Coronavirus diary day 68 – Catholics, evangelicals, Trump and the virus

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Don’t put your faith in miracles – Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus

Today is a long weekend in France, thanks to Thursday being the Feast of the Ascension, a public holiday in a secular country that still observes Christian festivals. After victory in a spat with the government, traditionalist Catholics will be able to celebrate in Church tomorrow. Muslims have been advised to celebrate Eid at home.

Five days ago, France’s Conseil d’Etat ordered the lifting of a ban on religious services within a week. The government has gone one better and scrapped it now, in time for Sunday mass, while reminding the faithful that they should still observe social distancing and other precautions against the spread of Covid-19.

The case was taken to the State Council by right-wing traditionalist Catholic organisations, whose adepts have accused France’s bishops of insufficient zeal in their attempts to overturn the decision.

Muslims, however, will not be going to mosque for prayers to mark Eid. The French Muslim Council, which yesterday announced that the end of Ramadan would be marked on Sunday, said it would abide by the government’s anti-epidemic advice not to organise events that would bring groups of people together.

Perhaps chastened by the role played by a megachurch in spreading the virus in eastern France, evangelicals have warned believers that their services are “at-risk events” and advised them not to hold baptisms and communal meals.

Religion is grist to the political-exploitation mill for Donald Trump, of course.

He has declared that he will order state governors to lift bans on religious assembly, a power that appears not to be vested in him by any worldly authority.

“In America we need more prayer, not less,” he said, ignoring as ever the lack of clinical evidence for his preferred methods for fending off plagues. It would be interesting to know how often Trump prays to any god other than Mammon, although such speculation does not seem to trouble his evangelical voters, at whom this latest sally seems to be aimed.

Questioned about it, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attempted to outdo her employer in spiteful fatuity by telling a press conference “ … boy, it’s interesting to be in a room that desperately wants to seem to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed”, the kind of remark that sorely tests one’s commitment to religious tolerance.

More on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine: A study published in the Lancet concludes “Although generally safe when used for approved indications such as autoimmune disease or malaria, the safety and benefit of these treatment regimens are poorly evaluated in COVID-19.”

Since a Marseille-based sociologist whom I have enjoyed interviewing in the past declared that coverage of two recent studies that I cited shows that “French journalists don’t know either how to read or how to interpret a medical study”, I’ll just leave the link here.

France’s Covid-19 death toll has not been officially declared today, apparently because reliable figures are not available for care homes during the holiday weekend. 17,383 people are in hospital, down 393 yesterday, with 1,701 in intensive care, down 44. 64,209 patients have been discharged from hospital, 351 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 67 – Back to market, with masks, gel and lots of plastic

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Some stalls missing but the charcuterie is there Photo: Tony Cross

Champigny market has reopened, with a restricted number of stalls, still tightly packed in some places. As a new Covid-19 cluster is noted in our region, the government has set a date for the  local council elections’ deciding round, which was postponed because of the epidemic, and domestic violence has risen but not feminicide, apparently.

Today I returned to shopping in the local market. It was closed during lockdown and has now reopened in a downsized form.

Hand gel dispensed at one end of the market Photo: Tony Cross

Entrance is limited by temporary barriers and at one end a council worker offers hand cleanser to shoppers as they enter. Strangely, this is not the case at the other entrances, although we are offered leaflets by trade unionists and masks by representatives of the regional council.

Epidemic-fighting rules mean a reduced number of traders, with no take-away cooked food – there’s usually a choice of Turkish, Vietnamese, Moroccan and Tunisian – and no clothes and hardware.

The alleys are still quite packed Photo: Tony Cross

That leaves meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, all surrounded by plastic, the stallholders wearing either masks or visors, which give them a slightly military aspect.

Despite the thinned ranks of traders, they keep to their usual spots, meaning that distancing is not easily observed in the narrow aisles. And some people seem to think that wearing a mask makes it unnecessary. Others appear to believe that a mask is some sort of talisman providing magical protection no matter where you put it, around your neck or just over your mouth, for example.

