Kiko Mon Jul 12, 2021 7:05 pm
Paris goes on a crusade, by Gevorg Mirzayan for Russian RT News. 12.07.2021.
France is becoming a real European vaccine hawk. But will this help Paris to earn respect among Europeans?
French government secretary of state for European affairs Clement Beaune continues his crusade against Russian and Chinese vaccines. At first, he said that decent European countries should not be vaccinated with these drugs, and now the Greek authorities are attacking, who dared to let tourists vaccinated with the "wrong" vaccines into their territory. “I am sorry that Greece did this. I would also like to note that Greece, whose control system has shown some unreliability in recent weeks, has systematically tightened checks at the entrance to the country, ”said Mr. Beaune.
No, we are all adults and we understand everything.
We understand that Europe is not going to admit the Russian (and Chinese) vaccine to its market in the near future for economic reasons. After all, this is billions and billions of dollars in revenue for local pharmaceutical companies, which naturally have their own lobbyists in European and European Union organizations. Lobbyists who now protect not so much the health and lives of EU citizens as the wallets of their employers.
We understand that Europe is not going to admit the Russian vaccine to its market for political reasons. Local propagandists have spent too much effort and money in order to demonize Russia, to draw from Putin the real Sauron, dreaming of conquering the free peoples of Middle-earth. And then it turns out that Moscow is becoming the savior of the European Union from the coronavirus.
We even understand that Europe is not going to allow the Russian vaccine into its market for bureaucratic reasons. The process of full-fledged certification of non-Western drugs in the EU is really too complicated and confusing, and none of the European officials (people acting strictly according to the rules) will speed up the process. Especially now, when the vaccine deficit in the EU has decreased.
In principle, we ourselves do not particularly want to supply our vaccine to the European market. The domestic population has finally understood that it is necessary to be vaccinated, as a result of which 700 thousand vaccinations are made a day throughout the country, and it is not surprising that in a number of cities there is a serious shortage of vaccines.
However, all this does not mean that Moscow should tolerate the rudeness of a French official. If he simply said that the Russian vaccine is not certified, so while it cannot be injected, there would be no questions for him. Instead, Mr. Beaune openly expresses doubts about the quality of the Russian drug, after this quality was confirmed not by politicians, but by leading scientists, including in the framework of peer-reviewed articles in leading Western scientific journals The Lancet and Nature.
Mr. Beaune openly criticizes Greece for accepting tourists vaccinated by Sputnik V, after the European Union, through its Ambassador to Russia, Markus Ederer, offered Moscow virtually partial mutual recognition of vaccines (that is, it will still be impossible to sell Sputnik V in the EU , but the Russians vaccinated with it will be deprived of the need to comply with some of the coronavirus restrictions when traveling across the EU).
Has Mr. Beaune gone mad or is taking too much on himself?
According to the representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, the problem is no longer so much in Mr. Bon, as in Paris. “This is not the first such unacceptable statement of the French Foreign Ministry, it is not about the personal opinion of an amateur, but about the country's political position. So, we will talk in a different way. We condemn France for such discriminatory statements by its high-ranking official, which revive the spirit of neo-Nazi segregation in Europe. It is not the French Foreign Ministry to dictate to countries and peoples what vaccines to vaccinate, ”Zakharova said.
She believes that the actions of Paris are explained by banal envy. “Obviously, the French foreign ministry is offended for their power, which has failed to develop its own vaccine. The efforts of the French company, which tried very hard, but failed, failed. We sympathize with France's failure. One could honestly say to Clement Bon: France was unable to produce its vaccine, we envy everyone who could, we have been tasked with propaganda methods to counteract the success of countries that have demonstrated the achievements of their science to the world, ”says Maria Zakharova.
But this is not the only insult. Resentment and awareness of weakness. France is no longer a country that, together with Germany, manages the affairs of the European Union: it was pushed back under Hollande, and Macron is unable to take the place of manager again. Even worse, Joseph Biden, who came to power in the United States, almost openly bets on Berlin, and within the framework of this rate he is even ready to make concessions to Angela Merkel (in particular, on Nord Stream 2). In this situation, the French desperately need some kind of pan-European leadership project, a topic that they can exploit and, on the wave of which, once again ascend to the European political Olympus. It is possible that part of the French elite saw such a project in the vaccine issue. Paris began to openly position itself as a country advocating the total protection of European citizens.
Yes, sometimes this leads to serious excesses - not only in relation to the Russian Federation, but also in relation to the EU member states (the other day Clement Bon initiated a scandal with Spain when he suggested that the French should not go to the Iberian Peninsula on vacation due to a sharp increase in the number of sick people. there). But the French authorities do not retreat from their path. Paris, in their opinion, is worth such a mass.
https://russian.rt.com/opinion/884611-mirzayan-franciya-rossiya-vakcina-koronavirus