In mid-April, pharmacies will be able to issue saliva self-tests to detect Covid. We want to say: Finally! First of all, we remind you that these self-tests make it possible, as their name suggests, to see if you are a carrier of the virus. The principle is simple: a swab in the nostrils, without pushing it as far as the PCR or the antigenic tests, we put it in a reagent and we wait a little. Same principle as for pregnancy tests.
So yes, a hundred times yes, it is less reliable than PCR, it is not as simple as it is said because it is necessary to take the sample, it risks falsely reassuring people who are carriers of the virus. but whose test would be negative, it allows those who would be positive and little responsible to keep the result to themselves with the risk of transmitting it.
In recent months, I have been careful not to criticize the decisions taken by the health authorities, the Minister of Health or the President of the Republic. We’re not going to get into the controversy, it’s better elsewhere, or we should have done this or that while the virus is unpredictable.
However, what happens with these self-tests is incomprehensible. First, other countries have been selling these tests for weeks. And they do it, not only in pharmacies, but also in supermarkets. In France, it takes weeks between the authorization to market them in mid March and their release to the public in mid April. And I will surely anger these essential health players, pharmacists, but why are they the only ones able to sell these tests?
Admittedly, these are medical devices and the law prohibits their sale in supermarkets. Except that there are exemptions provided that there is a pharmacist since one can find pregnancy and ovulation tests there. IA decree would suffice for the Covid self-tests to fall within the scope of the exceptions but no, pharmacists have obtained exclusivity.
The priority should be to get out of the epidemic quickly
The more accessible the tests, the more French people will use them. Of course, not everyone will necessarily declare themselves if they are positive, so what? Do you think that because a person will have bought their test in a pharmacy, they will feel obliged to declare themselves? If this is the case, all of the countries that allow mass merchandising are completely oblivious.
Finally, this story of self-tests is symptomatic of everything that has been happening on the bureaucratic and corporate level since the start of the epidemic. Emanuel Macron keeps repeating that our country is weighed down by the twists and turns of bureaucracy, administrations that pass the buck, the precautionary principle which becomes completely delusional so much it does not adapt to the terrible crisis we are going through.
We are frozen by dogmatism, laws that we do not want to touch, lobbies, corporatism, even in this period when everyone should help find solutions.
How long did it take for veterinarians to be authorized to vaccinate, how long did it take for the private sector to be called in when there was a lack of sheave beds in the public? The priority is to get out of this epidemic and quickly. But then, in the new world, you really have to look at what went wrong and there is work to be done.
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