My chateaux d'If: The doxa of covid.

The good thing about news is that there is always one piece of information that replaces another. We're not bored. We are not left without bones to gnaw, without unnecessary fear. Immigrants one day, the ultra-right another, the violence of the yellow vests, the black blocks, and all that mixed together, it's even more scary. Especially if you're old, it seems.

Another thing is that the time comes one day to contradict everything that has been said before. We saw it for the Reichstag fire, for the lies of the First World War, for the Dreyfus affair, for the Gulf War. The bigger the lie, the more it passes. Except that later, no one cares. Evoke the daughter of the RER D, victim of anti-Semitism in 2004 and you will see that no one remembers it anymore. She will admit to having invented everything after all of France is indignant. In a while, we will begin to shed light on the current epidemic, we will stop ranting against Raoult or Mucchielli but they will remain with opprobrium, because the press will have attacked them so much that there will always be an indelible stain. Slander is stronger than the restoration of truth. (When I think back to Libé, who became a warmonger during the first Gulf War, it hurts. At the time, there were few of us with Denis Langlois and the people who launched Big Bertha (in particular the former members of Charlie Hebdo 1st version between others) to denounce this fucking war. Luckily there was this newspaper to save honor.)

In the summer of 2020, on vacation in the Var, I came across the “excellent” Var matin which made its front page on drownings with staggering figures. I'm afraid. Fortunately, I have my buoy. Such a first page was well worth the one on the Covid carnage which we did not talk about for a few more days. Nowadays, when it's not drowning in the Var, it's the eternal orange alerts, rain, ice, with a list of departments where divine lightning strikes. By taking the train, I receive messages to wear my mask properly, not to fall off the platform, to be with a ticket in order, to pay attention to abandoned packages, to close my fly, I am put in a condition of permanent danger. A simple trip to Aubagne is an adventure worthy of a secret agent jumping by parachute on a stormy night in mid-August 1942 on the Kommandantur. (I'm reading Alias ​​Caracalla by D. Cordier right now). If we count the messages on France Inter where I am told to blow my nose in the elbow, to sneeze behind my ear, to isolate myself, to wash my hands without touching the soap, the list of my contactless life is constantly changing like a paranoid distraction. Viruses never listen to messages from either France Inter or SNCF. FFP2 or FFP 33 mask, distancing, case of contact, they don't care. They circulate. You can confine, curfew at 6 p.m., at 9 p.m., vaccinate, prevent people from taking the train, from going to the restaurant, them the viruses, they go out for a pizza, make themselves a canvas, an exhibition, and go up to Lille or Rio if they like it. Viruses don't say anything, they circulate and when they kill, they stop circulating. So they prefer to circulate, not stupid, with their cousins, their sisters and nephews, its millions of replicas that no Chinese wall can prevent from moving. And when they meet a vaccine cousin, they both greet each other and walk together.

I still remember demonstrations in defense of the public hospital, large mobilizations against the closure of hospital services. We were a few thousand but surely not enough for the ARS to change their minds. The ARS are these big viruses put in place to liquidate the so expensive public hospital. And at the head of this kind of big virus, there was a certain Jean Castex. That is to say that one of those responsible for fee-for-service pricing, profitability in the hospital (Hospital Plan 2007) is the one who explains to us one day that the sick are the culprits, another that the non vaccinated are sub-citizens. Well, I say congratulations Jean because no one recalls this information, neither the average pequin, nor our great journalists, busy putting their masks back on their lies. And when nurses show up in the street at the end of the first confinement, they are gassed. Doctors who are rarely left-leaning and therefore unaccustomed to the street are given little gauze. And then we need them to treat fractures after demonstrations, blind spots... Today, thanks to this policy of rigor in the face of the public monster, we spend lavishly on private companies that make vaccine tents, tests, analyzes, medicines, equipment of all kinds around the corpse of our hospital which melted with its fewer beds and depressed staff. Long before the Covid, I met doctors leaving the ship, annoyed by the liberal bureaucracy which stuffed itself with hospital corpses. The enarques and commercial of all stripes sucked the blood of all the field hospitals, sparking the revolt of the Yellow Vests. Read Mathieu Amiech's brochure, This is not a pandemic, for more details. The author defends the idea that our leaders take advantage of the crisis to promote a new social organization. It warns about new vaccines and obviously opposes the vaccination pass. Its angle is all the same the harmful attachment of individuals to everything digital.

