2023-10-20 12:30:07
“But what did you say to the president the other night? You managed to scare him! » It is with these words that the Secretary General of the Elysée, Alexis Kohler, welcomes the Minister of Health before the Council of Ministers, on February 12, 2020. Five days earlier, Agnès Buzyn finally managed to speak to Emmanuel Macron , on the phone, to express his concerns regarding the health crisis, this « tsunami » that she feels coming.
Their conversation took place on a Saturday evening, while the minister was at the cinema with her husband. She speaks to the president on the steps of the staircase that leads to the UGC toilets, discussing what is coming: border closures, stoppage of flights, loss of 10 points of GDP, shutdown of the economy while the virus circles the Earth, mortality… She explains to him that, without confinement which would slow the wave, hospitals would not be able to absorb an influx of cases. Macron listens in silence, “taken aback”. This will be the one and only conversation that the minister will have with him, before his departure on February 17.
Become one of the faces of the Covid-19 crisis and the country’s unpreparedness, particularly on the issue of masks, criticized for having left the ministry in order to represent the majority in municipal elections, the only minister to have experienced an implementation examination for her management (indictment subsequently canceled), Agnès Buzyn was keen to deliver her version. Her diary, published by Flammarion, runs from Christmas 2019, the day she saw information on Twitter concerning unexplained cases of pneumonia in China, until the second round of municipal elections, at the beginning of summer 2020.
By revealing his correspondence with Emmanuel Macron and Edouard Philippe (revealed by The world, end of October 2022), Agnès Buzyn wants to demonstrate that she took stock of the crisis very early on. And that she continued to alert them. As the weeks go by, her messages become more and more urgent, but she feels like she is never heard. At the end of January, she even warned the Prime Minister that the March 2020 municipal elections might not be held. “We have to get into combat mode”, she slips. The same day, she asked Mr. Macron for a one-on-one meeting to brief him on this virus which seemed “much more serious than the flu”. She can’t get an appointment.
“Organizational error”
This extraordinary testimony, which offers a rare insight into the corridors of power, is intended to be both a “feedback” and an “contribution to public debate”. It sheds light on political action and its limits, shows dysfunctions in governance. If the Prime Minister is the interlocutor of the members of his government, the fact that the Minister of Health did not manage to see the President of the Republic face to face throughout this period raises questions in an ultra-centralized system, where everything comes from the Elysée. Mr. Macron also appears much more interested in the political turmoil linked to the municipal elections – for this, he responds to Ms.me Buzyn – only by the warnings of his minister on the health front. Coming from civil society, the latter does not have the political surface to impose itself, moreover in Macronie, where, she assures, women do not have the same weight as men. The former minister also insists on the absence of a health advisor at the Elysée for weeks, at the start of the crisis.
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