COVVI-19: Solitude of Agnès BUZYN, shortage of masks, raoult “con like the moon” … A shock book pinning the government management of the pandemic

Three judges, those of the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR). An assassin, the COVVI-19, which caused 170,000 people in France over the past five years. An extraordinary investigation against three ministers implicated in the pandemic crisis: Edouard Philippe, Agnès Buzyn and Olivier Véran. This is the setting of the book published this Wednesday, January 22, by journalists of Monde Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, who had access to the file, while Emmanuel Macron was not affected by these investigations, protected by his status as President of the Republic.

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The authors retraced, with hundreds of thousands of documents in support (confidential notes, texts, emails), the management of the first six months of the health crisis in 2020. If the CJR – Close survey since the end of November Last-has not resulted in any indictment of the three former members of the government and should give birth to a probable dismissal, it has the merit of pointing the numerous hiccups of the state apparatus, crushed by the weight of the bureaucracy .

A long-term work of almost five years for these three judges, who did not hesitate to search to the homes of the ministers and their ministries, even that of justice with the opening to the grinder of a trunk- With the former Garden of the Seals Eric Dupont-Moretti to the “Black Regard”.

Agnès Buzyn's loneliness

From the first pages, the authors report on the loneliness of Agnès Buzyn, Minister of Health, who repeatedly expressed his concerns in a form of general indifference to the highest peak of the State. “Mr. PR, a small information that is not yet in the media but can go up, she writes to Emmanuel Macron in an SMS on January 11, 2020, a little more than two months before the first confinement started on March 17. A one New epidemic has been in China for two weeks.

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COVVI-19: “Fortunately I scared the president”: Agnès Buzyn recounts the beginnings of the pandemic

Or, on February 13, in a message to the tenant of Matignon Edouard Philippe: “We are going on a crisis of magnitude and very long (several months). I will need reinforcements to the ministry.” Three days later, however, she left avenue de Ségur with Olivier Véran as a successor, to replace Benjamin Griveaux at the Battle of the Paris municipal. With the success we know.

Masks, “the shortage was known”

The survey shows that the health authorities had, in 2013, identified the need to constitute a strategic stock of a billion masks. But its number will gradually decrease from year to year in view of the various health players, with a logic of cost reduction.

So that “no mask was acquired by Public Health France (SPF) in 2016, 2017, 2018”, notes Jérôme Salomon, Director General of Health (2018-2023). On January 23, 2020, journalists write, “there are only 65.9 million surgical masks available to the Marolles platform (Marne), managed by SPF […] A derisory figure, there should be at least ten times more … “

“The shortage was known but in the name of the reason of state, it was necessary … to hide it”, to deny Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, who also return to the many government communication hiccups, with Sibeth N'Diaye then on the front line.

Raoult, “con like the moon”

Also in the book, some passages on Didier Raoult, judged “con like the Moon”, according to a relative of Edouard Philippe. This did not prevent the head of state from going to the IHU in Marseille in April 2020 to meet the researcher. Because despite the distrust against him “Didier Raoult, in authentic madman of the king, has long been in court, at the Élysée, but also at the top of the Ministry of Health, and not only at the start of the crisis.”