Queues not really spaced out Photo: Tony Cross

Lockdown must have been hard for the traders, even if they received some government bailout funds. One chap, of Algerian origin, I think, started an organic fruit and veg stall last December. The government’s grants are based on their contributions to the tradespeople’s social security system, so I believe he won’t have been eligible.

Nevertheless, they seemed to be in good form, the fishmongers yelling through the protective cloth, the cheesemonger boasting about the quality of his Cantal and the women on the offal stall asking how Mum is as she meticulously pruned the veal kidneys I bought.

A new cluster has been identified in our region, the Val-de-Marne, although not in a town near us.

Eight cases have been identified on a building site in Villeneuve-le-Roi, near Orly airport.

The second round of local elections will be held on 28 June, the government has announced, so long as the virus respects the democratic process.

The first round took place just before lockdown, leading to some criticism about the risk to public health, in particular to polling officials. A report has since claimed that it didn’t result in extra infections. Even if that’s true, it was a risky choice, made by Macron partly because of pressure from the largest opposition parties, apparently.

A local councillor told me a couple of week ago that he expected the whole process to be started all over again. “Some of the candidates are dead,” he pointed out.

The number of women murdered in France appears to have gone down during lockdown, according to Gender Equality Minister Marlène Schiappa. But the number of cases of domestic violence registered with the police has soared.

The number of feminicides reported went down to one every 4.2-4.4 days, compared one every 2.5-3.0 days, she said, while warning that the figure could be a result of underreporting.

But fears that confinement would lead to more violence in the home seem to have been justified. The number of legal complaints has risen 36%.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,215, with 83 in the past 24 hours. 17,583 people are in hospital, down 358, with 1,745 in intensive care, down 49. 63,858 patients have been discharged from hospital, 504 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 66 – Che’s special offer and what will the epidemic change?

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Che Guevara. You’ve bought the T-shirt, hung the poster on your wall (when you were a student, of course), collected the stamp, maybe even slept under the Che duvet cover, now you can see that saintly face displayed in Champigny town centre, sporting a protective mask and a pair of colourful glasses.

At first sight it looks like an inventive public health announcement. But wait, the slogan “Conseil, Hygiène, Emotion” (Advice, Hygiene, Emotion) – it’s cunningly designed for the purposes of the acronym but seems to have no more bearing on the fight against Covid-19 than on a call to insurrectionary action.

In fact, Che is offering us 30% off frames for our glasses in the opticians that looks onto Place Lénine (at least that’s appropriate). Hasta la vitoria siempre!

It remains to be seen whether this will prove as controversial as Champigny’s Pizzagate, when a picture of Lenin as a pizza chef was posted on a fast-food stand during a festival of street art last year.

That achieved media coverage after a far-right councillor demanded it be taken down, accusing the Communist-led council of brainwashing the schoolkids who had reproduced the image of “this grim character” (Lenin being the wrong kind of grim character for the Rassemblement National).  

Photo: Tony Cross

He didn’t complain about the pictures of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Perhaps he judged them less grim. Or perhaps he didn’t recognise them.

Will revolution, or at least radical change, follow this crisis? After all, it has been compared to a war and war is the midwife of revolutions.

For the moment austerity has been ditched and there will presumably be some sort of pump-priming to reboot the economy.

Cities are taking some measures to ensure that pollution does not return to pre-lockdown measures and everybody’s talking about an eco-friendly future.

The epidemic has been a lesson in the need for a decent health service, state intervention and solidarity.

The French government is to hold a consultation on the future of health care and promised to end the “pauperisation” of healthworkers, a situation that could surely have come to their attention without a virus threatening to bring the system and its employees to their knees.

But plans are afoot to save the big polluters and, as for paying for the current epidemo-Keynesianism, it’s beginning to look as if it will be back to business as usual, if it is left to those in power to decide. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has dismissed the proposal to bring back France’s wealth tax as “pure demagogy” and that seems to be the ruling-class consensus.

