POINTE-À-PITRE, Guadeloupe (LifeSiteNews) — A French hospital worker has embarked on a 27-day hunger strike to protest the suspension of unvaccinated healthcare workers.
“I find this law to be inhumane because it almost pushed more than four hundred families of hospital workers and firefighters out on the street with no appeal possible,” said healthcare worker Denis Deloumeaux in a recent interview with French radio channel Sud Radio.
Deloumeaux, a worker at the hospital of Pointe-à-Pitre, on the French island of Guadeloupe, recently ended a 27-day hunger strike which he started on February 12 as a way to protest the suspension of healthcare workers who refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Since July 2021, healthcare workers in France and French overseas territories have been protesting a law introduced by French President Emmanuel Macron that compels them to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk losing their livelihoods.
Deloumeaux was among these workers who got suspended for failure to get vaccinated and has been without pay since October 2021.
He explained that he refused to be vaccinated because he does not consider that a vaccine which received only a conditional authorization should be imposed on the population.
He mentioned a number of French scientists known for their criticism of the COVID-19 vaccine, including Dr. Raoult and Dr. Perrone, whom he described as “brave and eminent scientists who are suddenly being discredited.”
Deloumeaux added that he was reluctant to be vaccinated because of the many reports of adverse reaction to the COVID jab in France alone.
“After only 14 months we already have 200,000 reports of adverse events,” he said.
He compared this to the hepatitis vaccine which he said has had “less than 50,000 adverse events over more than ten years.”
The healthcare worker explained that all this contributes to a great lack of trust in the government and the vaccines in Guadeloupe, a phenomenon exacerbated by past industrial scandals such that involving chlordecone, a toxic compound used as an insecticide which caused a high number of prostate cancers in Guadeloupe.
According to Deloumeaux, “more than 70% of Guadeloupe’s population remains completely unvaccinated,” and “less than 18% have been fully vaccinated.”
The 52-year-old administrator and accountant for the pharmacy of the Pointe-à-Pitre hospital said his hunger strike was a way to fight for all healthcare workers of Guadeloupe.
“I consider it unfair that fathers and mothers who have committed no professional faults are left almost homeless from one day to the next,” he said.
“We have cases of married couples, mothers and fathers, who both worked at the hospital and were both suspended … children who study in metropolitan France who couldn’t pay their rent and have had to come back and interrupt their studies,” he said. “To me this kind of thing is inhumane.”
Deloumeaux called for all healthcare workers in metropolitan France and Guadeloupe to be reintegrated and insisted that he was not against vaccines in general but against the COVID vaccine and mandatory vaccination.
“We’re against this particular vaccine because it only has conditional authorization. Right now, we’re in the pharmacovigilance phase — we used to wait five to six years to conduct studies, now we have to conduct them less than fourteen months into the vaccination campaign,” he said.
In the last days of his hunger strike, Deloumeaux started experiencing chest pains and heart issues. His cardiologist had to take over toward the end of his interview with Radio Sud, as the father of four “was starting to show some minor symptoms.”
A couple of days ago, it was announced that Deloumeaux ended his 27-day hunger strike, at his family’s request and on doctor’s advice. He has since then resumed a normal diet.