PFor almost two years, the Covid-19 pandemic and the health of the world have been the priority themes of all meetings of the G7, the G20, the European Council and regional diplomatic summits. Diplomacy was on the front line. The expression “vaccine diplomacy” has entered the language of negotiators. Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen founded ACT-A (for Access to Covid-19 Tools-Accelerator), a new mechanism for financing research and the purchase of drugs and vaccines against Covid-19 .
A few months after the end declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the global pandemic emergency, the watchword seems to be silence and denial feigning oblivion. Neither the French President, nor the German Chancellor, nor the President of the Commission will participate in the extraordinary meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response in New York in September. Neither the word “health” nor that of “pandemic” were uttered by Emmanuel Marcron in his speech to the conference of ambassadors.
National and international political attention waned and we entered what the Anglo-Saxon world calls the cycle of panic and neglect. Dismay in the face of the health emergency gives way, without lessons being learned, to omission, even negligence. In the report published in May 2021 of the Independent evaluation group of the international response to Covid, we noted that less than 10% of the recommendations proposed by the bodies responsible for drawing lessons from the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa had been followed. In fact, when Ebola broke out in Uganda a few months ago, the therapeutic antibodies developed in the United States following the epidemic were in stock, but were not accessible.
Essential new devices
We wondered, on June 16, when the state of health emergency had clearly passed, if it was nevertheless reasonable to definitively turn the page on a disease that continues to take three times more lives. lives than seasonal flu. New potentially threatening variants such as BA.2.86 are emerging and the WHO recommends monitoring them. The recommendations for booster vaccinations against Covid-19 at the national level primarily concern people at risk of serious forms. But if the British decided to bring forward the campaign by a month due to the current worrying trend, the French government is still procrastinating on this subject.
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