Previous wars, plagues and other crises have either sparked revolutions, strengthened the hand of labour, and/or given birth to the welfare state.

But it looks as if, in the gruesome logic of capitalism, not enough people will die this time and most of the deceased will be old, so no post-Black Death-style labour shortages or other reversals of power relations.

What conclusions the majority of people will draw and what they will be prepared to do about them remains to be seen.

If you scroll down to previous posts, you’ll see that France’s official death toll went down yesterday. Sadly, this is not thanks to 217 resurrections but because a group of care-homes adjusted the figures for Covid-19-related deaths downwards.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,132, 110 in the past 24 hours. 17,941 people are in hospital, down 527, with 1,794 in intensive care, down 100. 63,354 patients have been discharged from hospital, 791 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 65 – Now they order a billion masks!

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The French government is to order one billion masks from local manufacturers. To which the only possible reaction is, what took you so long?

Having told the general public that we didn’t need masks when the epidemic first hit, the government now declares itself worried that France is dependent on international suppliers.

There are four medium-sized companies producing 10 million masks a week locally at the moment but they are working at near full capacity.

The government wants production to rise to 50 million a week by the end of the year and says that will mean the country will be able to supply health professionals and patients who have Covid-19, although not the general public despite the fact that we are now urged to wear them to avoid the spread of the disease.

So the Finance Ministry has finally got round to requisitioning companies that have the capacity to produce this vital product – four of them. One, Brocéliande, which is owned by supermarket chain Intermarché, actually manufactured masks in the past but presumably stopped doing so when previous governments ran down the programmes launched during the bird flu epidemic.

Macron yesterday told BFMTV that the country never ran out of masks and people only thought that was the case because of “an error of communication”.

There were shortages, he admitted, but “Let’s collectively be honest enough to admit that in March, and even more so in February or January, nobody was talking about masks and we would never have thought we would have been forced to restrict their distribution to healthworkers.”

Which isn’t the way everybody remembers it.

In a victory for trade unions, Amazon has given up fighting court orders to tighten up anti-virus measures in consultation with workers’ representatives and reopened its warehouses in France.

With Europe’s car industry hard-hit by anti-virus lockdowns, Renault has announced a plan to save two billion euros, which will involve closing three small factories and “restructuring” or closing Flins, which employs 2,600 workers, according to Le Canard Enchaîné.

There’s a lot of talk about not returning to pre-virus levels of pollution, which would mean keeping the demand for new cars down, not to mention reducing air travel and other super-polluters.

To avoid an anti-green backlash, it’s vital to guarantee income to laid-off workers and plan centrally to provide jobs in ecologically friendly industry.

France now has nine different political groups in parliament. A two-party system it ain’t.

The new group has been formed by 17 MPs who have left Macron’s LREM, having apparently just realised that the millionaire former banker and budget-balancing economy minister lacks a certain commitment when it comes to social and ecological matters.

Macron’s 2017 presidential bid put an end to the dominance of the centrist Socialists and mainstream right in its successive incarnations. But even before that the country had a proliferation of small parties, largely because of the electoral system.

Most members of the smaller parties would have found a home in larger bodies in the UK or the US but leading a small party can be a politically profitable affair. You can usually bag a ministry or two when a government of your general political persuasion is formed (not to mention the considerable wealth the Le Pen family has accrued by establishing dominance in the hate market).

The latest mini-split deprives LREM of its absolute majority in parliament but Macron will be able to rely on the support of François Bayrou’s Modem and other liberal flotsam and jetsam. On top of which, the new group is not actually declaring itself to be part of the opposition but rather “independent”, so no big problems for the president there.

Encouraging signs in the statistics since lockdown ended, with the death toll, admissions to hospitals and numbers in intensive care all down. But experts say it is too early to judge whether the trend will continue.

