”Back to ’normal’ after Covid is a total illusion”

It would be illusory to consider the consequences of these tormented years as a simple bad memory destined to fade: on the contrary, they call for thought.

Excerpts translated from : https://www.epochtimes.fr/laurent-mucchielli-lidee-que-nous-ayons-repris-notre-vie-comme-sil-ne-setait-rien-passe-apres-la-crise-covid-est-une-illusion-totale-2876980.html

Laurent Mucchielli: “The idea that we have ‘resumed our lives as if nothing had happened’ after the Covid crisis is a total illusion”

INTERVIEW – Laurent Mucchielli is a sociologist, research director at the CNRS, author of La Doxa du Covid (two volumes) and Défendre la démocratie, published by Éditions Aeolianes. He has just published an article in the journal Dogma entitled “‘Populist’ or ‘popular’? Reflections on the American and French electoral results of 2024 and on the growing disconnect between the media space and real life”. In this interview, the researcher, who has distinguished himself with his incisive criticism of the institutional management of the Covid-19 epidemic, analyzes the ideological upheaval represented by the appointment of Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the United States Department of Health. Five years later, he also takes stock of this historic crisis that has marked France and the world, recalling that it would be illusory to consider the consequences of these troubled years as a simple bad memory destined to fade: on the contrary, they call for thought.

Epoch Times: Last Thursday, the American Senate validated the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Ministry of Health. What did this announcement inspire in you?

Laurent Mucchielli: Hope! Let's be clear: I have no particular sympathy for Trump and, if I were American, I would probably vote for someone like Bernie Sanders. But, unlike many other intellectuals, on the one hand, I am not an ideologue who divides the world into two camps—the "good guys" and the "bad guys"—and who politicizes everything; on the other hand, I am not afraid to stray from the herd to think for myself.

Finally, I am a scientist: my job is to objectify reality and diagnose problems. In this case, the good or bad health of a population is not a question of right or left. Just as corruption, fraud and tax evasion are not problems of right or left. They are public problems that elected officials, the “representatives of the people”, have the fundamental mission of improving in the best interests of the general population.

So it is an ethical position. Kennedy is a man of conviction, sincere and disinterested. Qualities that we are entitled to expect from our elected officials, but which, too often, are lacking. Hence our frequent disappointments in politics. So, for once that we have someone who holds the road, it seems to me that we should support him strongly.

I add that Kennedy is also someone competent, who works his files. In recent years, he has written, with a whole small team, three books on these public health issues, books that I have read and which make a diagnosis with which I largely agree as a sociologist working on public health issues and white-collar crime.

Kennedy analyzes a public health system in deep crisis and a continuing deterioration in the general health of Americans, symbolized by the historic reversal of the life expectancy curve at birth in the mid-2010s.

And, beyond these observations, he denounces a public health control system structured around the FDA and a world of biomedical research deeply corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, which is an open secret in the research community. In this respect, I recommend reading Sergio Sismondo's recently translated book, The Shadow Management of Medicine: The Invisible Hands of Big Pharma (our analysis here).

E.T. : Let's come to the media coverage of his nomination. "Antivax and conspiracy theorist,...", "Former drug addict...", "controversial positions... appetite for conspiracy theories": since the announcement of his nomination as head of the Ministry of Health last November, Kennedy has been the target of a quasi-unanimous media barrage. [...] What do you think the media coverage reserved for Robert Kennedy Jr is the name of?

In France, as in much of the West, the media did not report the American election neutrally; on the contrary, they campaigned against Trump and for Harris.

When Biden was still the Democratic candidate, they first praised a “glowing record” (Le Monde, March 7, 2024) and “excellent results” (L’Express, February 19, 2024), without ever questioning his physical and mental fitness to perform his duties until he gave up running again. Then, the press simply replaced his name with another and painted an equally flattering portrait of Ms. Harris: a “charismatic,” “warm,” and “knowledgeable” woman (Ouest France, October 26, 2024), with some even going so far as to publish “declarations of love” to her credit (Slate, July 26, 2024).

In return, the same media demonized Trump, going so far as to predict “chaos” on the eve of the elections (L’Express, November 5, 2024). They were offended and also denounced the noisy support of billionaire Elon Musk without realizing that, at the same time, another extremely influential multi-billionaire, Bill Gates, was more discreetly donating $50 million to the NGO organizing Harris’ campaign (Forbes, October 23, 2024).

This journalistic blindness deserves to be confronted with reality, so far has it moved away from it. “Kamala is coming, Donald is trembling,” ran the headline in Libération in huge letters on the front page of August 22, 2024. A few days later, L’Express predicted an electoral “tidal wave,” claiming that Ms. Harris was on the verge of “winning all the swing states.”

However, the reality was quite different: she lost them all. Trump won a landslide victory, giving Republicans a majority in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.

