This is supposed to be the country which invented human rights.” In Caen, Mélanie, a primary school teacher in her thirties, said: “I’m vaccinated. Others detest the idea of health passes restricting personal freedoms or creating separate categories of French people: the government-approved “fully-jabbed” and the unvaccinated and “unclean”. And there are also many hundreds of moderate-seeming, apolitical people. There is the rump of the anti-Macron Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which has little support and no clear aims but is keen to latch on to any protest against the President. The intended message is that “you-know-who” (ie the Jews) are somehow responsible for the pandemic. There are priggish anti-vaccine fanatics, some of whom attacked and destroyed a stall in front of a pharmacy offering free Covid tests on Saturday’s march in Montpellier. There is the anti-capitalist hard-Left, which believes the pandemic was invented by “Big pharma” to sell vaccines. There is anti-Semitic ultra-right - some of them holding banners which read simply “qui?” or “who?”. The political and social geology of the gatherings is equally bizarre. There are anarchists. Further protests are expected this weekend. And the numbers have doubled since they kicked off three weeks ago. Politics goes to the street more rapidly in France than other democracies - but protests during the late July-August holiday season are very unusual. It may - though less plausibly - have been painted by ordinary apolitical people infuriated by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to ban all fun and long-distance travel for unvaccinated citizens from Monday.Īll three of these groups, along with many other angry citizens, were represented in the protests against the “passe sanitaire” (health pass) on Saturday, which attracted over 200,000 people to 150 demonstrations in French towns and cities last Saturday. It may be the work of the libertarian Right. This may be the work of the anarchist far-left. Le virus c’est l’état (“The virus is the state”) - so reads a freshly-painted slogan on a motorway bridge on the Norman-Breton border. It has also raised concerns about other ways in which assumptions about Gillick Competency might undermine parents’ authority.Mandatory passes could provoke a new Gilets Jaunes movement The suggestion that kids could consent to the vaccine without, or in spite of, their parents’ wishes has led some parents to vow to keep their children off school for the duration of any vaccination programme. Thanks to a move towards a ‘no decision about me, without me’ form of patient-doctor relationship, clinicians are now more likely to be concerned with what children think, rather than simply what their parents want. The 1985 court judgement that established the precedent related to contraception, but it is now applied in other areas. Established in the 1980s, the Gillick competence ruling allows the confidential treatment of under-18s without parental consent if the clinician considers they are sufficiently capable of understanding the treatment – and would further be at risk of harm if they didn’t receive it. But he has also suggested that if parents refuse their consent, children may be able to consent in their own right under the precedent known as ‘Gillick competence’. UK vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi has assured parents that they will be asked to give consent before their children are jabbed. This has come to the fore in the discussion about the roll out of Covid-19 vaccines for school children and teenagers. An adolescent may have strong views about what is right and wrong that differs from their parents’ views. This makes the issue of consent to medical treatment especially difficult when it becomes complicated by values and politics. While the legal age at which someone crosses the line to adulthood is clear and bright at 18, there are many important areas of life requiring mature judgement that happen earlier and young people’s capacity to make decisions can vary enormously. There has always been a grey area with adolescents. If the patient is not able to consent, then someone needs to consent on their behalf – with children this often means parents or guardians. What if the patient doesn’t want what their doctor thinks is best? What if the parents disagree, or object in principle, to what is proposed? No clinician can treat a patient without their consent and by law consent must be ‘informed’, which means the patient must understand what the treatment entails (including its risks and benefits). However, sometimes making this decision can become complicated. In most cases, it is not a question that requires much scrutiny – both patient and parent usually want a healthcare professional to use their expertise and knowledge to treat and cure the problem. ‘Who decides?’ is an important question that underpins the medical treatment of children, regardless of what that treatment is.
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