Green = Hospital discharges, Yellow = In hospital, Red = deaths, Orange = In intensive care
Source: Mapthenews

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,022, 217 in the last 24 hours. 18,486 patients are in hospital, down 547, with 1,894 in intensive care, down 104. 62,563 people have been discharged from hospital, 835 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 64 – Forest bathing and religious assembly in an epidemic

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I went walking in the woods. For the first time since lockdown started.

Frogs croaked in the ponds, the sun dappled the ground and I couldn’t believe how loud the birdsong was.

The Japanese have a phrase – shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) – for going to nature recharge your batteries (to use a very unnatural metaphor). It works.

I was not alone. There was a group of pensioner-ramblers, some teenagers doing exercises by their car (the pensioners applauded them), families, groups of friends and cyclists – more people than usual on a weekday, perhaps because people want to stretch their legs and breathe the air of the woods after two months’ lockdown. And perhaps because many workers are still laid off or have lost their jobs, allowing them the small compensation of time to enjoy the natural world.

The forest, the Forêt de Notre Dame, is easy to get to from the towns that sprawl along the main road out of Paris to the east.

On sunny weekends, lockdown permitting, families come from the housing estates and residential streets to picnic on the grass in front of the Château des Marmousets. Smoke from barbecues grilling meat and veg for meals in French, Portuguese, Antillais and north African styles floats over a pond and a paddock for horses.

 Adventurous visitors can visit an 18th-century ice-house sunk into the earth behind the château.

The very urban shopping centre I visited on my way back was also busier than usual. Queues in front of a games store and more shoppers than usual in the organic supermarket I went to. No photo of this. I had my hands full of fruit and veg.

The Conseil d’état has overruled the government’s ban on services in places of worship during the state of emergency, judging it “disproportionate” and a “serious and manifestly illegal” violation of religious freedom.

The case was brought to the council by a number of Catholic groups, including far-right organisations that were active in the campaign against gay marriage. They run a permanent campaign to prove that it is they, not Muslims, who are victims of discrimination due to secular and Islamic “Cathopobia”.

Some Catholics took particular offence at Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s remark that one can pray on one’s own. The Conseil d’état agreed with them, declaring collective worship an essential part of religious freedom.

Protestants, Jews, Muslims and other religious persuasions have gone along with the government’s guidelines during the crisis.

So Catholics will be able to celebrate Pentecost in groups, although not in such large assemblies as the evangelical service that was party responsible for Covid-19’s virulence in the east of the country. The ban on assemblies of more than 10 people rests in place and was mentioned in the council’s ruling.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,239, 131 yesterday. 19,025 people are in hospital, down 346 in the past 24 hours, with 1,998 in intensive care, down 89. 61,728 patients have been discharged from hospital, 515 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 63 – Schools, slaughterhouses and worrying about America

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As more French pupils go back to school this Monday, 70 new cases of Covid-19 have been identified in infant schools, which partially reopened last week. Several schools, in various parts of the country, have had to close again.

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer says the kids probably caught the virus before returning to school on 11 May and insists that the closures show that “we are strict”.

Collèges, whose pupils are aged between 11 and 15, partially reopen today in green zones of low infection rates.

Of the 25 clusters found last week, some in green zones, two large ones are in slaughterhouses, reinforcing international concern that abattoirs are particularly prone to infection.

More than 100 workers have tested positive – 63 in a slaughterhouse in Brittany, 34 in another near Orléans.

More cases may be found in the latter, since the 400 employees are to be tested today and tomorrow. Officials say that the required precautions – hand gel, temperature taken on entry – seem to have been observed.

There have been a number of cases in meat-packing plants in the US and Germany, leading to concerns that they are particularly vulnerable to the virus.

The authorities in the two French regions have launched investigations.

In general the signs a week after lockdown are relatively good.

Although the number of deaths went over 28,000 on Sunday, there have been no more than 700 new cases recorded on any given day, way below the 3,000 that Prime Minister Edouard Phlippe said would lead to him confining us to our homes again.

The number of people infected by a carrier is 0.6, below the one per carrier that indicates epidemic, and testing has become more widespread over the last week with only 2% proving positive.

