The former Minister of Health tells “the truth” about government management of the Covid-19 crisis in a book and believes that her warnings were never heard.
“Giving up on the Ministry of Health was the worst mistake of my life.” More than three years after leaving the government in the midst of rising global anxiety over Covid-19 to replace Benjamin Griveaux at short notice in the race for mayor of Paris, Agnès Buzyn publishes a logbook of the pandemic in the form of a 500-page book, entitled Agnès, you scared the President. On this occasion, she gives interviews in West France And The Parisian.
With this work, the former minister, who has since migrated to the Court of Auditors, says she wants to “propose another story than the one we have been hearing for more than three years” and denounces “the outpouring of conspiratorial and anti-Semitic hatred” his regard on social networks.
SMS with Emmanuel Macron and Édouard Philippe
Agnès Buzyn publishes in particular several months of exchanges by SMS with Emmanuel Macron and Édouard Philippe, to express her good faith on the management of the crisis and to avoid “seeing them appear in small pieces, out of context and in an instrumentalized way” . She explains that these messages would have leaked at one point or another, because they are recorded in the investigation file of the investigation into the management of the health crisis.
Agnès Buzyn was for a time indicted in this case for “involuntary manslaughter” before this procedure was canceled. She is still implicated in this case, under the status of “assisted witness”, awaiting a potential judgment.
“The story will be taken over by the opposition and by the conspiracy theorists”, she already resigns herself, “I am not going to escape it but I trust in collective intelligence”.
Defense of its alert work
The doctor, a specialist in hematology, swears and tries to prove, with supporting stories and SMS, that she tried to alert the top of the executive, both the president and his advisors as well as the Prime Minister, about the seriousness of the danger presented by Covid-19 which had already led China to quarantine several cities.
“I am the first in Europe, and perhaps even in the world, to have ordered masks”, “I am the first minister in the world to hold a press conference on Covid”, she spreads like so many tokens of his good faith.
She also criticizes the WHO which “did not do what it should have done” and the Scientific Council, “a mixture of genres between high-level scientists and people from civil society” which failed to recommend confinement on time according to her.
The former minister also believes that her sentence on the “low” risk of the spread of Covid-19 in France, on January 24, was misinterpreted, and wants us to remember the words she said. actually pronounced: “the risk of introduction into France is low but cannot be excluded, especially since there are direct air lines between France and the city of Wuhan”.
Forced to become a candidate for mayor of Paris
But three weeks after the first death due to the virus in France, on February 26, she was asked to quickly take on the role of candidate of the presidential party for mayor of Paris, after the withdrawal on February 14 of Benjamin Griveaux , who has just seen his intimate photos distributed on the Internet by Alexandra de Taddeo, with whom he had extra-marital affairs, and the sulphurous artist Piotr Pavlenski.
Agnès Buzyn then describes herself as in an impasse: pushed by those around her and by the temporary disappearance of Covid-19 cases in France, she “gives in”, reluctantly, after having nevertheless announced her intention to stay at Health for a few days earlier. She also knows that Emmanuel Macron wants a reshuffle after the municipal elections, and that a new refusal on his part, after that of becoming head of the list in the 2019 European elections, could hasten his exit from the government.
“I had the chance to serve my country by being a minister, I must give back what was given to me. This is my loyal side, a good soldier,” she summarizes.
Launched in a campaign that she retrospectively considers to be “lost in advance” given the chaos which accompanied the withdrawal of Benjamin Griveaux, she nevertheless continues to alert Emmanuel Macron and Édouard Philippe, without always receiving a response.
It is also from his insistence that the title of his book comes. According to her, this is a sentence pronounced by the secretary general of the Élysée and man in the shadow of the president, Alexis Kohler, after the defense by the minister to Emmanuel Macron of the option of a confinement from February 12, in the face of the explosion of cases in China.
Potential return to politics
After her departure from the government, Agnès Buzyn said she regretted seeing “manly” and “a little bravado” management of the health crisis. “Internationally, we see that heads of state have, on the contrary, taken more protective measures for their populations,” she defends.
And to question the weight of sexism in the consideration of his alerts: “If I had been a man or if I had been more politically powerful with a party, would my words have been heard differently?”
Today, the former minister is preparing with his lawyers a potential defense before the Court of Justice of the Republic in the event of a judgment. “France is the only country in the world to have sued its ministers over a global pandemic… This should make us think collectively,” she believes.
But the doctor does not necessarily imagine her future outside of politics. When asked if she could play a role in the European elections of spring 2024, she defends “a more assertive Europe” and ends up answering: “I will go where I am useful. I will never put my convictions in my pocket “. And when The Parisian asks her if she would accept the post of Minister of Health again, she believes that “it depends on what we can do about it”.