2023-11-19 11:01:38
SPITTING IMAGE – Minister of Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy then Emmanuel Macron, Roselyne Bachelot, 76, has respectively passed – more or less successfully – through the ministries of Health, Ecology and Culture. From 2002 to 2022, with an eight-year media break between 2012 and 2020, the long political career of the woman who was renowned for a certain outspokenness and a… colorful personality is not exempt from reproaches and controversies. His support for the HPST law and the health pass during the Covid-19 pandemic, his management of the influenza A (H1N1) epidemic, his role in the Mediator affair and in the withdrawal of press service status in line of our newspaper will have been the key moments of his chaotic journey.
“Daughter of” in politics for the sustainable development of Big Pharma
Roselyne Bachelot began her professional career in 69 as a medical representative for the ICI Pharma laboratory. She held this position until 1976, then in 1984 became responsible for public relations at Soguipharm. At the same time, she obtained her doctorate in pharmacy in 1988 at the University of Angers but, from 1986, sat on the board of directors of the Angers University Hospital.
Roselyne Bachelot juggles many responsibilities. Her political career was launched between her departure from the ICI Pharma laboratory and her time at Soguipharm, which she left in 1989. The former Minister of Culture, introduced to politics by her father Jean Narquin, himself a municipal councilor d’Angers and Gaullist deputy for Maine-et-Loire, was first general councilor from 1982 to June 1988, the year she obtained her doctorate. Simultaneously in this capacity, she was regional councilor for Pays de la Loire from 1986 before taking over her father’s still hot seat in the National Assembly.
Now a deputy, in 1989 she became head of the RPR (Rally for the Republic), a party in which, like her father, she was an activist. Roselyne Bachelot will also be spokesperson for her leader Jacques Chirac, candidate for his own succession in the 2002 presidential elections. Once elected, he appoints her as Minister of Ecology and Sustainable Development under the authority of the Prime Minister. minister at the time, Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
At 56, her first mission is to finalize the Environmental Charter. This introduces the polluter pays and precautionary principles into the French Constitution. Lawyers fall underwhen it was promulgated in 2005, the “uselessness” of the text and the “judicial danger” of some of its articles, particularly those linked to the precautionary principle, defined at the Rio summit in 1992 and which consists of taking measures related to the environment despite an absence or lack of scientific knowledge. Already…
credits: ARA
When incestuous ties interfere in governments
Roselyne Bachelot left the ministry in 2004. She again became regional advisor for Pays de la Loire and sat in the European Parliament until 2007, the year she was appointed Minister of Health by Nicolas Sarkozy. Despite a significant longevity in this ministry, this is, without doubt, the most controversial and caricatured moment of his political career.
The former general secretary of the RPR must deal with a Social Security deficit which gets up then at 12 billion euros. She supports the law reforming the hospital and relating to patients, health and territories (HPST), the beginnings of a long agony. The text, which creates regional health agencies (ARS) and reorganizes hospital structures, arouses the anger of health professionals. If they greet the idea of regional territorial management of the sector, they warn against the “heavy bureaucracy” of the ARS and their “politicization”. The directors of these structures are qualified as “health prefects” and the approach, taken by Sarkozy, aims to restore the authority of the State.
Roselyne Bachelot’s transition to Health is mainly marked by her management of influenza A (H1N1). In April 2010, around 1,300 serious cases of this disease and 312 deaths were recorded in France. In July of the same year, the WHO counted 18,311 deaths around the world. The Minister of Health – do we still need to remember her links with the pharmaceutical industry? – then initiates the order of tens of millions of masks and vaccines from laboratories such as Novartis, Sanofi and GSK. Total cost: between 1.5 billion and 2 billion euros. An expense borne, in large part, by Social Security, which is increasingly in deficit. Result of the campaign? Less than 10% of the population is vaccinated. Bachelot’s reaction is considered “too alarmist” and the Minister of Health terminates ultimately orders for 50 million doses.