But the virus’s incubation period is seven to 14 days, so the experts say we have to wait a week before breathing a sigh of relief (through our face-masks, of course).

Is anybody else worried about a Trump coup after the US presidential election?

Here’s the scenario: Assuming the election isn’t called off because of a second wave of Covid-19 and assuming Biden wins, despite being a terrible candidate and despite the possibility that the economy will pick up if the virus subsides, will Trump accept the result?

Isn’t he likely to declare there was fraud and that he actually won? Neither he nor his hard-core supporters are constrained by the requirement of proof for an assertion they want to believe, so hundreds of thousands of hard-right fanatics could be mobilised to support his claim.

As we have seen in the anti-lockdown demos, those die-hards come largely from the enraged petite bourgeoisie, the classic base of fascist movements, with the all-American ideology of an SUV-driving Calvinist elect, entitled to unlimited consumption, but convinced of their own victimhood.

Some of them are armed and able to march into seats of government unhindered.

What would the Democrats do if they did so across the country in the aftermath of the election results?

What would the police and the army do? Would generals and police chiefs order the dispersal of these militias, using arms if necessary?

Would the ranks obey those orders if they came? Would they split more or less on racial lines?

So what would happen? Civil war? A coup, followed by pogroms and purges?                                                                                                                                       

The US is showing the symptoms of an empire in decline. But none of its leaders show any sign of accepting the loss of world hegemony, Trump least of all. How would he face up to China’s rise if he returned to power?

Back to France. The official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 28,108, 483 in the past 24 hours. 19,361 people are in hospital, 71 down yesterday, and 2,087 in intensive care, down 45. 61,213 people have been discharged from hospital, 147 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 62 – Yellow Vests are back (a bit) as new virus clusters spotted

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The Gilets Jaunes are back. A few of them, anyway. And 25 clusters of Covid-19 cases have been identified in France since lockdown was lifted, although the situation does still seem to be improving.

A few hundred Yellow Vests appeared on the streets of several French cities on Saturday, apparently just to remind the government that they’re still there.

The biggest assembly, which wasn’t that big, seems to have been down south, in Montpellier. Others were in the Breton capital, Nantes, which can always be relied on for a protest whenever the possibility arises, Lyon, Toulouse, and Saint-Nazaire.

With demonstrations banned, some gathered in groups of 10, the legal limit of an assembly under the anti-Covid state of emergency. That didn’t stop police being considerably tougher on them than US cops have been on the armed lockdown-defiers there.

There were a number of arrests and police used their truncheons against the crowd in Montpellier, one woman being injured in the head.

In Bordeaux and Toulouse (see below), shopkeepers took the demonstrators to task for defying the lockdown and obstructing trade in these straitened times.

Business was also on Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s mind, as he reminded the public of the demo ban.

“In this period when we must help economic recovery and a form of liberty for our fellow citizens,” he said. “People who want to obstruct commercial activity have to understand that this is not the moment to express oneself in this way.”

Twenty-five new clusters of the virus have been identified in France since the end of lockdown, Health Minister Olivier Véran has told the Journal du Dimanche.

New cases were to be expected, he said, and the only part of France where there has been a resurgence so far is in Mayotte, an overseas territory in the Indian Ocean. (Yes, it’s part of France, as are French Guiana in South America, New Caledonia and French Polynesia in the Pacific, and several other Dom-Toms, as they’re called.)

Following Macron’s mea culpa in a hospital this week, Véran promised a consultation and review of the government’s health policy and pay rises for healthworkers, on top of the bonuses that have already been decided on.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,625, 96 in the last 24 hours. 19,432 people are in hospital, down 429, with 2,132 in intensive care, down 71. 61,066 people have been discharged from hospital, down 618 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 61 – Lockdown drove down French death rate, and not just for Covid-19

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Lockdown seems to have worked. The number of deaths per day has declined since a high point of 600 a day of the beginning of April.

