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“The Scientific Council, made up of brilliant people, has undermined our democratic principles”

2022-07-22T17:24:21.899Z


FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE - The Scientific Council created at the start of the pandemic will be officially dissolved on July 31. The essayist Mathieu Slama takes stock of this organization, which has been responsible for informing public decision-making to fight against the Covid.


Consultant and political analyst, Mathieu Slama collaborates with several media, notably Le Figaro and Le Huffington Post.

He has notably published

Adieu la liberté - Essay on disciplinary society

(Presses de la Cité, January 2022)

.

The Scientific Council met for the last time this week, and issued its 75th and final opinion yesterday.

He will officially disappear on July 31.

In his last note, he recalls the importance of better scientific training for the young generations of future public decision-makers, and recommends creating a "Science Council", "group of high-level scientists" to enlighten the summit of the 'State.

Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that a new body of this type will be set up in the coming months.

It is therefore the end of an organization which will have played a decisive role throughout the health crisis, and it is not useless to draw an initial assessment.

Populated with brilliant people and our best scientists, the Scientific Council will have been, despite all the talents that compose it, one of the main architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis.

And if there is a lesson that we can draw from this fiasco, it is that science must never replace politics and that political decision-making cannot result from simple scientific expertise - at the risk of deeply damage our democracy.

Systematically, the Scientific Council expressed its preference for the harshest and most drastic recommendation.

Mathieu Slama

The Scientific Council ruled France for almost two years.

The confinements, curfew, compulsory masks and passes were all recommended by the Scientific Council before being imposed by the political power, which therefore blindly followed the opinions of Jean-Francois Delfraissy and his colleagues.

The opinions of the Scientific Council always worked like this: a precise and rigorous analysis of the health situation, then a series of alternative recommendations ranging from the “lightest” to the hardest.

But the Scientific Council was not content to set out possible precautionary measures: it also expressed a preference.

And systematically, he expressed his preference for the harshest and most draconian recommendation.

And almost always

To strengthen their influence, some members of the Scientific Council roamed TV sets to provide after-sales service for their recommendations.

And to the anxiety-provoking words was added the ethos of scientists and doctors who put themselves) indicated the rules that had to be followed in their family life and their private life, specifying how they had to see their friends, party , eat - and even… talk (the Academy of Sciences recommends not talking on public transport…).

Science began to govern our lives and to decide, by its unquestionable authority, what to do and what not to do.

This Scientific Council was however perfectly legitimate, and a body was needed which could enlighten the government from the point of view of science.

It needed an organization to have a scientific reading of the figures of the epidemic, to understand the dynamics and the possible scenarios of contamination, to understand the way in which the vaccine works.

And if the Council had stuck to this type of lighting, then it would have been perfectly in its role.

We needed doctors and scientists to give us the keys to explaining contaminations, variants, protective measures and vaccines.

And on this point, the word of scientists has been invaluable.

No scientist is legitimate to declare that an entire country should be confined.

Mathieu Slama

But the problem is that scientists have started to play politics.

To recommend political measures as serious as confinement or the sanitary pass.

However, these measures cannot be taken on the basis of purely scientific considerations;

they bring into play our democratic, social and economic model and take on gigantic ethical considerations.

No scientist is legitimate to declare that an entire country should be confined.

Only politicians, after taking into account all the issues and problems, can decide to implement such a measure.

The pass consists in prohibiting a whole part of the population from social life by means of a QR code which is activated and reactivated as one makes his vaccine reminders: how can such a serious measure,

How can the very idea of ​​​​compulsory masks in the street, which calls into question the sociability of the face and therefore the very possibility of living together, result from a simple scientific recommendation?

How could the scientist recommend a curfew, that is to say to prohibit an individual from any outing and to guarantee this prohibition by a repressive police device?

And how, finally, can scientists be left to decide whether or not to reinstate caregivers who have not violated any clause of their employment contract?

Remember that the “zero covid” policy which has been openly advocated by several renowned scientists implies reconfiguring the entire population at the slightest upsurge in the epidemic.

