Dr Gérald Kierzek, emergency doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu, gave an interview in which he defends his role as a consultant on television during the Covid-19 crisis.
Criticism of the vaccine pass, denunciation of the “terrible vicious circle“screening tests… Dr. Gérald Kierzek, emergency doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital and consultant for TF1 and LCI, does not hesitate to condemn the health decisions taken by the executive during the Covid-19 epidemic. His speech often deviates from that of the majority of scientists, which leads some of his peers to discredit him. His detractors, for example, criticize the fact that he is not often on the field. “He has to do two 4-hour shifts a week in a ghost ship.“, thus launched the general practitioner Christian Lehmann, quoted by The Parisian. A position that Gérald Kierzek does not, however, totally deny, as he repeated in an interview with The New Republic and published this Saturday, February 12. In particular, he defended his outspokenness and his role as a consultant on television.
“Consultant, but not expert”
“If I still love this job so much, it’s because I do it part time“, admitted the medical director of Doctissimo, for whom communication is even inseparable from medicine. “I always loved. During my studies, I made videos. To be a doctor is to communicate: it is a dialogue, exchanges with the patient“, he explained.
But Gérald Kierzek wanted to be clear about his role on television sets: “Little by little, I became a consultant, but not an expert“often accused of being”reassuring“, a term used to describe the doctors very present in the media who hold a more optimistic and less alarmist discourse on the epidemic or who even minimize the waves of Covid-19, the emergency doctor said he did not regret anything about his statements. “My speech is intended to be reassuring, positive, soothing. I do not withdraw a word from my articles and interventions since the beginning of the crisishe said. I know that I am on a crest line: between the alarmists and the ‘reassuring’, I am the pragmatic.” In the columns of The New Republic, Gérald Kierzek, whose primer Your health in the world after will be released on February 16 in bookstores, highlighted his legitimacy as an emergency doctor, and at the same time condemned the fact that “hospitals are run by administrators and not caregivers“.