Graph by Insee

In fact, numbers crunched by the official statistics institute, Insee, show we have now reached a lower death rate for all causes than in 2018 and 2019, as this fascinating thread from British journalist John Lichfield shows:

At least two causes of death have declined because of lockdown – traffic accidents, down 55% in April to 103, and air pollution, largely due to reduction in road and air traffic, since highly toxic pollution by chemical fertilisers and, earlier in the year, wood-burning stoves, has continued.

There are undoubtedly other factors that should be taken into account and the long-term effects of confinement, for example on mental health and poverty, have yet to become clear.

The Insee figures, unlike the current government figures, include an estimate of deaths at home.

The number of admissions to hospital and patients in intensive care, a better indication of the number of infections today, continues to fall.

Five days after the end of lockdown, there has been no resurgence of the virus. But the weekend will be a new test, in particular of how people observe social distancing in public places.

Having championed the wearing of masks, I think I have detected a downside. Some people wearing them seem to think they are sufficiently protected to be able to dispense with social distancing.

Several French mayors have declared face-masks compulsory in all public spaces.

An order to wear maskes between 8.00am and 8.00pm in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret

The rulings are likely to be overturned. The Conseil d’Etat has already ruled that the mayors are exceeding their powers in this respect.

On the phone to my brother Peter yesterday, I found he was joining other parents in indulging in the French habit of bending the rules by allowing his daughter, Rita, to play on the grass in the courtyard of the Paris block of flats where they live.

That lawn-consciousness reminded us of the age of the park police – uniformed functionaries who used to blow a whistle and gesticulate at you if you sat on the grass in public spaces. They seem to have been abolished a few years ago. These days Parisians can park their elegant arses in green spaces without fear of reprimand or fines.

Why did they exist?

Is it because France is partly a Mediterranean country and so grass needs protection in the drier parts of the country?

Is it because of the concept of the hypercivilised jardin à la française, a delicate creation for aristocrats to admire without being troubled by plebs littering the lawns?

Or is it a legacy of Bonapartism-Gaullism, a state that enrols part of the population in policing their fellow citizens, like the legendarily nosy Paris concierges who were widely believed to enjoy close relations with the police?

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,529, up 104 in the last 24 hours. 60,448 people have been discharged from hospital, 843 yesterday. The number of patients in intensive care fell by 96. The government’s website has not updated the other figures I usually give.

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Coronavirus diary day 60 – Hydroxychloroquine, turns out it doesn’t seem to work

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Hydroxychloroquine isn’t a miracle cure, then. It appears that Professor Didier Raoult is a bit of a bullshitter and President Donald Trump is a bit of a mug. Who’d have thought it?

The Raoult cult – a Marseille man has had his leg tattooed with the professor’s image

“Hydroxychloroquine has received worldwide attention as a potential treatment for covid-19 because of positive results from small studies,” the abstract of a French study published in the British Medical Journal today says. “However, the results of this study do not support its use in patients admitted to hospital with covid-19 who require oxygen.”

It bases its findings on 84 patients who received the treatment Raoult has so loudly advocated and 89 who did not.

There was virtually no difference between the results for the two groups, apart from the fact that eight patients in the treatment group had to stop taking the drug because of heart problems.

A Chinese study of 150 patients with mild or moderate symptoms also found the treatment made no significant difference, apart from the fact that 30% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine got the shits or some other side-effects, compared to 9% in the other group.

Raoult, who prefers to air his theories in online videos rather than peer-reviewed papers, has polarised opinion since he made his claim that the anti-malaria drug, when combined with azithromycin, could cure the disease.

Where you stand depends on how you feel about an energetic self-publicist who slags off his colleagues and cultivates the friendship of hard-right politicians, all qualities that don’t automatically make you a bad scientist, I suppose. Some people – conspiracy theorists, Marseille patriots – seem to like that sort of thing.

In an interview with the New York Times, Raoult criticised his profession  for being riven with hubris. Pot, kettle, black …

I went to Joinville-le-Pont yesterday. It’s the furthest I have been since mid-March. What an adventure!

