France and the United States facing the virus

France and the United States, unfortunately, are among the countries most affected by Covid-19. By sticking to the simple, hardly contestable criterion of the number of deaths per million inhabitants, we are at 1,600 in France and 1,800 in the United States, that is to say a total of 111,000 deaths in France and 603,000 in the United States. -United. With a development equivalent to ours, Japan has only 14,000 victims (110 per million inhabitants). The virus is not therefore solely responsible for the disaster: it enters through all doors, but gives up where a mask or a vaccine block its way. In other words, the pandemic is a relative fatality, depending on our behavior and policies. It is early to take a final decision on this pandemic, but it is possible to sketch a rapprochement between France and the United States, as the pandemic photographs who we are.

In our two countries, initially, the same national vanity manifested itself in denial: while Asia took the measure of the scourge, the French and Americans remained haughty. This “grippette”, they said in Washington and in Paris, could not destabilize our countries, endowed – we believed then – of the best health systems in the world. This vain nationalism cost the French and the Americans six fateful weeks, allowing the virus to invade us. This initial denial was murderous, the root cause of a massive, irrecoverable death. When finally, in March 2020, Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron admitted that we were ” in war », The faults of our two political systems appeared, gaping.

France, hyper centralized for centuries, accumulated delays in the obligation of barrier gestures, then in the orders, delivery and use of masks and vaccines. Because nothing can be acquired without the decision being disputed, before being recorded at the end of a chain of offices jealous of their prerogatives. We imagine the all-powerful French president, when in reality he is a Gulliver tied up by the dwarves of his administration. Emmanuel Macron could not escape this long story. In France, elected officials command but only the administration acts; in the United States, it is rather the opposite because of the spoils system.

While these dwarves discussed acceptable standards before a mask was approved, people died for lack of masks. While the doses of vaccines were available, the dwarves discussed the capacity of the nursing staff to administer them, the requirement that a doctor be present in any vaccination center, the consent form to be signed by any candidate for the vaccine. vaccination. While in the ministries, we aimed at bureaucratic perfection and, above all, we ensured that no one – in the event of an accident – was held responsible, the French died. It was then that the mayors, the only truly effective elected representatives in France, proposed to the State to take over and organize the distribution of masks locally, then vaccinations. The state bureaucracy, challenged in its sovereign functions, prohibited these initiatives. Before authorizing them late, but according to standards enacted in Paris: more deaths. It is said in France that the country is dying of its bloated state: with the Covid, the metaphor became a reality.

In the United States, the road to disaster, on the other hand, was an anemic failure of the central state. In the name of federalism, President Trump turned his back on the states in the fight against the pandemic. It is true that health is a matter for states, but weren’t we at war? If that was the case, it was up to Washington to lead it, which it did not do. In France, people were dying from an excess of centralization and in the United States, from an excess of decentralization.

At least, France was and remains spared from the politicization of the pandemic: if some, in France, persist in refusing vaccination, their motivations are religious, obscurantist or conspiratorial. In the United States, these refusals, on the whole, follow a political line. The Trumpists show their attachment to the former president by refusing the mask and the vaccine, to their misfortune and that of their neighbors: in America, mortality remains the most constant in the republican states, while New York, Democrat, has pretty much got over the pandemic.

This health crisis will have revealed another distinction: the power of American scientific research which, allied with American capitalism, immediately dominated the market. While France expected everything from the venerable and public Pasteur Institute, Pfizer won the day, followed by Moderna. This success of American companies, from which the whole world benefits, reflects the lead in innovation of the United States against France. Economist Philippe Aghion estimates that the number of innovative patents filed each year in the United States is a hundred times greater than patents made in France. An American capitalism backed by the state, because Washington places its trust in profitable companies: this is how Donald Trump, daring, bought in advance millions of doses of vaccines, not yet tested, from private laboratories, while the French , in cooperation with the European Union, quibbled on prices in laborious negotiations with these same laboratories.

Eighteen months after the start of the pandemic, have our two countries taken note of their shortcomings? Yes. The fantasies about miraculous remedies, like the chloroquine dear to Marseille doctor Didier Raoult, have dissipated; charlatans are no longer successful on social networks or on extremist television channels such as Fox News in the United States and CNews, its French equivalent. It is widely accepted that only vaccination will put an end to this pandemic. It is also accepted that the new generation of so-called RNA vaccines is the effective solution. In Washington as in Paris, governments have achieved fairer coordination with local authorities, states and town halls, to speed up the pace of vaccination. But it remains slow in the face of the threat of variants because neither in France nor in the United States, we have completed the persuasive discourse that would sweep away the reluctance of the obscurantists.

In our two countries, the doses are there, their effectiveness is proven, the risks almost non-existent, but demand is failing. Governments should no doubt give the floor to more credible, more persuasive lawyers. Americans trust their pastors more than their deputies and the French would more willingly listen to Catherine Deneuve and Omar Sy talk to them about the vaccine than President Macron and his Minister of Health. It is a lot to ask politicians to give up the microphone, but the ultimate success against the pandemic through vaccination requires the mobilization of civil society.

Article published in the August 2021 issue of France-America. Subscribe to the magazine.

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