2023-09-04 16:02:02
Professor Claude Got died, in the middle of August. He went to die in Belgium, since France is reluctant to authorize medical assistance in dying. Éric Favereau, health journalist at Release and founder of the site Vif and François Meyer, doctor and long-time head of evaluation at HAS, pay tribute to his incessant fight for public health, from AIDS to road safety.
Claude Got had always told us: he would not let anyone decide the moment of his death. His wife, whom he adored, had died a few months ago. Two of his daughters also, suffering from a genetic disease, died in 2013 and 2019. He helped his parents die.
Claude Got was 85, and we loved him. We loved his fights, his tenacity, his generosity, and above all his taste for life when ignoramuses accused him of wanting to impose a “sanitary society”, without pleasures or risks, boring to death.
This man was unique. He was one of that rare class of people who saved lives. Cigarettes stamped “Tobacco kills”, like this spirit of the times that has transformed speeders into road killers, it’s a bit like him. He has been part of all the public health battles of the last thirty years, patiently fighting once morest all these “disasters in pieces”, these collective misfortunes which pass to the ace, for lack of arousing movements of opinion. He never stopped, always on the lookout, railing once morest those who are still trying to amend the Évin law because, they say, “it would harm our good local wine”, and especially once morest those who broke the speed limit at 90 km / h, furious at the passage once morest those who took refuge behind the bad presidential argument: “stop annoying the French”.
Yes, we loved it. Not only because of those unwearable sweaters his wife has always knitted him. We loved him because of this very special face he has, the innumerable mouths he pushed, the doors he so often slammed, we loved him above all because he was a grain of sand essential in the French health landscape. “Society is crazy, but I don’t have a particular problem with that. I was born in a psychiatric hospital, my father and my stepfather were psychiatrists, my brother still is. I have a form of affection for deviance, I believe it is inseparable from life.
The most obsessive of public health fighters
We had met him once more in 2021. In his house near Paris, under a winter sky, Professor Claude Got was equal to himself, excessively talkative, passionate as always, invaded by road safety and therefore for several months, at the forefront of the fight once morest the return of 90 km/h on the roads of France. Although Claude Got was very old, he remained the most effective and obsessive of public health fighters.
His fight, like his commitment, did not fall from the sky. It was a meticulous fight, in no way for the beautiful eyes of the gallery: for him, it was a question of accumulating knowledge to build strong and legitimate decisions in public health. That’s what he did. Being of all the debates, decisive from the 1970s on road safety, then on alcohol and tobacco to build the Évin law, but also to structure in 1988 the response to AIDS Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. In English, AIDS, acquired immuno-deficiency syndrome. Or even recently, on the Covid A coronavirus disease, sometimes referred to as covid (following the English acronym for coronavirus disease) is a disease caused by a coronavirus (CoV). The term may refer to the following illnesses: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) caused by the SARS-CoV virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) caused by the MERS-CoV virus, Coronavirus disease 2019 ( Covid-19) caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Claude Got was not a gentle dreamer. He was a man of action, precise and meticulous.
On the ground floor of his house, his vast living room had become a warehouse of books and files, among which he said he found himself without any problem. There are also his two desks and the few computer screens he works on all day. In a long interview, he distilled his principles: “Public health is health without inequalities”. Or: “Public health is politics. These are not medical decisions, these are political decisions relating to public health”. A little worried regarding the spirit of the times: “We have entered an incoherent, bizarre period, faced with a succession of limitless decision-making debility, unimaginable forty years ago.
Today, the administration talks, it even talks a lot, like anyone in the supposedly social networks, but it is weakened. She becomes cowardly and does not oppose decisions”. Severe once morest the president: “We have a very intelligent president, but bad in terms of decision-making in the field of road safety. When the President of the Republic allows the speed to be increased, he programs death, because the dominant risk factor is traffic, not the road. The best motorways reduce their accident rate if their speed is reduced and they increase it if the speed is increased. Pompidou ended up accepting it in 1972. We are once once more in a decision-making deadlock”. And noting: “It is not so much the decisions that are problematic, but the ability to apply them. During the first wave of Covid, in the spring of 2020, this was obvious with the question of masks. We didn’t have enough, we had to be honest, and say it and ask everyone to make one, instead of infantilizing people and lying to them.
Is public health better today? “To talk regarding it, yes no doubt, we talk regarding it everywhere. But that’s still talk. We are in a period where we can say anything without reasoned opposition.
By leaving his house, we left a free man. “I did autopsies very early on. My father was a psychiatrist in Évreux. But he was a paraplegic. I did the autopsies for him. It was natural, I said to myself and I say to myself: “We mightn’t save the life of this person, at least that we know what happened, if we were wrong… “” Adding: “A corpse is no different from a piece of wood. What is important is people’s lives. And his life was a magnificent fight.
AIDS and Claude Got
In 1988, Claude Got presented Claude Évin with a landmark report, since he proposed the creation of three structures, one on research, the other on prevention, and a final one on ethical issues. . “We were in a period of fear and Claude Évin wanted to make decisions in a short time. I offered him a personal report established in six weeks, by meeting a hundred people to combine my management skills with their knowledge of AIDS. I had no expertise in the field of AIDS. I was put on this file when I knew nothing regarding it, I was chosen for that, for an organizational purpose. Claude Évin, who had just been appointed Minister of Health, wanted to choose someone in his office to take charge of the AIDS dossier. The time was tense, we talked regarding sidatorium, exclusion, etc. I was already known as a doctor who had a past as a technical adviser to Simone Veil and Jacques Barrot, and this kind of reference is useful for a decision maker. Claude Évin offered me this position, and I advised him not to have an AIDS adviser, because he would have too many different aspects to deal with and it was rather necessary to imagine groups capable of dealing with various questions: How to finance research ? How to communicate? How to organize the hospital aspect? And he accepted. But he wanted to have a quickly effective device in a short time. What device to put in place? He mentioned the idea of entrusting this work to a commission. I tell him that, if in your commission, there are twelve people, it will take twelve months, six people, six months. “And only one?“, he asks me. I answer him “a month”. “Go ahead,” he told me. And I accept. I tell him that the report will have to be published very quickly to give immediate visibility”.
The rest is history: in the years following the report, the French Agency for the Fight once morest AIDS (AFLS) for prevention and information, the National Agency for Research on AIDS (ANRS) for research and the National AIDS Council (CNS) on ethical issues. The last two continue to fight today, extended to issues of emerging infectious diseases for the ANRS – following STIs Sexually transmitted infections. and tuberculosis – and hepatitis for the CNS…
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