Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

If anyone in the US thinks France is doing any better with "expeditious vaccination," let me disabuse you of that conceit right now. Until recently, I've been fairly supportive of Macron's government. Tough job, tough people to govern.

After this? If I were a French citizen, I'd probably vote for the communists or the fascists (and those probably will be the options, at this rate). If the guys who're at least supposed to be competent technocrats can't manage a vaccination campaign--

--and offer idiotic excuses like, "Well, we're taking it slowly because, you know, France is full of lunatic anti-vaxxers and we don't want to frighten them"--I'm not making that up, folks, an aide to the health minister said exactly that, yesterday--

--why the hell would you put them back in office? If you want incompetent government, why not at least go for the gusto and get the incompetent ideologues your heart truly desires?

I do hope Macron realizes that if the non-insane French citizens don't get needles in their arms, fast--as in, "within a month, not within ten years," that's it for the Fifth Republic, because the French have had it. He was the Establishment's last chance.

I shudder to think what life would be like here under a Le Pen or a Melenchon, and I'd never be so stupid as to say, "Things couldn't be worse." They can always be worse. But if you run as a competent technocrat who unlike Le Pen or Melenchon actually knows how things work--

and then, while Germany manages to keep its citizens more-or-less alive and then vaccinate them, throw up your hands and say, "Well, the last government let the PPE stockpiles atrophy, and we didn't replenish it, which was unfortunate--

--and now we're dealing with a bunch of hysterical anti-vaxxers, so *you* can't get a vaccine," you won't have my sympathy if the public concludes that things couldn't be worse--and then votes to make them far worse.

And that will happen. It will be this government's fault. So, if I may offer a word of advice to Olivier Véran: Get your citizens those vaccines, *now,* even if you have to drown the anti-vaxxers in the Seine.

Because otherwise, it's the end of the Fifth Republic.