These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
The Science Council systematically expressed its preference for the strictest recommendations most inimical to liberty, as it directed France during nearly two years. The quarantines, the curfews, the mandatory masks, and the requirement of passes to enter the public were all recommended by the Science Council before being imposed by political authorities, which evidently chose to follow blindly the opinion of Jean-François Delfraissy and his colleagues. The opinion of the Science Council always functioned like this: a precise and rigorous analysis of the health situation, and then a series of alternative recommendations ranging from the “lightest” to the strictest. But the Science Council was not satisfied with merely presenting the possible precautionary steps: it also expressed its own preferences. It always preferred the harshest recommendations, and nearly systematically the government followed those recommendations to the letter—with the exception of January 2021, when Emmanuel Macron decided not to return the country to quarantine, against the advice of the Council (although a curfew restriction remained in place at that time).
In order to amplify their influence, some members of the Science Council even showed up on television shows, offering after-sale service for their own recommendations. The anxiety they spread through their words was exacerbated by their prestige as scientists and doctors, as they spelled out the rules to follow in family life and the private sphere, mandating how one might meet with friends, enjoy parties, eat . . . and even speak (the Academy of Sciences recommended that one not speak in public transportation). Science began to rule our lives and to decide, on the basis of its unquestionable authority, what one had to do and not do.
The Science Council is of course perfectly legitimate, and there was indeed a need for a body capable of explaining the perspective of science to the government. It was necessary to provide a scientific interpretation of the quantitative data about the epidemic, to understand its dynamic and the possible scenarios of containing it, and to grasp how the vaccine was functioning. And if the Council had restricted itself to this sort of clarification, it would have been perfectly within its proper role. We needed doctors and scientists to provide the keys for explaining the disease, its variants, the protective steps, and the vaccines. On these matters, the scientific discourse was valuable.
But the problem is that the scientists began to do politics when they recommended policy measures as severe as quarantine or the health pass. After all, these are steps that cannot be taken on the basis of purely scientific considerations. They threaten our democratic, social, and economic model, and they pose enormous ethical questions. No scientist has the legitimacy to declare the compulsory confinement of the whole country. Only politics can decide to put into place a measure like this, and only after having examined the full set of challenges and problems. The health pass involved prohibiting the complete social life of part of the population on the basis of a QR code, dependent on one’s vaccination record: how could a measure this grave, which poses immeasurable ethical problems, be ordered by . . . doctors?
How can even the idea of the obligatory mask in public, which limits facial sociability and therefore the possibility of a common life, be the result of a simple scientific recommendation? On what grounds can science call for a curfew, i.e., prohibiting individuals from going out and to back up this prohibition with the repressive power of the police? And finally how can it be left to scientists to decide whether to reinstate caregivers who have not violated any clause of their work contract? Let us remember that the policy of “zero COVID,” which was openly advocated by several renowned scientists, assumes a reconfinement of the whole population at the slightest return of the epidemic. This was more or less the policy that was carried out during the first year of the pandemic, amounting to a total erosion of the rule of the law, replaced by a permanent state of health emergency. And what some scientists called “measures of restraint” were in reality steps that, to a certain degree, amounted to an attack on the rule of law.
In its final opinion, the Science Council is right to call for better science education of the young generations. However it should have also called for a better education about democracy and its requirements for scientists and doctors. The matter cannot be attributed only to an authoritarian impulse at home in the medical world: there is also, for many scientists, a profound ignorance concerning democratic institutions and the fundamental norms that govern our Republic. There were, by the way, some scientists who admitted that certain democratic challenges went far beyond their own realm of competence. Yonathan Freund, an emergency doctor at Pitié Salpetrière and a professor of medicine, expressed his discomfort when some of his colleagues recommended ranking patients in need of intensive care according to their vaccination status. The big question is why there were so few who expressed this kind of humanistic point of view.
Yet medical ethics is at the heart of the practice of medicine, and it is astonishing that nearly no one was concerned with the ethical failings in measures like mass confinements and the vaccination pass. To be sure, public health centrally involves the existence of sweeping measures applying to whole populations. But it should also recognize the challenges of liberty and consent, as was the case for example in the response to the AIDS epidemic, which was far from perfect but which privileged information and pedagogy over any coercive politics. One might equally object that there are compulsory vaccines and fortunately so: this is true, but not being up to date with one’s vaccinations does not lead to social death or the loss of civil rights. In addition there is a strong social consensus concerning those vaccines, which means that in reality coercion in those cases is much less significant. In short, ethical questions are always very present in questions of public health, and it is surprising that they were so absent since the beginning of the COVID crisis. By the way, we have a national advisory committee on ethics that issues regular statements on this kind of question (such as the bioethics law): one did not hear from it once during the COVID crisis.
It is therefore urgent to separate science and politics, without breaking the obviously fundamental link needed to understand health, technological, and climate phenomena that is essential today. This is a vital and difficult challenge. This confusion of orders—the order of politics and the order of science—is one of the major traits of “macronism,” which treats every political question as a problem to resolve and a situation to manage. The logic of politics implies the conflict of values and arbitrating among them in terms of what one considers the priority. But with Macron, the reign of expertise sweeps away everything else. It is no longer a matter of arbitrating among values but of imposing, without debate, measures taken solely through the prism of managerial efficiency.
This evil has been coming for a long time, as one can see in the continuous decay of our public services in the shadow of neoliberal policies taken in the name of efficiency and profit. But Macron has indisputably made it worse. It is moreover this managerial utilitarianism that has led the government to take other security measures incompatible with liberty, such the law on “global security” or to respond with force and even with violence against oppositional movements, such as the “Yellow Vests.”
It is therefore incorrect to treat the management of the health crisis as a simple, exceptional parenthesis, the effects of which are separate from the context in which it took place. On the contrary, it can only truly explained in terms of the global logic in which it is located. This is the logic of management, the method of authoritarian government that ignores all the fundamental principles that should guide political action. One does not manage a democracy like a company, just as one does not do politics like a scientist. Otherwise one has to accept that in the name of efficiency, democracy becomes relative, more or less active depending on crises, which ultimately means definitively losing the principle of the rule of law.
Mathieu Slama is a consultant and political analyst who contributes regularly to Le Figaro and the Huffington Post. He is the author, most recently, of Adieu la liberté: Essai sur la société disciplinaire (Presses de la Cité, 2022).