And far from causing any questioning, or at least inducing more nuance in their analyses, these results have on the contrary further radicalized the dominant journalistic discourse. On November 17, 2024, the newspaper Le Monde purely and simply announced "the return of fascism in the West". In this, it was not making an analysis but still politics, taking up a theme from the end of Ms. Harris' campaign.

Thus, almost the entire press did not report on the American election: it campaigned in a totally partisan manner, convincing itself that Trump could not win because he should not win.

Kennedy is therefore caught in these ideological pincers. The result? A series of articles entirely incriminating, of the same type as the anti-Raoult cabal during the Covid crisis, all based on a simplistic Manichaeism: the supposed confrontation between the good pro-vaxers and the bad anti-vaxers.

However, Kennedy has never expressed any hostility in principle towards vaccination, unlike, for example, some Americans who reject it for religious reasons. What he disputes is the vaccination obligation. Above all, he demands solid proof of efficacy, and even more of safety, for these new vaccines, which the pharmaceutical industry and the Gates Foundation dream of imposing on the entire planet in the form of regular consumption.

He denounces the gigantic cynical business that hides behind this vaccination policy that has become the systematic response to epidemics, and, gradually, to a growing number of diseases.

But journalists do not even bother to read it. They have demonized it in advance. Conformism, intellectual laziness and work in a hurry do the rest, producing these purely moralizing articles, which do not seek to explain but only to denounce, and which copy each other, without anyone taking the trouble to investigate seriously.

Ultimately, this media treatment, intellectually pitiful, is revealing of the state of journalism in the West. I devoted two long texts to trying to understand this functioning of which I myself was a victim during the Covid crisis: censorship, defamation, ostracization: a fate reserved for all scientists who dared to challenge, in one way or another, the official narrative and the political-health management of this crisis, and who were not afraid to express it publicly (see here).

[…]

E.T. Regardless of the media coverage, politically, Robert Kennedy’s nomination received unanimous support from Republicans, with the exception of Mitch McConnell, while Democrats strongly opposed it. However, this former Democrat, nephew of John F. Kennedy, defended causes traditionally associated with the left. How do you interpret this partisan divide in the vote? What do you think it reveals about the evolution of ideological lines in the United States?

A first element, which has just been described: the debate becomes sterile because of the radicalization of positions. If you say that Trump is “a Nazi,” you immediately reach Godwin’s point: any discussion becomes impossible.

But there is also a deep ambiguity among Democrats regarding big industries, particularly pharmaceutical and agri-food, the Gates Foundation and, more broadly, crony capitalism, of which they are now major players. The Biden administration’s handling of the Covid crisis has been a blatant illustration of this.

Since the 1990s, the Clinton era, the Democratic Party—like the Socialist Party in France—has moved considerably away from socialist ideals and working-class groups to move closer to business and financial circles.

The day after Trump’s re-election, Naomi Klein summed it up in her own way: “The Democratic Party is perceived as more elitist than the Republican Party (…). Elon Musk interacts with Twitter users, while wealthy Democrats don’t talk to anyone outside their circles. In 2016, I wrote that the Democratic Party is like a party you weren’t invited to. It’s a super elite that put on a show and thought working people would join in. But people felt insulted and excluded. That’s how they elected Trump.”

Which is why she calls, moreover, on the political and intellectual left to re-appropriate the concept of "populism" to address the working classes again.

To explore this question further, I recommend reading the two books by Thomas Frank, Why the Rich Vote Left and Why the Poor Vote Right (Agone editions).

To return to the present, election campaigns are one thing, exercising power is another. Whatever he does, whatever he says, Kennedy will advance in a minefield and will have to make compromises. Moreover, he only obtained narrow majorities during the votes in the Finance Committee and the Health Committee, steps to confirm his nomination by Trump.

Beyond the principled opposition of many Democrats, he will also have to definitively rally his own camp. Because Big Pharma has allies in both parties, including among Republican parliamentarians. […]

However, we are only at the beginning of a story whose outcome I will be careful not to predict. Especially since we will have to observe the actions of Professor Jay Bhattacharya at the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. David Weldon at the helm of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Dr. Marty Makary at the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

E.T. : On this subject, you were one of the French voices who publicly opposed the health measures put in place by the government and criticized the mass vaccination strategy very early on. Then, you deepened your analyses in La Doxa du Covid, the second volume of which was published in March 2022. We are now in 2025. In hindsight, has your view on the management of this epidemic changed, both in terms of health and politics?

For the record, I began analyzing the Covid crisis in mid-February 2020, when I noticed the accumulation of speeches and political decisions that, while claiming to be "Emergency" and constantly invoking "Science", actually went against the lessons learned from experience and established knowledge.

I then carried out a collective survey by mobilizing around fifty doctors and researchers to try to understand all this. I published the results in a series of individual or collective articles from the end of March 2020: around a hundred are online to date. Everything is summarized in my book La Doxa du Covid.

