Eurofund produced a study on Living, working and COVID-19 . Towards the end of that PDF from page 16 on are some graphs and also discussion relating to vaccine hesitancy in EU. The UK isn’t in it for obvious reasons but the ONS provide data for UK here.
With regards to France here is a paper from Feb 2021 relating to Covid vaccines and hesitancy here is one from 2016, before covid, about vaccine hesitancy in general in France.
It seems it’s not a new thing. It has little to do with immigrant status.
In terms of total percentage of vaccinated IOM, UAE and Israel are ahead of UK, Ireland, Spain and Denmark are pretty much the same with 1% difference and most of the other countries in Europe are not that far behind. USA, France and Greece are in a similar situation. Looking at the figures here some seem to have a higher proportion of partially vaccinated. I suspect that relates to vaccine availability and they are catching up now that vaccine supply has improved. UK had a better supply chain earlier on. It’s still mostly the richer countries that are managing any kind of effective vaccination, if you add in South Africa, Nigeria, India the picture looks pretty bleak.
“Some might suggest that China, knew what China was doing and they were more prepared for this outbreak than other countries.”
China responded to the first SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 with a recognition it didn’t have the warning mechanisms in place to pick such new viral illnesses up early. They set up a system of supposedly “political meddling” free surveillance. Apparently the political meddling still happened with the provinces not wanting to report bad news to Beijing. However, look at the WHO timeline here. At the end of Dec 2019 the WHO alerted health authorities and by early Jan it was knows there was a cohort of pneumonia cases of unknown origin. On Jan 9 2020 WHO reported that Chinese authorities have determined that the outbreak is caused by a novel coronavirus. On Jan 13 the first case outside China was reported in Thailand. And so on, read it for yourselves.
I remember reading that the two countries most prepared for a pandemic were UK and USA, what a load of tosh that turned out to be. The world had 2 months to prepare a response. Most didn’t bother. Do you remember Trump’s response? Do you remember Boris proudly stating that he shook hands with people? Whatever the origins of it, we had time to get ready for it and that time was squandered.