The 24e International AIDS Conference will begin in Montreal in a few days in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, because, even if we no longer count the waves, we know that the viruses and their variants are still there. So, let’s talk about COVID and AIDS, and remember those who are still on the front line.
COVID has imploded a self-absorbed, horribly dehumanized healthcare system into a tone-deaf, indifferent power war, disregarding the needs of suffering communities. This system first exhausted and burned its main resource, that of humans working there at their own risk. Yet we had built and implemented, in the trajectory of the Quiet Revolution, a real community health network 40 years ago, making the envy of many countries around the world.
It is the community who, with enthusiasm and confidence, thanks to his know-how in the field, his resourcefulness and his ingenuity, largely contributed to the development of the first true local centers of community services, autonomous, financed and multifunctional, including only rare samples remain! It was the community that accompanied the agonizing AIDS pandemic from 1979, then 1984 at the express request of the distraught government and with its support. It is the community which, with the World Health Organization, gave its support in 1981 to the future National Institute of Public Health of Quebec. It was by and for the community that the Institut Pasteur in Paris graciously offered the initial strain of HIV to the INSPQ in 1984.
Once again, it was the community who knew how to organize, to the great relief of the Minister of Health at the time, vaccination during outbreaks of bacterial meningitis in 1992. It was the community who, reluctantly, is currently concerned with the unwelcome and excluded from society. It is also the community that knew what to do, how to do it and did it immediately, as of July 2016, in response to poisoning and overdose by opiates, including fentanyl. It was the community who launched the detection and analysis of substances and the transmission of information, on the spot, in response to the horrible bereavements of the survivors who were begging to be informed of what was added to their drugs. usual for it to kill them. It is the community that currently bares its teeth and bares its claws in the face of the unmistakable stigma around monkeypox.
The community was available with his know-how in the face of another viral pandemic, that of COVID-19. It was ignored and bourgeoisly rejected, alas! It is all that also the community.
There is talk of dusting off the Clair report, a missed rendezvous with the history of twenty years ago, and of returning to the sources of the Castonguay-Nepveu report of 1971, its implementation plan for 146 CLSCs, from citizens, community organizers, nurses, caregivers, MPs, administrators, social workers, doctors, volunteers, those who know what to do, with whom to do it, how to do it, when to do it and do it.
Let us do ! We have already started. In short, let’s give back to caregivers the pleasure and gratification of relieving their fellow human beings with rigor, but without the current sterilizing rigidity.