Three years after the start of the Covid-19 crisis, it is time to take stock. There is no question of going back here on what has been done well or badly. No here, we are mainly talking about scientific controversies and the latest with Didier Raoult and the promotion of hydroxychloroquine to fight against the coronavirus. It is however only a pretext, a starting point for Patrick Cohen to return to an entire era of mystifiers through 90 minutes of stories, testimonies and historical archives. And it is to be found in a documentary broadcast this Sunday evening (at 8:55 p.m.), on France 5.
Initially, the idea came from a general desire to work on “disinformation, major deceptions and mystifications in information”, tells our microphone Patrick Cohen. But the subject is wide and it is necessary to readjust the focal length. Could have been told for example the affair of the fake mass graves of Timisoara at the end of the 1980s, but Patrick Cohen prefers to refocus on the subject of scientific and medical mystifications. “It seemed much more fun to me to go and tell these stories knowing in advance that there would be echoes with what we had seen during the Covid-19 crisis and with Didier Raoult and the IHU”. Without too much hesitation, the choice falls on four cases, each one more emblematic than the other.
When science becomes politics
First there is the treatment of cyclosporine for AIDS, the Lyssenko affair during the Soviet regime, the false miracle of the memory of water and finally the media presence of the climatosceptic Claude Allègre who became Minister of National Education. under Jacques Chirac. If the link is not obvious here, there is nevertheless a troubling common thread between these affairs: science can quickly become a political and media affair, as evidenced by the press conference organized by force on October 29, 1985 to present the miraculous treatment with cyclosporine, an immunosuppressive drug. “The AIDS episode is very enlightening even if we have not kept a very vivid memory of it because the episode only lasted a few days”, underlines Patrick Cohen who recalls with a small smile the sentence of the scientist head of this affair Philippe Even: “Better a disappointed hope than no hope at all”.
In addition to the scientific faux pas, there is also the political ideology which is at the center of this documentary through the Lyssenko affair. At the heart of the Soviet years, the biologist offers a new vision of agriculture thanks to genetics… which is formally opposed to the Western vision. But this technique is not a revolution and the popularity of the scientist ends up collapsing. “Even if the media ecosystem is different, we see that things can happen again. There are the same mechanisms at work. Instead of producing truths, within the framework of science, of sticking to the scientific consensus, which was the case for the laws of Mendel and Darwin on genetics – we prefer to mobilize the marginal and dissenting opinions which are carried by scientists isolated”, comments Patrick Cohen.
The issue of media hype
The memory of water is another outstanding example. In 1988, the immunologist Jacques Benveniste proposed a theory that would legitimize homeopathy. In the media, we cry at the miracle. But very quickly, the treatment became controversial and its links with Boiron laboratories were suspected. Whose fault is it ? To the scientist or the media who too quickly echoed the discovery? For Patrick Cohen, as there are good and bad scientists, “there are good and bad journalists”. “We would need a collective discipline which does not exist”, regrets the columnist who however notices developments during the Covid-19 crisis. “Didier Raoult was never invited to the 8 p.m. television news, he did not have the media coverage he could have hoped for given the extent of his revelations. Many journalists had a healthy reflex of caution,” he notes. The only major change since these historic controversies: the arrival of social networks which form a new sounding board.
90 minutes later, the documentary is coming to an end and the absence of the subject’s investigator, Didier Raoult, will not even have been noticed. “I didn’t want to pull the string. Three years later, what could we have said that is new and interesting in addition to the things that have already been said, filmed, published? asks Patrick Cohen. And the journalist to add: “I am quite proud that we were able to approach the subject in an original way by stepping aside and on stories that evoke this crisis without directly displaying it. It seems to me to be an original way of doing it even if it was not obvious at the start”.