There follows a guest post by former Google software engineer Mike Hearn.
I just got back the south of France, flying from Switzerland. Myself and my fiancée visited Antibes and its local theme parks. The Pass Sanitaire came shortly before we arrived, so I got to see how it was doing on its first days of implementation.
Polling from the end of July stated that about half of the French are opposed to the anti-pass protests, about 35% are supportive and about 15% are indifferent. How does it look on the ground? I decided to do a simple experiment to find out: always present an expired test even though I had a valid negative one, and see what happens. Over a four day stay I was required to show a valid pass exactly zero times; that includes at the airports in both directions. Compliance is absolutely min viable and often lower. At small businesses enforcement was non-existent: sometimes the pass requirement was ignored entirely, other times we were asked “do you have a pass” and our answer wasn’t checked. One restaurant had come up with a clever way to detect police stings without requiring customers to actually present a pass. As expected, enforcement was stricter by larger firms, however even there we saw the following:
- Test certificates being checked once and then swapped for a token that doesn’t expire.
- Expired tests being accepted.
- People accepting paper test certificates without scanning them.
- Scanning tests and then not looking at the screen to see the results.
- Accepting QR codes that failed to scan.
We saw no evidence of compliance checks being done on businesses, although it was only a short stay. We saw only one person voluntarily present a pass when it wasn’t being requested, and that person was unsurprisingly quite elderly.
Mask enforcement has collapsed. In the theme parks nobody was wearing masks despite the signs and announcements telling people it was obligatory. Even at large venues the staff frequently wear masks around their chins or dispense with them altogether. Social distancing is of course a long forgotten memory by now.
It’s a good thing enforcement is lax because the testing system is in a state of disarray. The massive throughput needs of the Pass Sanitaire mean that every pharmacy is operating rapid testing tents with staff no more trained than the average counter clerk. Despite that, there are always huge ‘queues’ (often more like a crowd milling around outside a tent). At one pharmacy, personal details had to be filled out on a smartphone while you were hanging around, but you didn’t get any kind of code or evidence you’d done so. The tester did the test, then assured me I’d get my results in 20 minutes. I had to point out that this was impossible because he had no idea who I was.
Delivery of test results also seems to be quite broken. Although the test completes within 15-20 minutes the results email frequently took hours to arrive for me. Moreover, that email did not contain the certificate. Instead you retrieve your results only after getting a code via email or SMS, which must be typed in within ten minutes. SMS codes never turned up and emails were routinely being delivered after the ten minute window had expired, meaning that actually downloading your test certificate was an exercise in frustration. My guess is the sudden spike in testing combined with the desire to use new-style digitally signed QR codes is causing automatic anti-spam throttling of messages from the Government. It’s possible they didn’t anticipate this and now have no way to fix it without removing the ‘security’ on their system.
Macron has claimed that, “Never before in our history was a crisis of such magnitude fought in such a democratic way.” In the parts we visited at least, the French are ‘democratically’ rejecting his rule by simply ignoring it. The motions are being made but on close-up inspection nothing is actually happening.
Polls vs. reality
How can this experience be reconciled with the anti-protest polling?
One answer is that the beliefs of a composite/average French person don’t actually matter here. The scheme is most popular with the elderly and public sector workers, least popular with the young and business owners. But retirees and government workers aren’t the ones waiting tables or selling tickets. Nor are they the employers of the people who do. In fact, among company managers, sympathy for the protests rises to 60%; higher than private sector workers as a whole. We may also assume that plenty of people are against the Pass Sanitaire while also being against protests, which have a history of being violent and disruptive in France, and it seems safe to assume that support for it will fall further as the system actually starts to bite (the poll pre-dates enforcement). Thus the true levels of support for the pass amongst the managerial classes are certainly much lower than the 40% this poll would imply.
Finally, not for the first time, we must raise eyebrows at polling that paints a totally different picture of what people think than what is observable with our own eyes. Polling firms try hard to ensure their sample is representative, but it’s been known for many years that their samples are not genuinely reflective of the population under test. A large but very predictable problem is that polls massively over-represent volunteers. It seems likely that there’s a correlation between the sort of people who support the Pass Sanitaire and the sort of people who enthusiastically volunteer to spend time on surveys without compensation. In the past I’ve encountered a belief among (ex) professional pollsters that it’s an open secret in the business that any question with a “pro-social” answer will get wildly un-representative answers. However, I’ve never been able to find any kind of rigorous written discussion of this. If you work or have worked in polling and have some insight to offer here, please do get in touch and share it. Enquiring minds would like to learn more!
Conclusion
Converting ordinary businesses into an unpaid police force cannot work without high levels of support amongst the young and entrepreneurial. The Pass Sanitaire doesn’t have that. Implementation difficulties leading to arbitrary and random arrests will only further erode support for the scheme.
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Encouraging news.
However, the law remains on the books, and even lip service is still participation in the theatrics – which is all they ever were.
Encouraging stuff.
“Implementation difficulties leading to arbitrary and random arrests will only further erode support for the scheme.“
Hopefully that’s how it will go.
Though teething problems for such illiberal measures might prove just that, and if the regime persists and isn’t overthrown, these restrictions might just be normalised in the present lax form and then tightened up over time.
That’s my fear, that a few public beatings (legally speaking, for once) will see enforcement firm up over time.
This is great to hear.
If the vaccine pass is rolled out in the UK, then I will be exempt from it.
