Indeed, during a January 14 interview on Europe 1, France’s leading radio network, the head of the infectious-diseases department at Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Dr. Eric Caumes, said that “this is clearly a mistake,” adding that vaccine passports had nothing to do with medicine or public health and everything to do with the upcoming election. “It is a branding exercise and above all designed to divide [society]”.

From this perspective, the unvaccinated and the partially vaccinated have become, to Macron at least, a useful cog in a complex political machine. Though no real threat to the public good, they can be used as such to score short-lived political points.

The stigmatization of around 5 million people ought to be a cause for alarm, not least because the reasons for not getting vaccinated are more nuanced than the ubiquitous binary world-view that casts the vaxxed as smart and the unvaxxed as idiotic.

As the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research found, at least 40 percent of the unvaccinated have not taken the shot because of difficulties in accessing it. They are, in other words, France’s poorest. The other 60 percent didn’t get the jab out of choice, which in a free society ought to be the end of the story.