Masks, vaccination, collective immunity … A centrist senator multiplies untruths

If they are all elected or ex-elected, Martine Wonner, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and Florian Philippot also have in common that they are regularly pinned down because of their propensity to spread false information on the health crisis. Less media-oriented, the centrist senator from Haute-Savoie Loïc Hervé is one of the parliamentarians who are generally described as “moderate” and much less controversial.

The announcement of a vaccine pass however made him jump: he lamented in recent days in an interview “a staircase of no return where month after month, the only adjustment variable to face the epidemic is to reach public freedoms”. On his Twitter account, the senator published a series of messages, started by specifying that he is in the eyes of the society of “good citizen”, because “vaccinated x 3”. In the process, he slips wearing the mask “even if it is of no interest from a health plan”, and deplores that “the vaccination did not lead to the famous collective immunity“. Before stressing that “the sanitary pass does not protect against contamination”. Misleading words.

No interest in wearing the mask for a health plan? By these words, Loïc Hervé recalls the position of certain activists, since the start of the epidemic questioning their effectiveness. If the elected official does not use the term “muzzle”, regularly used by opponents of the mask, he clearly questions the relevance of its wearing, thus going against a broad scientific consensus.

Jean-Christophe Lucet, head of the infectious risk prevention team (EPRI) at the Parisian hospital Bichat, reminded LCI in the spring that “what we know for sure today is that wearing a mask reduces the risk of transmission when worn indoors”. The member of Inserm’s Infection, Antimicrobials, Modeling, Evolution (IAME) unit also cited the work carried out by the Institut Pasteur as an example, thus justifying the restaurant closures that had been decided at the time by authorities.

More recently, these are works published in the British Medical Journal which in turn came to confirm the effectiveness of the masks. Analyzing more than 30 studies carried out across the world since the start of the pandemic, the researchers saw it as the most effective measure against the spread of Covid-19, reducing its incidence rate by 53%. These results will not surprise surgeons and other healthcare professionals who have been used to wearing the mask for many years, especially in hospitals. From the start of the pandemic, they stepped up their interventions, both to explain their usefulness and to reassure the population, in particular about the absence of risk in the event of prolonged wear.

Loïc Hervé notes in his messages that the health pass does not protect against contamination. This is partially true, but it should be emphasized that the Scientific Council from the start saw this tool as a means of “minimize the risk of contamination by the Sars-CoV-2 virus”, without guaranteeing to be completely protected. In the same way, moreover, as the vaccine, designed above all to protect serious forms and which only partially protects against infection.

Moreover, with regard to the objective of collective immunity, on the other hand, the senator disseminates misleading remarks. It is fair to point out that at the present time and despite the vaccination, we have failed to achieve this immunity, but this is actually not due to a lack of efficacy of the vaccine. It should no longer be explained by the excessively high proportion of French people who remain hostile to vaccination.

Today, experts believe that a 90% vaccinated population would be a minimum threshold to reach in order to hope for collective immunity. This is still quite a long way off due to the approximately 18 million people who today do not have a complete vaccination schedule. The opening of injections every 5-11 years could also make it possible to gradually approach 90%.

Finally, it should be noted that the virus we are now struggling with is no longer quite the same as the one that circulated at the time when vaccines were developed. “the arrival of more infectious variants has increased the proportion of the population requiring protection”Inserm immunologist Frédéric Rieux-Lauca pointed out to LCI a few days ago.

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