The suddenly truncated story of the pass sanitaire

Magie noire

If you’ve been following along, you will know the importance of the pass sanitaire, the Covid vaccination certificate without which you cannot participate in everyday life in France—despite the variability from venue to venue as to whether they ask for it or not.

It’s the old panopticon trick: you never know when they are watching (going to ask for the pass), so you always come prepared.

Anyway, we applied for ours before we left Australia and the estimated time for getting it was eleven days.

By mid-last week that had blown out to eighteen days.

A friend who lives in the Middle East, and who is coming to France and therefore also had to apply for a pass sanitaire, saw my post/s about the delays and emailed me with this advice, based on advice from another friend: cancel your application and reapply.

She told me that both she and her friend had done did this and that they both had the pass issued within an hour.

With much trepidation, I cancelled my original application, and, lo and behold, an hour later, my pass sanitaire arrived in my inbox.

What black magic is this?

There was a catch: Tanya didn’t get hers, and it took another email and the provision of a bit more information—none of which I had to provide, for some reason—to sort it out, but hers arrived two days later, considerably earlier than the originally projected eighteen days.

Go figure.

So, if you are heading this way, it might be worth keeping this completely illogical, Kafkaesque hack in mind.

We now no longer need to have Covid tests every three days and we are safely in the fully appified embrace of Grand Frère, who we love.