Fourth of the population would reject the Covid-19 vaccine in France

18-07-2020 by Mirai

If a vaccine were to be available in the coming weeks, a quarter of French people would not want to be vaccinated, according to data from the Coconel study conducted by the School for Advanced Studies in Public Health.

Around the world, the Covid-19 vaccine race has been underway for several months. If all the researchers are working hard to develop a treatment and a vaccine against the new coronavirus, some French people are skeptical.

Questioned by the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health as part of the Coconel study, 23% of French people said they would refuse to be vaccinated if a coronavirus treatment was discovered. "The main reason mentioned was the idea that this vaccine would not be safe," Jérémy Ward, a sociologist, said Tuesday June 16 at Franceinfo. Specifically, 15% of respondents explain that they would reject the vaccine because it would be developed in an emergency and is therefore too dangerous for health. Among the panel, 6% of respondents say they are against vaccination as a general rule and 2% consider the vaccine to be useless because the virus "is not very dangerous in any case."

Be transparent

The reluctance detailed by the sociologist: "They are found more particularly in the most vulnerable groups with the lowest incomes. We also found that there was a strong effect of politicization since these doubts were much more present among people who felt close to the parties. , either from the extreme right or from the extreme left, but also among people who do not feel close to any party or who abstained in the first round of the 2017 presidential elections. " In fact, women (more than 30%) and young people (almost 40%) are the least favorable to the vaccine.

To reassure the population, the sociologist advocates transparency at the Franceinfo microphone: "At the moment, we have not talked enough about the specific conditions for the manufacture of these vaccines, so these are rather the conditions imagined by But that underscores how important it is today to be transparent and communicate about the procedures by which these vaccines will be produced, evaluated. "

French distrust

If Jérémy Ward acknowledges that about 25% of the population regularly doubts vaccination, he says he was surprised by these results regarding a possible Covid-19 vaccine: "But when we look in detail, these doubts are directed at vaccines that It is the subject of public debate or vaccines that a part of the population does not see very well the interest, for example, the flu vaccine This is a special case since these surveys were carried out during the month of April, in a At a time when the number of deaths was increasing enormously, it was a period during which there was no particular debate about the danger of this vaccine since, in addition, there were not many media reports about this vaccine. So yes, that surprised me a lot "

Compared to the other G7 countries, it is in France where there is a greater reluctance regarding this future vaccine. The state and the Sanofi laboratory have decided to join forces in the search for a vaccine. The pharmaceutical group will invest 490 million euros in a new factory in France. Emmanuel Macron announced the availability of an envelope of 200 million euros as part of the Investments for the Future Program.