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Olivier VéranBFMTV / YouTube

ANALYSIS

PARIS, France, April 7, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — In a recent lawsuit initiated by a COVID-vaccinated octogenarian against the French State, a revealing statement was made by French health minister Olivier Véran. According to the nationwide mainstream radio station Europe 1, Véran said: “Vaccinated individuals are also those most at risk for severe forms and death in the event of initial vaccine ineffectiveness or post-vaccine reinfection or variant virulence.”

These words are certainly worth a second read. In substance, and if Europe 1 reported them exactly, they amount to saying that people who have recently received the COVID-19 jab are not less, but more exposed to becoming ill and even to dying because of the Wuhan virus.

So France’s health minister is acknowledging — albeit in the relatively discreet environment of an administrative procedure — that vaccinated individuals can actually be more exposed to severe COVID-19 than if they had not received the jab, either because the vaccine has not yet produced its effects, or, more worryingly, because they had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2 prior to their vaccination and the new “wild” infection can be worse, especially when in “variant” form.

A caveat here: This sounds like part of the fear 2.0 project denounced by anti-lockdown scientists after Geert Vanden Bossche started warning about variants that could lead to making a new vaccination campaign necessary for people who have already been vaccinated, as LifeSite’s Patrick Delaney made clear only last week.

But whatever the objective, Olivier Véran has now officially said that vaccination does not actually protect individuals as promised. On the contrary, they should stay at home, wear masks, and observe “social distancing” as usual.

The 83-year-old man who launched a “référé-liberté” procedure before the French Council of State — an emergency lawsuit before the highest administrative court with an aim to protect civil and fundamental liberties against decisions made by the executive — was among the first people in France to receive the COVID-19 experimental vaccine. He got both the Pfizer jabs in January.

When in March, new lockdown measures were set up in his “département” in the greater Paris region, he complained that he would be prevented from going further from his home than 10 kilometers, even though he was no longer at risk. He said that he should recover his liberty to come and go, as measures such as movement restrictions, lockdowns, and the curfew at present applied in France between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. are not necessary or proportionate for vaccinated people. Had he won his case, all fully vaccinated individuals could arguably have ignored COVID restrictions by applying the Council of State’s jurisprudence.

The Council of State decided to reject the plaintiff’s request, following the government’s reasoning as put forth in particular in a memo produced by Olivier Véran that is not available to the public. However, Europe 1 claims to have had access to the document and has reproduced several of its passages in quotation marks. The quotes — including the one about “vaccinated individuals” who are “most at risk” in some cases — were repeated widely both in the mainstream and in the alternative media over the last six days, and have not been denied by Véran or his cabinet. Le Figaro, a mainstream daily, published further quotes. It is by now reasonable to consider them to be authentic.

Other assertions by Véran quoted by the two media deserve mention, such as:

  • “The effectiveness of vaccines is only partial.”

  • “The vaccine does not prevent transmission of the virus to others. The impact of vaccination on the spread of the virus is not yet known.”

  • “Vaccine efficacy has become particularly contingent due to the emergence of new variants”

  • The South African and Brazilian strains “may notably cause reinfections in people who have already been infected with COVID-19, as well as a risk of vaccine escape (leaky vaccines)”

  • “Vaccinated individuals may develop mild forms or even be asymptomatic, and still spread the virus.”

  • “From the trial stage … there was therefore no guarantee of immunity.”

So: Back to step one? Did the French minister just admit that the experimental COVID vaccines cannot be invoked or used to stop restricting civil liberties, simply because no one has a clue as to whether they are going to make the situation any better anytime soon, or even whether they might be making the situation worse?

The judge’s decision does not directly quote Véran’s memo; in particular, it doesn’t pick up the first phrases quoted in this story showing that in some situations, vaccinated individuals could in fact be “most at risk” regarding COVID-19.

It notes that even if the jabs are efficient, only a minority of the most vulnerable to COVID have been fully vaccinated, and that they do not eliminate the possibility for the vaccinated also to be potentially contaminating virus carriers. The judge rejected an American study affirming the opposite, as produced by the plaintiff’s lawyers: He said that it did not demonstrate with certainty that non vaccinated vulnerable people would be protected from being contaminated by others who did receive the jab. Vaccine coverage would have to be higher, the judge stated.

Vaccination is therefore not enough, and “barrier gestures” and restrictions on liberties can and should apply and are “proportionate,” added the ordinance.

The plaintiff’s two lawyers, Diane Protat and Henri de Lagarde, attempted to obtain a decision that would “discriminate” between the vaccinated and the non-vaccinated, in the same way that little children who have no vaccine certificate are not eligible for day care or inscription in schools.

Lagarde told the news site “Dossier familial”: “The question is whether it is justified that people who have been vaccinated are still confined. The purpose of confinement is to avoid pressure on hospitals, to avoid having too many patients in the resuscitation services. Now, when one is vaccinated, one is certain not to develop a serious form of COVID-19,” he said.

He mentioned another objective of containment, which is “to limit the circulation of the virus and therefore social interaction.” “Can vaccinated people still transmit the virus? In the state of our scientific knowledge, vaccination leads to a decrease in contagiousness,” he said, adding that vaccinated people who wear masks and respect barrier gestures do not have to be confined. “If there is still a risk of contagiousness, it cannot justify confinement, or else we would need confinement to go on forever,” he noted.

Lagarde also underscored that Olivier Véran argued in his memoir that any certainty regarding the contagiousness of the virus will appear “in two years’ time.” The lawyer said that was reason enough to refuse present and possible future lockdowns.

But to date, the governments of the world in general and of France in particular have not been open to such logic.