4:18 p.m., June 3, 2022, modified at 4:36 p.m., June 3, 2022
January 24, 2020. Agnès Buzyn, then Minister of Health, reassures a worried France, frightened by the images of confinement from another time coming from China. “The risk of importation from Wuhan is moderate. It is now practically nil, since the city is isolated”, she assures. Not only will the coronavirus not arrive in France, but if by chance it deigns to show up at the airport, an exceptional system is in place – consisting mainly of information posters. And if by the greatest of misfortunes, cases arose on French territory, “our health system is well prepared”confirms the minister.
Sure of its testing capacities, its resuscitation beds and its reserves of masks, the government is betting on soothing communication. Meanwhile, in the media, a little music begins to rise: are we not in overreaction, in a form of irrational panic? Aren’t we making the same mistakes as in 2009 during the influenza A episode, a real-false pandemic that left us with whole boxes of vaccines on our hands? On March 6, when the virus is already everywhere in France – but our detection capabilities are making us blind – Freeze frames
denounces an unreasonable media frenzy: “In the morning report, there are seven deaths in France since the start of the epidemic. Against how many road accident deaths? 583. » A columnist from France Inter outbids that morning: “Can you imagine two alerts a day, on smartphones, about road deaths? ». A few days later, we will understand that the media frenzy was definitely not one.
Should we aim for a “Zero Monkeypox”?
Why return again to this collective failure, rehashed a thousand times? Because it forms the inevitable backdrop to our reaction to monkeypox, a virus detected in just over a thousand people worldwide, which has so far caused no no deaths. In terms of epidemics, everything is now seen in the light of Covid-19, the ultimate pandemic, the one that will irrigate our collective memory for several decades. Faced with monkeypox, which remains in many respects mysterious, is our health response, for the moment relatively timid, well formatted?
Read also – Monkey pox: what vaccine is recommended for contact cases?
“No, monkeypox is not the coronavirus”, repeat health authorities around the world. Certainly, but, above all, let’s not repeat the same mistakes as in the winter of 2020, plead in return several scientists. In a word: let’s overreact, so as not to have to regret our under-reaction once again. Let’s panic once and for all, and too bad if it’s overplayed, so that we don’t have to really panic once this virus invades us.
This is the message of epidemiologist Antoine Flahaut, interviewed by Obs “Faced with the current situation, there are two options. Wait and react if the situation gets worse. Or else say to yourself that you have to work twice as hard now. (…) And if we have done too much, we will be very happy: we must overreact, in an assumed way, to avoid the start of a new global disease”. In this case, the overreaction consists of testing, tracing, isolating as much as possible, vaccinating contact cases and doing everything to protect against a possible animal reservoir. To put it another way, and to stay within the lexical field of the Covid pandemic, we should aim for a “Zero Monkeypox”.
The unfortunate precedent of the WHO
Listening to the new Minister of Health, Brigitte Bourguignon, some could hear the echo of the disastrous declarations of Agnès Buzyn. The Minister does not expect a “blaze” monkeypox. ” We are ready “, she assures, explaining that France has “strategic stocks” of vaccines – reminiscent of the famous stockpiles of masks in 2020. But this air of déjà vu is probably misleading, the two epidemics being very different. Already because we know the monkeypox virus, discovered in the 1970s, that we have vaccines, but also and above all because the mode of transmission does not seem comparable. “It’s not the Covid”wanted to reassure Jennifer McQuiston, of the American CDC.
Read also – Should we really be afraid of monkeypox?
“Contamination through the respiratory tract is not the major concern. It’s contact and intimate contact [qui sont prédominants]. We are not in a situation where if you meet someone in a grocery store, they can infect you”. The American doctor takes the example of nine infected people who traveled on long-haul flights from Nigeria, without infecting anyone on the plane.
To put it another way, the monkeypox virus would not be aerosol – at least not predominantly as in the case of Covid-19. This point is central and already arouses strong controversy. It must be said that there is a sad precedent: a virus that is supposedly not an aerosol, we know… it was SARS-CoV-2. In a tweet published on March 28, 2020, the WHO decided : “Fact: Covid-19 is not an airborne disease”judging that the idea of aerosol contamination is fake news.
The World Health Organization will take many months to recognize this regrettable mistake. The WHO has learned lessons and is this time much more cautious. “Is there a transmission of the virus when we speak and breathe? We do not know yet “, recognized the technical officer for monkeypox at the WHO, Rosamund Lewis. In the name of the aerosol precautionary principle, several voices have been raised to call – in vain – for a return to the mask.
The actors of the same play are in place
Health authorities navigate a narrow ridge, between a necessary precautionary principle and a desire not to overreact with superfluous measures – the second part of the proposal having become much less popular after the blindness of the first months of the Covid- 19. The precarious balance between these two imperatives is felt in the messages of the WHO. “For now, an effective response to monkeypox will not require the same extensive health measures that we needed for Covid-19”said Hans Kluge, director of WHO Europe. “But, and this is important, we do not yet know if we will be able to completely contain its spread”. It’s all in the “but, and it’s important”. For the WHO, all scenarios remain possible.
The monkeypox would therefore not be the Covid. However, it is fascinating to see how the actors of the same play are in place on social networks. Antivax have not missed the opportunity and have already developed a long list of conspiracy theories about monkeypox; the Covid “alarmists” tirelessly tweet all foreign articles announcing new cases of monkeypox; while data scientists are resuming their methods inherited from Covid to draw curves for this new epidemic – the excellent OurWorldInData site already has its page dedicated to monkeypox. It may not be a pandemic, but the information ecosystem built, for better or for worse, during Covid-19 is already ready to deal with it.