evidence: Anti-vaccine sentiment was high in France before COVID-19, in part the legacy of major French health scandals, including donor blood found to have been contaminated with the AIDS virus in the 1990s; a furor, also in the 1990s, over a supposed link between Hepatitis B vaccines and autism, which has been disproven; and millions of euros spent needlessly on H1N1 flu vaccines in the late 2000s. [...] Now that vaccines are here, many French doubt their government’s word can be trusted. "There is a really, really strong link between skepticism of the vaccine, and distrust of political institutions," says Antoine Bristielle, a researcher with the Jean-Jaurès Foundation in Paris, who has conducted several polls on vaccine views. "We have a very, very high level of political distrust," he says. [...] But that caution seems to have backfired, as millions of French now wonder why other countries’ vaccine programs are working so much better than theirs. "Macron overestimated the anti-vaxx trend in France," says Karine Lacombe, head of infectious diseases at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris. "The government was really afraid of promoting the COVID vaccine, in case there were problems, and they would be held responsible."