Health crisis: "The government will have to face the weariness of public opinion"

Arnaud Benedetti is editor-in-chief of the Political and Parliamentary Review and Associate Professor at Paris Sorbonne University.

He publishes

How are the policies dead ?, The great malaise of power

The narrative of the epidemic does not end; it comes back like a second skin that we could not get rid of. The worst thing in this affair is the quasi-sheepish accommodation that it gives rise to a model of society where health, that of fear in this case, dictates and commands, even if it would come to produce a number of contradictions. that the executives try to conceal under an anxiety-provoking communication.

The permanent immediacy to which we are exposed neutralizes the capacities of reflection, memories, and vigilance.

Everything goes to the point of blurring the certainties of yesterday buried in a lost story.

It is far away, and perhaps there never existed the time when, peremptorily, optimists learned doctors and politicians professed the idea that all vaccines would definitively defeat the epidemic.

These will swear today that they never uttered these definitive words, but the time will come when a scrupulous history will restore the chain of events.

Everything becomes legitimate as pandemic evolutions go through the sieve of an instantaneous science which has shown that it groped forward.

Arnaud Benedetti

At this stage, everything is still too early, so much the “waves” - semantics moreover revealing our discomfort to define what we are going through - follow one another to conform in the media the opinions to the messages and other injunctions of their masters of the moment.

The latest government announcements are part of this context of pretense.

Not that the epidemic recovery is not at the rendezvous, but the fact remains that we should also question the nature and scope of its impact - which clearly is not possible - except to take the risk of being suspected of "conspiracy", a catch-all category which authorizes the disqualification of any critical mind, including that which would endeavor to rationally question choices which claim to be rational but which are above all political, which does not mean in no way that they result from any rationality.

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After all, that the health pass is first and foremost a coercive instrument of social control and not a measure of health protection, the fact is hardly contestable, even if it dresses up by the vaccine incentive all of us to be aligned. under the umbrella of vaccination which we no longer ignore that does not exclude more contaminating than being contaminated. To refer to the triumphalism at the beginning of the vaccine adventure, a few months ago, it is clear that humility, now at the rendezvous, has found a rhetorical argument - the famous "limitation of severe forms", which one can only wish that it is not exclusively an effect for rhetorician in difficulty. Because in the long run, what lies in wait for the rulers is not it

the exhaustion of their arguments to the test of the growing weariness of opinions which have witnessed for months the defeat of many certainties and to begin to the growing weakening of the doxa of a biopower which has shown very little prudence in his instant assertions?

Letting Olivier Véran communicate is leaving the minister as much to the imperfections of his communication as to the uncertainties of an action which sometimes gives the impression of getting closer to the bottom of the wall.

Arnaud Benedetti

Everything becomes legitimate as pandemic evolutions go through the sieve of an instantaneous science which has shown that it progresses by groping, but which too often will have communicated by affirmation, thus contaminating a word and a public action grappling with the hazards of 'a virus that plays with people and knowledge.

The measures taken by the executive to deal with the epidemic rebound consequently arouse the feeling of yet another "barrier against the Pacific", as if, failing to close the company again, it was first a question of locking up people. first of all individuals in a straitjacket reinforced by individual constraints.

Society continues to function, provided that we mourn part of our freedoms and free will.

So we must understand the choice of issuers to deliver to the French the latest executive measures: the Minister of Health is as much a shield as a fuse in case ... While the presidential pre-campaign is accelerating, the leader of the State has wisely refrained from speaking out, as if it was reserving itself on a subject whose escalation appears with each new sequence much more communicative than argumentative.

Letting Olivier Véran communicate is leaving the minister as much to the imperfections of his communication as to the uncertainties of an action which sometimes gives the impression of getting closer to the bottom of the wall ...