillaume Rozier, a twenty-five-year-old computer engineer who, having tracked the epidemic in France since Covid-19 first reached Europe, went on to build a website to help people find vaccination appointments nearby. The day before, partially at Rozier’s urging, President Emmanuel Macron had announced that anyone over the age of eighteen could take up an appointment that remained unfilled by priority groups with twenty-four hours left to go. Rozier’s website promptly crashed, but after much refreshing I grabbed the midday slot in Meaux for the following day.

The enormous vaccination centre, or vaccinodrome, as the mass injection sites are evocatively dubbed here, is housed in a converted concert hall near a bend in the river Marne. A mix of doctors, firefighters, and enthusiastic volunteers shuffle the crowds along the line to get their doses in rows of white tents. My partner and I exchange a hearty high ten once the shots are in our arms. We celebrate with a wedge of brie and a baguette on a windy riverbank before heading back to Paris.

By the time I return for my second dose in mid-June, the vaccinodrome is mostly empty. Those who want the vaccine have taken it by now, and those who don’t will need some more persuading. A volunteer in a Pikachu costume wanders around aimlessly, looking for people to entertain. This time, the health worker has the needle in my arm before I have sat down. Her colleague rolls her eyes. ‘I am so bored with giving out vaccines,’ she says.

France has long had a complicated and contradictory relationship with vaccination. The birthplace of immunology is nonetheless the most vaccine-hesitant country in Europe, partly due to a series of healthcare scandals and bungles in recent decades over swine flu, hepatitis B, and HIV. Yet eleven vaccines, including those for diphtheria, tetanus, and polio, are mandatory in France, a policy that most accept. Not having the prized carnet de vaccination, a small booklet containing a person’s history of immunisations from birth onwards, is an ongoing bureaucratic headache for millions of immigrants like me.

Still, the distrust of government, evident everywhere from the rise of the far right and the popularity of the gilets jaunes, or yellow vest movement, runs deep in France, periodically threatening to tip the country into disarray. And so the nation that gave us Louis Pasteur also produced Didier Raoult, the maverick scientist from Marseille who has promoted the discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid throughout the pandemic. Raoult has built a mass following among vaccine sceptics, many of whom believe the government is deliberately suppressing evidence of the ‘miracle’ drug’s effectiveness so that Big Pharma can rake in the profits from a nationwide vaccination campaign.

For the less conspiratorially minded, there are other reasons to refuse the jab. In a rideshare in the Camargue last summer, our driver said she was fine with the eleven mandatory vaccines, those that had been around for decades, but she wouldn’t take a newly developed formula for Covid because she didn’t trust what was in it. Anyway, she said, Covid was a disease of the elderly, no worse than the flu. Over winter, my mortgage broker advised me that he had no need for a vaccine as he always eats organic and keeps in shape.

The government has made its own contribution to vaccine wariness. In January, Macron declared the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed across the channel in Oxford, to be ‘quasi-ineffective’ in those over sixty-five, without proffering any evidence to back this up. In March, the vaccine was limited to those over fifty-five because of fears of rare blood clots that continue to hamper take-up around the world, including in those places where AstraZeneca is the only option. France recently decided to donate its remaining supplies of AstraZeneca through its humanitarian aid program rather than using them at home, a policy that will only fuel hesitancy in those countries, some of them former French colonies, where they are needed most and where people will rightly feel they are getting the rich world’s unwanted cast-offs.

In May, Macron himself, who tested positive for Covid in December 2020, was vaccinated with a single dose – only one was needed due to his previous infection. At age forty-three, he will have received either Pfizer or Moderna.

The AstraZeneca debacle may sound familiar in Australia, but the difference here is that there was enough Pfizer and Moderna to make up for the prevarications over the Oxford vaccine. And after being left in the dust by the United Kingdom’s lightning roll-out in the midst of its winter third wave, France is set to surpass its neighbour (forty-seven per cent of the population were fully vaccinated at the time of writing). But with the Delta variant looming in daily case numbers, the fear is always for the recalcitrant. And so, having dangled the carrot of immunity for six months, in mid-July Macron brought out the stick: the pass sanitaire, or health pass.

The pass sanitaire, stored on your phone in the form of a QR code, provides proof that the holder has received a European Union-approved vaccine, or has tested negative for Covid within the past forty-eight hours, or has recovered from a past infection. When I upload my vaccination records to the app, confetti rains down from the top of the screen and it gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up. As of August 9, the pass is mandatory for those wishing to go to restaurants, bars, cinemas, museums, concert venues, or, crucially, to travel by train.

The timing of the announcement of the pass was no accident. July and August are when the vast majority of French people decamp for their vacances, a tradition not even a pandemic could prevent. A large proportion travels on high-speed rail to their summer lodgings in Provence, the Pyrenees, the Alps, or the Atlantic coast. Faced with the prospect of missing out on an entire summer, the erstwhile unvaccinated crashed Rozier’s website once more. Within twenty-four hours of Macron’s announcement, 1.7 million people had booked appointments. Later that month, Macron pinned an order of national merit to a masked Rozier’s chest in a closed ceremony at the Élysée Palace.

Not everyone has been willing to accept this minor infringement on their liberté. In the weeks after the policy was announced, hundreds of thousands took to the street to protest the pass. In the usual fashion, the protests were a mix of those with genuine concerns about the policy’s capacity to reinforce social inequalities – the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, where I live, has one of the highest poverty rates in mainland France and also its lowest vaccination rate – and those conspiracy theorists who find it acceptable to compare immunisation to the Holocaust on the very streets where Jews were dragged out of their homes and sent to concentration camps by the Vichy regime.

Still, if the summer population of Paris is anything to go by, the nudge largely worked. Just as before the pandemic, shutters are down in city businesses, emails are bouncing happily back to the sender, terraces are sparsely filled, and life has slowed to a crawl. Without the usual surfeit of tourists who make up the summer numbers, Paris is as empty as I have seen it, analogous to those eerie days after the 2015 terror attacks when locals stayed home and visitors stayed away.

The real test of the pass sanitaire, of course, will come with la rentrée, those buzzing weeks at the beginning of September when families and workers pour back into the major centres. Schools reopen, public transport fills up, socialising resumes, and the conditions are primed for an infectious disease to take hold. 

In 2020, the associated mixing that came with the autumn return caused an explosion of infections, deaths, and hospitalisations that led to an inevitable winter lockdown, including school, restaurant, and bar closures, a curfew, a limited-travel radius, and border restrictions. With little appetite left for a repeat confinement in 2021, all hopes are now pinned on vaccinations – and the social exclusion that comes with refusal – to get us through the winter. If a booster shot is required, I’ll be booking something closer to home.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.