The government’s new invention in the “confinement” family is the end of weekend outings. Once again the Minister of Health moves, struts in front of the cameras and turns the media machine without saying anything, but dramatizing the urgency of decisions that he does not announce, to leave the prefect to take care of ‘inform the population. In short, the strategy of maintaining an anxiety-provoking climate continues without taking into account the damage it causes in the population and which have been amply emphasized by doctors, teachers, retirement home directors, but also by many citizens, whether students or residents of nursing homes.
The problem is that these endless discussions around the adaptations of containment measures are only a default method because hospital resources and vaccines are lacking. However, the observation of the government’s failure on these two issues is obvious. For a year, nothing has been done to increase the number of beds in hospitals. I know that I am repeating myself but the figures are there to show it: for a month, the number of hospitalized patients, in particular in intensive care, has been stable, certainly at a high level – between 3,000 and 3,500 patients – but should not be such an acute problem if we had increased our capacity over the past year, as had been promised. But liberal logic continues to prevail. Above all, we must not increase the number of hospital beds in a sustainable manner, because the objective remains to continue reducing hospital capacity, under the pretext of the famous “all outpatient”.
With regard to vaccines, the same logic which leads to privileging capital rather than public health results in the refusal to impose the ex officio license, that is to say the lifting of rights on patents, associated with a requisition of factories to be able to manufacture mass vaccines very quickly for the whole planet. The requirement to be able to continue living evenings and weekends requires another policy to fight the epidemic.
Find his previous post, “The benefits of laboratories”, and all of his columns.
