Former French Health Minister Agnès Buzyn faces a possible prison term and heavy fine for “endangering the life of others” in her mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, as France leads the way in making its leaders accountable.
Despite the massive failures by governments and public health officials across the globe in dealing with the pandemic, it’s only the dead that really pay any sort of price.
Most of the so-called experts simply move on, retire, or fade back into academia or big pharma where many of them came from.
Not so in France, where the appetite for accountability has landed former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn in la merde, having just been indicted by the Court of Justice of the Republic – a special court established specifically to hold government ministers accountable for their actions – for “endangering the life of others” through mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has cost the French 115,000 lives.
If found guilty, she faces a year in jail and a €15,000 fine.
Buzyn, a former doctor, did not have a good pandemic.
She stood on the steps of the Elysee Palace in January last year and foolishly declared:
“The risks of the coronavirus spreading to the population are low.”
Ooops.
But Buzyn is not the only French politician with their neck on the block.
Her successor, Health Minister Olivier Véran, is also under investigation, along with former Prime Minister Edouard Phillippe.
Surely, this is the sort of ministerial accountability that every democratic nation should be enforcing.
Too often, incompetent, bungling, and plainly dishonest politicians escape sanction when they step aside, trying to present their resignation – or sacking – as some kind of noble gesture for which they should be congratulated, not imprisoned.
Former UK Health Minister Matt Hancock was given the nudge after he was found canoodling with a staff member and flouting his own social distancing guidelines. Justice found him, though it was at the hands of a group of rowdy girls on the Tube, who mocked him, filmed him squirming on their phones, and nicked his baseball cap.
Justice of sorts, and hilarious, but something more formal would also be good.
But what about the rest of the COVID clowns around the world, with their misinformation, backtracking on guidance, exaggeration, underestimation, and sheer, cack-handed incompetence?
Right up there is WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus who, when meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, was full of praise for China’s containment of the coronavirus.
The very least we could expect would be the WHO boss clearing his desk.
In the US, Dr Anthony ‘Flip-flop’ Fauci faced his own messaging problems, having initially announced that the pandemic posed a “very, very low risk to the United States,” in January 2020.
Since then, there have been more than 40 million reported COVID cases in the US and around 652,000 deaths.
I hope he likes golf, because Dr Fauci might soon have a lot more time to work on his handicap.
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We’ve all seen the various flip-flops of the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci over the last 18 months.
To help keep track, I present “Fauci vs. Fauci,” chronicling the twists, turns, contradictions and backtracks from the man and his agency.⤵️
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) July 28, 2021
He also faced ridicule for his U-turn on facemasks, first declaring them ineffective in keeping the virus at bay, only to later decide that they should be worn indoors at all times, regardless of vaccination status.
Meanwhile, in the land (Lock)Down Under, security guards meant to be keeping watch over quarantine hotels for tourists were alleged to have spread the virus after having sex with their charges.
Vaccination rollout was beset with shortages and mismanagement, while hugely unpopular on-off curfews and restrictions on leaving home have been enforced by armed military patrolling the streets.
Victoria’s State Leader Dan Andrews, who couldn’t recall who had made the decision to employ private guards, was told by his opposition leader Michael O’Brien that his handling of the hotel quarantine programme “has been the most disastrous failure of public administration in Victoria’s history.” Not. A. Fan.
Going after these health experts is like shooting fish in a barrel, but France seems to be the only nation prepared to insist that mismanagement of the greatest public health crisis the world has ever known is not allowed to slide.
Liberty is treasured in La République, and the French public look ready to exact a price for surrendering theirs in the name of COVID-19.
It will be interesting to see which nations follow their marvellous example.
Source: Damian Wilson – RT
Notes:
The charges are a blow to President Emmanuel Macron, whose handling of the health crisis will come under scrutiny during next year’s election campaign, but the tribunal is also likely to face allegations of judicial overrun.
Buzyn, who resigned his post in February last year, weeks after the first cases of COVID were confirmed in France, has been criticized and ridiculed for his initial statements about the pandemic.
She said in January 2020 that there was “virtually no risk” of importing COVIDd-19 from the Chinese city that caused the epidemic, Wuhan, then said that “the risk of the spread of coronavirus among the population is very low ”.
A month later, as she left the ministry to launch a failed bid to become mayor of Paris, she asserted that “the tsunami has not yet arrived,” in apparent contradiction to her earlier statements.