Written by Aude Henry
Registered with the Toulouse bar, Julien Brel has not worked for two years. The lawyer has been suffering from long-term Covid since November 2022. An endurance athlete before catching the disease, he is now disabled. Five years after the appearance of the virus, he agreed to give us his feelings on the management of the health crisis until today.
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It was January 11, 2020. The day China officially announced the first death from a mysterious virus. The epidemic, which originated in the province of Wuhan, will turn into a global pandemic in the weeks and months that follow. The coronavirus, Covid, will disrupt the lives of millions of people in France. Among them: Julien Brel, lawyer in Toulouse. Contaminated twice in 2022, and although vaccinated, he suffers from the long form of the disease. He has been unable to work for two years. But he fights. Particularly for another speech from public health authorities.
The coronavirus appeared in the television news of France 2 and M6 on January 18, 2020. Julien Brel is not really paying attention to it yet. Five years later, he told us, “What I remember most is from mid-February, when there were major outbreaks which appeared with information coming from Italy in particular.“
“I remember the government’s speeches at the time, which were already extremely reassuring. And I found it quite astonishing, when there was a situation which was already very difficult in Italy, that we had such a reassuring speech in France even though the Italian situation was inevitably going to happen. There was no reason why it shouldn’t be more difficult here than on the other side of the Alps.“
Julien Brel remembers a speech by Agnès Buzyn at the time. “Who, I believe, said: everything is fine, we are ready. It was… With what we know about the sequence of events, it was already this desire to be overly reassuring only to end up not being ready.“
The first three cases of the disease in France were recorded on January 24, 2020. The first died on February 15. A first confinement was decreed the day after the first round of municipal elections, on March 17. We then have to wait for the masks, the vaccines…
As soon as the anti-Covid vaccination campaign was launched, Julien Brel was there. But the lawyer contracts the virus for the first time in January 2022.It didn’t do anything special to me, I had a completely normal life afterwards, and my life changed after the second contamination in September 2022“, he says. The lawyer suffers from the long form of the disease. Long Covid which can affect the cardio, pulmonary, digestive and neurological systems.
“For me, it is well fixed at the neurological level. With enormous fatigue. It’s not the fatigue I knew before, which is made up for by rest. We can rest as much as we want, we are always in a state of significant fatigue. We have extremely invasive and very debilitating fatigue and almost pulmonary difficulties concerning me and then neuropathic type pain in the lower limbs and then sometimes on the upper limbs too. It’s very changeable, it migrates.“
Also read: “It’s like a biological prison” suffering from long Covid, he describes a poorly recognized illness
One year and eight months since Julien Brel has been off work. “I was sporty, I was active from a professional point of view. I was not part of the category they like to highlight, the vulnerable. And I fell into disability. I have a recognition of a disability rate between 50 and 69%.“
Since his long Covid, Julien Brel has participated in the fight against “the invisibility in which we would like to be left, like a bad memory of a period we would like to forget. Getting this illness recognized, getting the rights attached to our new situation recognized, was a bit of a journey through the desert. It still is today“, he tells us.
We can’t pass on this thing. We buried people who died from Covid. We have people who are disabled by Covid. Some die slowly.
Julien Brel, sick with long Covid and on disability
But, five years after the appearance of the virus, what bothers him above all is that “Covid is today presented as something completely benign, treated like the flu, like a pseudo-winter virus.“No more wearing a mask.”As if the pandemic was over. However, we know that the virus is still circulating and prevention is very, very far from being up to par.“An example: vaccination open only on October 15.
Also read: Covid, flu and bronchiolitis: “Getting vaccinated is protecting yourself”, the health authorities decree general mobilization
For the lawyer, it is clear that the discourse of politicians and health authorities is still not adapted to the situation. “The only prevention talk there is around Covid is for vulnerable people and the elderly. And that, in fact, is criminal, as a speech“, tells us the former endurance athlete who, two and a half years after his last contamination, walks with a cane. And to defend another public health policy, Julien Brel joined the ranks of the Winslow association.