Three years later, having continued to work on these issues almost full-time, I fully assume everything I have written there. In summary, what I dispute is first of all the general story, the global narration, which was put in place from the beginning. As if history were written in advance. This also deserves a real investigation, and not just a lazy denunciation of “conspiracy”. […]

And to make matters worse, my criticism doesn’t stop there… It also looks at the origins and consequences of this crisis.

Upstream, the investigation suggests that SARS-CoV-2 was not a zoonosis—the fable of the bat, the pangolin, and the Wuhan animal market—but rather the result of genetic manipulation carried out in the Wuhan virology laboratory. This research on gains of function, which had been banned in the United States, was then outsourced to China with the financial support of Anthony Fauci, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recalls in one of his books.

That said, I obviously do not subscribe to conspiracy theories claiming that the virus was deliberately modified and then released with the aim of decimating half of humanity, or whatever. This is most likely a laboratory accident, an event that, alas, is nothing exceptional in itself.

Then, downstream, the idea that we have "resumed our lives as if nothing had happened" is a total illusion. This refusal to think about this period is confounding. On the contrary, it is essential to take stock of this political and health management of the Covid crisis, taking into account its medium and long-term effects, which are numerous and varied.

In addition to the medical consequences of non-treatment, such as long Covids, and those of wild vaccination, with its procession of more or less serious and disabling adverse effects, we must also question the social, economic, legal, cultural and even scientific repercussions.

Young people, in particular, have been hit hard by the lockdowns: psychologically, academically, socially. What will the consequences be in the years to come?

Our legal frameworks and our democracies have been deeply damaged, our fundamental rights and freedoms have been desacralized: they are no longer “fundamental” if governments can suspend them at any time and repeatedly under the pretext of an emergency, and if magistrates accommodate themselves without flinching.

A dangerous habit has taken hold: that of trampling on freedom of expression as soon as an opinion is disturbing. Journalism has completed its transformation into a channel of communication and propaganda. Academic freedom is disappearing: see on this subject the book by Brice Perrier, one of the rare journalists who dares to step out of the herd. As for medical ethics, it has been purely and simply sacrificed: they dared to inject messenger RNA into the bodies of pregnant women, violating what had until then been a major ethical taboo in medicine.

In short, the reality is a million miles from the yes-yes world that the mainstream media depicts for us all day long. Moreover, could this not be one of the reasons why public confidence in journalistic discourse is collapsing a little more each year in the polls?

E.T. : During the Covid crisis, health workers who had not been vaccinated against the virus were suspended without pay from 15 September 2021, in accordance with the law of 5 August 2021 on the management of the health crisis. At the start of this year, the Minister of Health, Yannick Neuder, made controversial remarks by arguing that the issue of mandatory vaccination of health workers against the flu "deserves to be asked". What was your view on this matter?

Health ministers generally do not stay in office for long in France. There have been nine since Mr Macron came to power. Perhaps they are trying to ingratiate themselves with the president from the start? I don't know.

Basically, this situation seems to me to perfectly illustrate what I wrote during the Covid crisis. For about twenty years, an ideology of universal and compulsory vaccination has been promoted by all means, supported by the pharmaceutical industries and by the Bill Gates Foundation, which has become, over time, more powerful and influential than the WHO itself.

This ideology has partly imposed itself among the political elites, sometimes at the cost of real corruption pacts, as is perhaps the case in the Ursula von der Leyen affair. It has also conquered part of the intellectual world, where the criticism of techno-industrial myths and marketing is too often assimilated to an “attack on science”, which is in reality the rhetoric of industrialists (let us recall that Pfizer’s favorite slogan during the Covid crisis was “Science will win”). Finally, it largely dominates biomedical research, which simply could not survive without this private funding.

“New vaccines” are constantly being announced in many medical subfields, while states introduce new vaccination requirements almost every year, especially for infants. A highly questionable practice, both in terms of effectiveness and safety, as demonstrated by the work of Dr. de Lorgeril. But since all this is done in the name of “Science” and to “save lives,” then there should not even be a debate…

This is where we are in our Western democracies: facing a form of return of state religion and, more broadly, the resurgence of authoritarian temptations among elites who nevertheless claim to defend democracy.

In reality, this may be a new stage of capitalism. For a long time, the logic of private profits and that of public protection and control have been opposed, with the latter constantly losing ground.

Since the end of the Second World War, regarding economic and social development, we have successively experienced “planning” states, then “police” states. Today, we have states that have become the “partners” of financialized mega-companies and multi-billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who exert a much greater influence than international organizations.

In this logic, the next stage is when the state would be nothing more than a simple armed wing facilitating the implementation of the projects of large capitalist companies. In my opinion, this is precisely what happened during the Covid crisis. And this is, I think, one of the reasons for the growing rejection of the political elites who participate in this game, a rejection that is increasingly clearly reflected in the ballot boxes.

Interview by Etienne Fauchaire.