I hate to burst your bubble but it’s already here! It just hasn’t been rolled out to every single aspect of life yet, but all in good time…
Anyone with a National Insurance or Social Security number in the UK already has a ‘digital ID’ and your ‘Covid Passport’ is already there waiting for you on the NHS/X app.
It may record you as having had no ‘vaccination’ but it is there. If you intend to leave the country you’ll have to prove you’ve had Covid within the past 6 months, or you’ll need to pay for an expensive test to show you are ‘negative’ (valid max 72 hours) or you will have to show proof of vaccination – and you will get this proof via your ‘Covid/Vaccination Pass’.
What part of this are people still not getting?
Going shopping in Tesco’s and counting the face masks, or going to your local pub and seeing no face masks, does not make this go away. You can pretend things are getting back to normal, but they are not. Not until all the testing centres and vaccination centres are done away with.
That’s optimistic observation.
Similarly, I’ve been heartened by the lack of outdoors mask wearing in this country in recently sampled destinations.
My worry is whether this can be turned into positive rejection of the next assault on liberty (which is bound to come), given the sensitization to psy-op techniques of falsification and exaggeration via media control.
The problem with Jeremy Vine isn’t so much what he says, but that he has access to the airwaves only because he actually believes such shit.
No longer cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
Which, of course, they never were …..
It’s possible I was once too ardent a fan of P J O’Rourke.
Is that you Jeremy. How’s it going down on the farm?
Vive La France! I’ve begun to notice a drop-off of mask wearing in shops round where I live, near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, The local Co-Ops now “welcome mask wearing customers”, probably about a 50/50 split and falling. Tesco requires a mask, I’d say down to 90% and again falling (I kind-of expect that to drop fast at some critical point, 2/3 rds maybe). Interesting in a way.
The true test will be when the inevitable clarion call comes in the autumn to reimpose distancing, masks and any other aspect of the covid prevention theatre.
I suggest to make that covid pretention theatre.
As for the polling, you often see this scenario we’re people say one thing and then do the exact opposite.
Surely there are enough of us now to operate outside any system they try to enforce and still enjoy a decent standard of real life.
The usual French treatment of laws ( and taxes) they don’t like/want is to ignore them as much as possible. It was always a point of amusement ( and frustration) that the UK took EU edicts from Brussels and added to them, whereas the French just ignored the ones they didn’t like ( quite often officially).
However, Mr Hearn when visiting fun parks around Antibes was presumably surrounded by people of a similar mindset. He wasn’t in older villages or towns, or indeed cities such as Paris. I wish I could share his optimism.
Here in sleepy Tarn, masks are still worn inside just about every establishment, and outside in town centres by at least 50%. I cannot report on the health pass use as we have not felt the need to test it in every day use. In August , unless you are a bit mad, residents don’t go to very busy restaurants/bars , you wait until the visitors have gone back home. We did go to Toulouse briefly a couple of weeks ago just after its intro, but again didn’t need it for anything we did. There is supposed to be a mask mandate in the centre of the city during the day, but no more than 50% were conforming.
Its estimated that last weekend up to 450k demonstrated around the country , not the official 207, 474 ( when someone comes up with a ridiculous ‘accurate’ number, you know they are lying). This is extraordinary in early August, so the liklihood it will swell to well over 1 million by September.
Its definitely a ‘testademic’ currently, out of 716k daily tests , 23.5k are positive; deaths were 44 over the last 24 hours, out of about 1,600. With the ‘pass’ of course the number of tests will just rise and rise; and so will the false positives.
The ‘little emperor’ is clinically insane of course as are several of his ‘court’. He is vainly trying to appeal to his core voters, the elderly , in advance of next year’s elections. If the conventional conservative parties get a half decent candidate, his goose will be cooked. problem we all have they haven’t found one yet!
In all likeliness, France isn’t ruled by Macron but by his wife and he’s just a pretty face which gets wheeled out for elections and similar publicity stunts.
Twenty five (25) years more is sufficient to have a Mama rule.
Hmmm…. you should see all the middle class virtue signallers in Waitrose all wearing masks. The UK bedwetters will simply roll over and submit to ‘Medical Treatment’ pass
You should pay a visit to Asda – very low numbers of virtue signallers shop there. It always cheers me up immensely.
I agree, the majority of Waitrose customers wear masks but those who don’t are often the very aged which I like to see, and a fair number of staff for whom I’ve always had the most sympathy since they disappeared behind them last year. In truth, I like to believe that most people now just employ them as comfort-blankets and know full well how pointless they are.
The trouble is though that it’s not a comfort blanket. It’s an outward sign of compliance (by the customers, not by the poor staff members) and is detrimental to health, lowering oxygen levels and increasing your risk of developing a nasty bacterial or fungal infection. But hey ho, what do the sheeple care! Health these days is only relates to whether or not you’ve had your latest jab, not using your brain to choose a healthy lifestyle and avoid activities like mask wearing that are high risk and of no benefit!
Splendid report. Hope we get regular bulletins.
Okay we get it. Macron was bought/threatened so he instigated draconian passport measures and then advised those charged with enforcement to ignore the mandate. Brilliant ploy and so simple.
Look who owns most of the ‘Polls’
Mori and Ipsos is owned by the Gates Foundation…duh, go figure!
good to hear report any news of the french truckers strike august 15th.good for them can’t find anything about it