I haven’t been around the world, as John Littlejohn claims to have done in his stunning rendition of this Jimmy Rogers number, but I have visited at least 35 countries, some on the other side of the planet.

 Now a drive of four kilometres to pick up some groceries seems unspeakably daring.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,425, with a worrying rise to 351 yesterday. The other figures are more encouraging – 20,463 people are in hospital, down 608, with 2,299 in intensive care, down 129. And 59,605 people have been discharged from hospital, 932 in the pat 24 hours.

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Coronavirus diary day 59 – You pays your money, you gets your vaccine

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It ain’t over yet! Keep washing your hands! (And social distancing, which they’re not doing in this old ad for laundry soap)

First it was our masks, now it’s our medicines! The US will be served first if Sanofi develops a vaccine against Covid-19 because the Americans have put more money into the research, the French-based drug company’s boss said yesterday.

Last month US diplomats in China bought shipments of masks ordered by France, Germany and other countries as they stood on the airport runway.

Now Paul Hudson, a peripatetic British marketing expert who was appointed last year, has said Washington will be able to place the biggest advance orders of any vaccine that is developed because the Barda research and development body has “shared in the risk” in trying to develop it.

If Europeans want to move higher up the pecking order, the EU must match American investment, he said.

The French opposition Socialist Party shot out a communiqué dubbing the announcement scandalous.

Pointing out that France has contributed a fair bit to Sanofi’s worldwide success, the party says that our health should not be subject to the whims of the market, adding “no French company should gamble with our own health security without facing the threat of nationalisation”.

“It’s obvious that our health must be excluded from the rules of the market,” Socialist former minister and presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, told France Inter radio.

All of which begs the question of why they left pharmaceutical companies in private hands while they were in power.

Junior government minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher joined in the condemnation, although she kept it in the conditional.

“For us it would be inacceptable if any country had privileged access on a pretext that would be a monetary pretext,” she told Sud-radio.

In the evening Sanofi said that the US would have priority for vaccine produced on its territory and the rest of its production would go to “Europe, France and the rest of the world”. They didn’t say where they plan to produce how much of the product, which, for the moment, remains strictly hypothetical anyway.

There will be a second wave in France unless strict control of people’s behaviour is maintained, a study led by the Institut Pasteur warns.

The boffins who estimated that 5.7% of France’s population had been infected, thus making herd immunity an idle fantasy for months to come, now believe that was an overestimate. They have revised the figure to 4.4%, ie 2.8 million people.

In Ile de France, the hardest-hit region, 9.9% of the population has been infected, they believe.

Lockdown has been effective, the study concludes, but that means that very few people have assembled the necessary antibodies.

They find that 3.6% of infected people are hospitalised and 0.7% die, ranging from 0.0001% of under-20s to 10.1% of over-80s.  

“Effective measures of control designed to limit the risk of transmission must be maintained after 11 May [when lockdown ended] to avoid a resurgence of the epidemic,” they warn.

Meanwhile, people are rushing to the shops to buy clothes and get haircuts.

They can also go to the beach in some areas, although they mustn’t sunbathe or picnic, just take exercise.

So what has the government got against parks?

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants them to be reopened to the public for the sake of their health.

“You can take the métro but you can’t go into a park,” she points out.

But the capital is in a red zone, so letting the populace gambol in those green spaces would be “inopportune, given the vivacity of the virus’s circulation in Ile de France,” government spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye says.

As a compromise, Hidalgo suggests limiting the number of people who can enter at any one time.

Cédric Herrou, the farmer who helped migrants cross the border from Italy, has been acquitted by an appeal court in Lyon.

NGOs say the decision means that solidarity is not a crime.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,074, 83 in the past 24 hours, which is a return to the lower figures reported at the end of last week. 21,071 people are in hospital, down 524, and 2,428 are in intensive care, down 114. 58,673 patients have been discharged from hospital, 888 of them yesterday.

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