A commission of inquiry is set up in the National Assembly. His conclusion: the government and Roselyne Bachelot “did not resist the pressure from the laboratories” and their lobbies, whose experts were imposed on the executive as advisors. “The number of vaccines ordered is out of proportion to the actual need: 94 million doses were ordered and only 7.8 million were used (…). The GSK laboratory issued an ultimatum by giving a deadline for ordering the doses or risk not delivering them. The government therefore gave in to the blackmail of the pharmaceutical industry,” says François Autain, president of the commission of inquiry, who speaks in the press of “incestuous links”.
When Bachelot scratches the heartstrings of benfluorex with his mediator
Another controversy overtakes Roselyne Bachelot after her departure from the Ministry of Health. This concerns the Mediator affair, a medicine composed of benfluorex, the taking of which resulted in, according to the magistrates “between 3,100 and 4,200 hospitalizations for valve insufficiency”, “between 1,700 and 2,350 valve replacement surgeries” and “between 1,520 and 2,100 deaths”. Between 1984 and 2010, more than 134 million units were sold. Servier laboratories achieved, during this period, a turnover of nearly 500 million euros just from the sale of Mediator. Between 2002 and 2007, 3 million months of treatment were delivered. In March 2021, Servier was finally fined 2.7 million euros for “aggravated deception” and “homicide and involuntary injuries”. Following appeals from the prosecution and the laboratory, a second trial is expected.
This affair broke out in 2010, several months before Roselyne Bachelot’s departure from Avenue Duquesne and when she was Minister of Social Cohesion. She claims to have taken all her responsibilities to remove the Mediator as soon as its dangerousness was noted. “Immediately, the Afssaps (National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products) is on alert and will carry out three studies (…) The studies in the first half of 2009 will make it possible to detect 40 cases linked to benfluorex”, she explains. And to add: “The pharmacovigilance commission meets and the marketing authorization commission pronounces the withdrawal in November 2009”. She never publicly raises the issue of Mediator or its dangerousness, although the first alert took place in 2008…
From one media to another, she improvises herself as a figurehead of the cabal against France-Soir
After a stint at the head of the Ministry of Solidarity from 2010 to 2012, Roselyne Bachelot decided to end her political career to become a host and columnist. During this media interlude, she made headlines in 2016 with her conviction for defamation, after accusing tennis player Raphael Nadal of doping.
In 2020, she was appointed Minister of Culture by Emmanuel Macron, in the midst of the Covid epidemic. She announces “making a dream come true”, even though she had constantly repeated on TV sets some time before that a return to politics would be “a nightmare”. “Never, never,” she even affirmed. Despite the mockery aroused by this return, Roselyne Bachelot remains popular as a TV star, like Hanouna on C8.
At the Ministry of Culture, she ended up defending the health pass after having opposed it, even rejecting criticism of the drop in attendance at cultural places as a result of this measure deemed to be an attack on individual freedoms. Vaccinated against the coronavirus, she tested positive and hospitalized in March 2021.
The one who carried the Bachelot law establishing “super health prefects”, and who led the work of the Environmental Charter, which endowed the judge with “considerable power in the name of the precautionary principle”, decides, this time, to directly exercise its authority against France-Soir. In February 2021, she asked, in her capacity as Minister of Culture and Communication, to re-examine the IPG certificate (political and general information) issued to our online media and which expires in November 2022.
The Joint Commission of Publications and Press Agencies (CPPAP) then withdrew its online press service approval from France-Soir, under the pretext that the media “was devoid of the character of general interest regarding the dissemination of thought ”. France-Soir finally won its case in February 2023 before the Paris administrative court and regained its status with retroactive effect.
Roselyne Bachelot leaves “sans regret” the Ministry of Culture in 2022, after a complicated passage, where she passed “from dream to nightmare”. In addition to the criticisms linked to the conditions of deconfinement of cultural establishments, she does not hesitate, in a book published this year (682 days, the ball of hypocritesPlon), to settle scores with certain artists “ungrateful”.
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