Covid-19 is “a real cowery, it was in 2020, it remains so in 2022!” For Professor Jean-François Delfraissy, President of the Scientific Council, it is time for confessions, in an interview granted to the Parisian (article for subscribers), Saturday July 30, on the eve of the end of his mission. He details his regrets, but also his successes, during more than two and a half years of pandemic. And concedes that he would never have believed that the coronavirus crisis “would last that long”.
After having “lived, thought, dreamed Covid”the scientist thinks “relieved” that his mission is over and will not return if called back. “It’s up to others to lead this adventure”, he believes. After the end of July, a committee for monitoring and anticipating health risks, beyond Covid-19, must take over from the Scientific Council. “This committee will therefore be made up of specialists in human, animal and environmental health, to have a broader approach”, says Jean-François Delfraissy. “I have no illusions. We will have new tools, but we will be surprised by a new virus which will have other properties”, he says.
His “first regret”who will follow “all along [sa] life” is to have passed in June 2020, during the deconfinement in nursing homes, the “health above all, to the detriment, perhaps, of a form of humanity”. “My second regret is that we could have made decisions with the citizens”he judges. “We could, for example, ask parents about the reopening of schools.”
He also regrets that during this crisis the World Health Organization (WHO) “did not take power over vaccines”. “It is up to it to guide manufacturers and not up to them to say when they need to be adapted”he believes, calling it “profound error” this “lack of strategic and scientific vision”.
On the side of “achievements”he is glad that “excess mortality in France in 2020 and 2021” that is “much lower than in our European neighbours”. “What reassures me is that we have returned to the model of recommendation and no longer of prohibition”, he adds. For example, he judges “important to continue to wear the mask in the hospital, but it is now up to the French to choose”.
Referring to the beginnings of the Covid crisis, Professor Delfraissy declares having had a “awareness” of the seriousness of the situation around mid-February 2020 during a meeting at WHO headquarters. “We asked lots of simple questions to the Chinese… And they always answered on the side!”, he recalls. Their ambiguity makes him think “that the crisis was surely much more serious than we thought”. “But I never thought it would last so long”he adds.