Covid, super-variant, vaccination, return of the mask…: “They continue their fear campaign”. Interview with Professor Christian Perronne

2023-09-22 18:30:00

ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE – Covid is back. In any case, this is what a recent media campaign claims. Last September 1, France-Info evokes during its morning edition a “super variant” named Pirola. Several newspapers use the expression, such as Point or The Independent. The day before, an AFP dispatch described a “new variant of Covid-19, BA.2.86, carefully monitored by the World Health Organization (WHO)”. According to the president of the Committee for Monitoring and Anticipation of Health Risks (COVARS), Brigitte Autran, this variant from the Omicron family is worrying due to a “greater number of mutations” who make it “likely to evolve more significantly and spread more easily”. But is this a “super variant”, implied to be capable of being more formidable than the others? Probably not. “We do not expect to see comparable levels of serious illness and death compared to (…) the Alpha or Delta variants”analyzes the geneticist François Balloux, of theUniversity College from London. An observation which is shared by Professor Christian Perronne, who denounces in this Essential Interview a new irrational episode of fear, imposed on the population. (Read the rest of the article below the video.)

Professor Perronne has been the health advisor to several governments. It reassures us about the dangerousness of the variants recently mentioned by “the main road media”. “It’s not really a public health issue in hospitals today”he says.

“A very benign virus”

The infectious disease doctor points here to a well-known virological mechanism. The more contagious a variant becomes, the less dangerous it is. The hypothesis of a viral infection which seeks to perpetuate itself, by contaminating and not killing the greatest number of hosts, is generally raised within the scientific community.

“The coronavirus adapts to the human population and humans adapt to the virus, it becomes less and less virulent”, recalls Professor Perronne. “Today, we don’t care about the Eris variant at all. It’s a very benign virus that causes colds and bronchitis”. Like other old strains of coronavirus that have been circulating on the European continent for decades.

Indeed, every winter, respiratory-tropic viruses affect the population, mainly elderly or fragile. And that didn’t “not to make the TF1 newspaper”, he summarizes. Certainly, in the hospital, “some very elderly patients, over 85 years old”, can develop “from time to time a serious form” with the new variants.

However, a general decline in serious and fatal cases, following infection due to a variant or sub-variant of Sars-CoV-2, is observed. For example, the Omicron variant appears to be significantly less dangerous than its predecessor Delta: in December 2021, in South Africa, new hospital admissions became rare and caused very few deaths despite a jump in contamination. In short,“what matters is mortality”, says Christian Perronne. And this, at present, can no longer worry the population in comparison with the results of other recurrent respiratory infections.

Persistent fear relayed by the media

However, the idea that the number of “reinfections” can cause a general public health problem is taking hold. A form of fear persists, correlated with the idea that a variant could suddenly cause high lethality. For Pirola or Eris, the “story” is therefore the same. In January 2023, several French media went into panic for another variantcalled Kraken, named after a sea monster… Quite systematically, a potentially obscure and anxiety-provoking scenario is presented, without always being based on solid medical and scientific data.

“It’s just to occupy the news, it’s to scare the French”, thinks Professor Perronne. But why ? The authorities have “still more stocks of vaccines that they bought for billions to sell off”. Fear would serve to make “join the population” and to relaunch vaccination campaigns to “justify this experimental inoculation”.

In fact, when other experts walk the TV and radio sets, vaccination is mentioned regularly. On France-Info (01/09), infectious disease specialist Benjamin Davido, from AP-HP, attempts to demonstrate that Covid variants still represent “a burden on society”. To his eyes, a “pedagogy remains to be done” in this “new era of Covid” which must go through a future vaccination campaign. A vaccination campaign that has been brought forward to October 2 by health authorities.

In this essential interview, Professor Christian Perronne answers our questions in order to sort out fact from fiction in terms of health information. According to him, the current media treatment of Covid continues to pose a democratic problem.

Restored to his position as an indisputable expert by the Île-de-France regional council of the Order of Physicians, the international infectious disease specialist offers us the keys to understanding the health situation. Not opposed to vaccination per se, after having worked in particular as an expert on the subject with the WHO, he is worried about young people who have suffered severely from the management of Covid, with serious consequences on their mental and physical health.