Exit the scientific council, hello the “committee for monitoring and anticipating health risks”… This new body, which will succeed the first, was created this Sunday by a decree published in the Official Journal Sunday, when the new health law is promulgated.
This committee will be made up of nineteen members, whose names will be “communicated in the coming days”, indicated the cabinet of the Minister of Health François Braun to AFP. It is not excluded that certain members of the Scientific Council – whose mission ends on Sunday with the end of the state of health emergency – are part of it.
“Monitoring the health risks associated with infectious agents”
This committee will be responsible for monitoring “the health risks linked to infectious agents affecting humans and animals, environmental and food pollutants, and climate change”. In particular, he will have to “issue recommendations when a projection reveals a health risk”.
It will also have the mission of “issuing recommendations on the measures envisaged by the public authorities in order to fight against a health crisis” and “on the vaccination strategy implemented, if necessary, in the face of a health threat”, according to the decree.
Established with the Ministers of Health and Research, it can be seized by one of them or self-seize. Its opinions will be made public.
“A very high level commando team”
This committee will be chaired by a qualified person, appointed by the Ministers of Health and Research, and composed of “16 personalities of scientists or health professionals, a patient representative, a citizen representative”, according to the decree. “In the event of a health crisis”, its president may “propose to call on additional personalities for their specific expertise”.
The members of the committee will be appointed “for a term of two years, renewable once”. The Minister of Health said on Wednesday on franceinfo that the committee would be “a bit of a commando team of very high-level scientists” and would be “independent, transparent in its opinions and extremely responsive”.
Missions that will go beyond the Covid
Its missions will go beyond the Covid “given the risks of emergence of other viruses”, underlined François Braun. “We will have new tools, but we will be surprised by a new virus which will have other properties”, judged the president of the Scientific Council Jean-François Delfraissy, in an interview with Parisian Sunday taking stock of his regrets and his successes in more than two years of pandemic.
With “specialists in human, animal and environmental health”, the committee will allow “a broader approach”, he added.