"The scapegoat strategy has nothing to do with science"

Danièle Dehouve is an anthropologist specializing in religious rituals in Mesoamerica.

Christophe Lemardelé is a historian of religions, specialist in sacrifices in Mediterranean Antiquity.

In a column published on December 1, 2021, we recalled that the phenomenon of the scapegoat is an anthropological mechanism, that is to say present in all human societies, which has been highlighted since the end of the 19th century, by researchers from various backgrounds and disciplines in the humanities. This mechanism is set up more or less consciously if we are not careful, whatever the society, even in democratic societies which think they have conceptions based on science as their representation of the world.

We wrote that the designation of the unvaccinated as responsible for the epidemic and their exclusion from a normal daily life was part of this mechanism and that we were worried

The health pass began to create a category of second-class citizens.

Danièle Dehouve and Christophe Lemardelé

When society thinks itself attacked by an external enemy - here the virus personified as a perverse being against whom we are at war - there is the collective unconscious need to find an internal enemy. This category is still constructed. It must be an entity, considered as a group operating in solidarity. The category of "antivax" created twenty years earlier to stigmatize people who asked questions about vaccines, including the presence of aluminum adjuvants, has been reactivated. And the health pass began to create a category of second-class citizens.

But Emmanuel Macron's statement in Le Parisien, January 5, 2022, changed everything. Henceforth the scapegoat mechanism is no longer a social phenomenon, with which the State would play dangerously. For the first time in a long time, and from the very heart of French democracy, the highest state authority is claiming the scapegoat mechanism as a mode of government.

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This part of the population that is deprived of its most basic rights - and whose right to citizenship is even questioned - has done nothing illegal, since the vaccine is not compulsory.

Neither does it constitute a well-defined category, but fluctuates - since the vaccinated of today can become the unvaccinated of tomorrow if for various reasons he stops receiving repeated new injections.

It is not a health strategy to control the spread of the virus.

This unprecedented designation of a "false culprit" is political.

Danièle Dehouve and Christophe Lemardelé

We wrote that the problem with the "logics of accusation" is that they arise from anthropological mechanisms that have nothing to do with science. Each passing day confirms that it is not the unvaccinated who are spreading the epidemic. In all countries, it is recognized that the vaccine does not prevent either contracting the virus or the spread of it. It is therefore not a health strategy aimed at controlling the spread of the virus. This unprecedented designation of a "false culprit" is political.

Emmanuel Macron's written, thoughtful statement comes at a precise moment.

It was preceded by the publication of a column of doctors questioning the resuscitation of the unvaccinated.

In their own way and in their sphere of action, these doctors applied the strategy of the scapegoat.

The result was this incredible declaration, contrary to all the principles of medicine since always, which are transcribed in the Hippocratic Oath.

If the Council of the Order of Physicians does not react and the refusal of care to part of the population becomes commonplace, medicine itself changes nature.

Read also Macron and the unvaccinated: "Democratic malaise"

After the application of the strategy of the scapegoat to medicine, the president's declaration institutes it in the political sphere, as a mode of government, at the very moment when the law transforming the health pass into a vaccination pass is being examined in Parliament. . When the president writes

he puts all these events in context, he claims the designation of the scapegoat as a global strategy, to be carried out today in France.

Also, the law of the vaccine pass that elected officials have just voted cannot be dissociated from this global strategy.

The context for voting has changed.

Voting for this law is tantamount to accepting in fact the designation of scapegoats as a mode of government, which is totally contrary to all the principles of the Republic and of democracy.