VS'

is neither more nor less the policy that was carried out in the first year of the pandemic, and which amounts to completely freeing ourselves from the rule of law and defending the idea of ​​a permanent state of health emergency.

And what some scientists called “restraint measures” were actually measures that, to some extent, undermined the rule of law.

The Scientific Council is right, in its last note, to plead for better scientific training for the younger generations.

But he should also have pleaded for better education of scientists and doctors in democracy and its challenges.

Everything is not only attributable to an authoritarian impulse specific to the medical world: there is also, among many scientists, a profound ignorance of the democratic institutions and the fundamental norms which govern our Republic.

There have been, however, scientists who have admitted that certain democratic issues go far beyond their area of ​​expertise.

Yonathan Freund, emergency physician at Pitié Salpetrière and professor of medicine,

had himself expressed his discomfort with some of his acolytes who recommended sorting patients in intensive care according to their vaccination status.

The big question is why they have been so few to hold this kind of humanist positions.

Ethical questions have always been very present in public health issues, and it is surprising that they have been so absent since the start of the Covid crisis.

Mathieu Slama

Medical ethics is nevertheless at the heart of the practice of doctors, and it is surprising that there was hardly anyone to worry about the lack of ethics of measures such as confinement or the vaccination pass.

Admittedly, public health makes the existence of major measures applying to populations part of its logic.

But it must also take into account the issues of freedom and consent, as was the case for example in the management of the AIDS epidemic, which was undoubtedly not perfect but which favored information and pedagogy to any coercive policy.

One could also object that there are compulsory vaccines and that this is good news: that is correct,

but the fact of not being up to date with these vaccines does not expose us to social death or any loss of citizenship.

And these vaccines are also the subject of a strong social consensus - which makes the coercion much less strong in practice.

In short, ethical questions have always been very present in public health issues, and we are surprised that they have been so absent since the start of the Covid crisis.

There is also a national advisory committee on ethics which regularly decides on this type of question (for example during the bioethics law): we will not have heard it once during the health crisis...

a strong social consensus - which makes the coercion much weaker in practice.

In short, ethical questions have always been very present in public health issues, and we are surprised that they have been so absent since the start of the Covid crisis.

There is also a national advisory committee on ethics which regularly decides on this type of question (for example during the bioethics law): we will not have heard it once during the health crisis...

a strong social consensus - which makes the coercion much weaker in practice.

In short, ethical questions have always been very present in public health issues, and we are surprised that they have been so absent since the start of the Covid crisis.

There is also a national advisory committee on ethics which regularly decides on this type of question (for example during the bioethics law): we will not have heard it once during the health crisis...

There is therefore an urgent need to separate science from politics, without breaking an obviously fundamental link for understanding the health, technological and climatic phenomena that are so essential today.

This is an exciting - and difficult - challenge.

This confusion between the orders - here the political order and the scientific order - is one of the major features of Macronism, whose managerial ideology considers all political questions as problems to be solved and situations to be managed.

Political logic presupposes bringing values ​​into conflict and arbitrating between them with regard to what is considered to be a priority.

But at Macron, the reign of expertise takes everything in its path: it is not a question of arbitrating between values ​​but of imposing, without debate,

It is an evil that comes to us from afar, as evidenced by the continuous decay of our public services under the effect of neoliberal policies taken in the name of efficiency and profitability.

But Macron unquestionably made it worse.

It is moreover this managerial utilitarianism that has led the government to take other liberticidal security measures, such as the "global security" law) or to manage by force (and sometimes even violence) the recent protest movements like that of the "yellow vests".

It would therefore be wrong to see in the management of the health crisis a simple exceptional parenthesis whose effects are separate from the context in which it arises: it only finds its deep explanation in the more global logic in which it is inserted.

This logic is that of management, a method of authoritarian government which ignores all of the fundamental principles which must guide political action.

You don't run a democracy like a business, just as you don't do politics like a scientist.

Either we accept that in the name of efficiency, democracy becomes relative and that it activates and deactivates according to crises, which would amount to definitively abandoning the very principle of the rule of law.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-07-22

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