"Agnes you scared the president..." Three and a half years after the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in France, Agnès Buzyn published this Wednesday, September 27, the logbook she kept at the time when she was still Minister of Health. Entitled Journal, January-June 2020 (Éditions Flammarion), the book of nearly 500 pages, whose subtitle "Agnès you scared the president" gives color, includes copies of his exchanges with Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe.
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Minister of Health from May 2017 until her resignation in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic on 16 February 2020, Agnès Buzyn was indicted in September 2021 by the Court of Justice of the Republic for her management of the crisis. However, the Court of Cassation annulled this decision last January. If the now senior adviser to the Court of Auditors delivers at length in her book her version of the Covid-19 epidemic, she nevertheless assures, in an interview with Ouest-France, that it is not her defense in anticipation of her judicial deadlines (she is still placed under the status of assisted witness, Editor's note). "It is at the Court of Justice of the Republic that I defend myself with my lawyers," she says. (...) There, I report on certain episodes that have not been seen, known, understood, and above all I give my analysis as this crisis progresses. "
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"Battle mode"
Agnès Buzyn maintains, moreover, to our colleagues that the President of the Republic and the former Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, "know perfectly well that this book is coming out": "I informed them that I will publish our exchanges. What for? Because these elements have been seized by the courts and are no longer private. There have already been leaks in the newspapers, there will no doubt be more. So I prefer to broadcast them in a coherent and chronological narrative rather than seeing them appear in small pieces, out of context and in an instrumentalized way." The former minister hammers once again that "his work as a hematologist" allowed him to "anticipate" the extent of the pandemic, without however succeeding in "convincing".
To explain the subtitle of her book, she tells Ouest-France an exchange with President Emmanuel Macron in a cinema: "We are on February 8. It lasts 40 minutes. It's a very scary moment because I'm the only one who sees the script to come. I talk to him about putting the country under a bell. It is normal that the President was very shocked. The following Wednesday, before the Council of Ministers, the Secretary General of the Élysée, Alexis Kohler, told me this sentence. I didn't want to scare the President but to make him aware that we had to go into combat mode."
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'Crazy anguish'
After her resignation from her position as Minister of Health, while she is the candidate of the presidential majority for mayor of Paris, she says she continued to send messages to Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe. In vain. "I feel that my word is not being heard, that I am probably annoying them, because the President never answers my texts about the crisis. On the campaign, on the other hand, he answers me. For them, I became a campaign candidate. But I remain a doctor. I live in crazy anxiety and I must continue to alert them, "she denounces.
Agnès Buzyn even says "regret having left the ministry", speaking of a "terrible wound" and evoking "strong pressure" from "many people" who had "interest" in seeing her "leave the government". The former minister still certifies receiving "death threats" and living under police protection. Asked about a possible participation in the campaign for the European elections in 2024, she does not rule anything out: "I will go where I am useful. I will never put my convictions in my pocket. I have a totally free speech."
