France achieves record Covid jabs with Macron’s ‘big stick’ approach

800,000 vaccinations in single day follows announcement that visits to many public venues will require a health pass

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Within 72 hours of the French learning they would soon need to be vaccinated or tested to go to the cafe, more than 3 million had booked appointments and France had broken its vaccination record, administering 800,000 shots in a single day.

At the same time, daily infections, driven by the more contagious Delta variant, continued to climb, reaching nearly 9,000 on Wednesday - and on Bastille Day, about 20,000 demonstrators nationwide protested against what some called a dictatorship".