Laurent Mucchielli, a sociologist specializing in security issues, has just released a survey on the political health management of covid. A few years ago, I chronicled his very documented work on video surveillance. I have been reading his very rich blog on publications in the humanities for a long time. At the start of his book, he sets the record straight against the frantic use of the word conspiracy about everything that does not say power or those who have the means to disseminate information. If, for example, I told you that Nicolas Sarkosy financed his electoral campaign with Libyan money and that one way of not reimbursing it was to start a war, you would say that, no, but really, I am a conspirator. At the time of the USSR, we said titist, it was cuter. If I told you now that the French news in 1942 told that London was constantly bombed, that the English were our enemies and that Marshal Pétain was our savior, well you would be like the vast majority of French people at the time: people to whom we lie but ready to do anything to defend the lie. It all depends on who is telling the story. Often the winner. The doxa is the official and indisputable discourse.

Laurent Mucchielli has another version to offer of the Covid crisis: He disputes the lethality of the virus, to which he is generally told that it is precisely thanks to confinement that the 500,000 planned deaths have been avoided. He claims that this stronger than usual seasonal flu was mishandled. It would have been necessary to protect and ventilate, to use barrier gestures including masks but to focus on vulnerable people, to carry out massive tests, and then to treat with city medicine which, according to him, has been excluded from the countryside. For him, only the IHU in Marseille does it with strength and honour. Since the hope given by Didier Raoult's team, a campaign against the professor has been launched. As Mucchielli reminds us, who is squarely on the left if you want to know everything, sometimes it was against his beard, his supposed right side, (it's true that doctors are all Trotskyists) his machismo, then it became against his managerial methods, his trials without nets. Didier Raoult saw many media and forces rise up against him to attack him against his treatment with chloroquine / azithromycin, inspired by Chinese doctors. Yet at first, Raoult was one of the few media figures to remain calm as the most delirious hysteria ignited everywhere. His first conference had been classified as fake news by Le Monde, which earned him incredible notoriety. The World by way of Ariane Chemin then attacked the character while everyone was supposed to choose between Raoult and the Scientific Council, elected by the president, from which Didier Raoult just came out. If you do not agree with this version, you can always read the Mediapart survey which it is dependent on the doctor. This subject is for Mucchielli a diversion which led to a political choice towards the vaccine as a miracle. Vaccines have worked some miracles, but above all in reducing childhood diseases and therefore reducing infant mortality.

Who remembers that Emmanuel Macron, advised by these wonderful scientists, let the municipal elections take place, “even for the most vulnerable. “He rightly explained that in the vast majority of cases, covid is harmless but that obese, diabetic or cancer patients, on the other hand, could be seriously affected. Public opinion decided otherwise and war was declared. Infantilization and guilt were powerful weapons. Laurent Mucchielli believes that viruses don't care about confinements and curfews. Their mutations take place regularly as can be seen today with a very high number of cases but an insignificant number of deaths. To give you an idea, 600,000 people die in France year after year. And for ten years this figure has been increasing. Does it help you?

The police management of confinement is crushed because, underlines the author, it is only in France that a system of self-attestation has been put in place. A bureaucratic pinnacle that has changed often in its formulation. The fines distributed to the opportune ones who broke the laws were an opportunity to verbalize everything that could be. And without it moving many people because it was necessary to face the threat. The most shocking was surely the absence of protest, of doubt among the population. The vast majority swallowed the speech prepared by the pharmacies of Nudge evoked by Barbara Stiegler. Mucchielli writes: “…the bureaucracy found a way to modify the rules of social life 38 times at the end of October 2020 and the beginning of April 2021, ie a modification every four days on average. You could call that the regime of arbitrariness.

We understood this a little late, but it was the number of hospital beds available that played a role in the coercive measures taken by the State. When 160,000 hospital beds are cut between 1990 and 2017 by the same teams of technocrats who run the country today, it's hard to understand how the same can tell us about the saturation they themselves have created. But this kind of information does not question the average citizen who spends his time getting tested, without sometimes being sick. From the beginning, there was such a focus on a single pathology that patients died for lack of care. We haven't all been lucky enough to have the Covid, some only have cancer!

The author then charges several pharmacies such as the European Medicines Agency or the zealots of the vaccine at all costs like the foundation of Bill Gates and his credo: vaccinate the world. His initial wish was mainly for children but led him to believe that an anti-flu vaccine could be found every year. Crazy hope that brings them closer to transhumanist delusions and technical beliefs inherited from the old background of humanity, to stay young and save us from death. Pharaoh's dream.

The great absence of the book is finally her, death. Its presence so strong during the first confinement where the absence of life in the streets and in the public space recalled these anticipatory films on nuclear accidents which empty the streets.

But it is only volume 1 that Laurent Mucchielli is publishing today.

The doxa of covid. Fear, health, corruption and democracy. Ed Aeolian, 2022, 12, 50 euros.

Democracy in a pandemic, Barbara Stiegler, Gallimard, 2021, 4 euros.

This is not a health crisis, Mathieu Amiech, Slow Editions. Free price.