Christian Lehmann’s Epidemic Journal: Chronicles of Society in the Face of Coronavirus

2024-02-20 16:38:30

Outbreak Diary

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Epidemic journal, by Christian LehmanndossierChristian Lehmann is a doctor and writer. For “Libération”, he chronicles a society long affected by the coronavirus. Today, he points out the lack of empathy among doctors in the face of the 2 million patients with long Covid and the resulting isolation.

I set up as a GP in 1984, at the start of the AIDS years. The population was worried, we did not fully understand the methods of contamination, and obviously we had no treatment to offer. The virus would not be sequenced until 1985, and the first treatment, AZT, would not be available until 1987. During these years of uncertainty, the medical profession divided. We knew that it was a sexually transmitted disease, we did not know the “risky practices”, yet we had to try to advise patients and promote barrier measures. Some of the colleagues at the time considered that we were doing too much with this pathology. Even if not everyone stated it clearly, for many of them it was an illness mainly affecting homosexuals, drug addicts, and Haitians, and therefore not the “normal” people they encountered on a daily basis. (ah the power of denial).

When a few years later, with doctors of my age, we decided to create one of the first city-hospital networks dedicated to AIDS, our elders advised us to go and beg for the anointing of one of the city’s notables, a delicately blotchy caricature of the doctor in the films of Chabrol and Boisset. So we went to a medical training evening

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