Chronic. “We can debate everything, except for numbers.” With this slogan, government communication for VVID-19 vaccination summarizes the current transformation of public debate. On a variety of topics, political choices disappear more and more behind rationality – real or supposed – scientific expertise. The disagreement is then no longer possible, except to be suspected of comploise or antiscience drift. Regardless of any other consideration on the management of the health crisis, it is indisputable that the main orientations of the Government’s vaccination policy followed the most up-to-date state of scientific knowledge, as it appeared in journals. learned.
Where does this distrust come from, then, who goes through society, and which is probably going well beyond a small minority of anti-vaccine activists? The answer is undoubtedly, in part, in the accumulation of sanitary or environmental scandals made possible by a failing expertise. Galvauder the authority of science to defend political decisions or special interests is one of the crucibles of distrust. It is no coincidence that it is in the West Indies, where the authorities have once allowed the large-scale poisoning of the environment and the population by a toxic and persistent pesticide, the chlordecone, that the vaccine distrust has reached his paroxysm.
This is another famous pesticide, the glyphosate, which fueled the suspicion in recent years. It was not allowed in Europe in Europe only for five years, after the favorable opinions of the regulatory agencies of the European Union, which concluded the opposite of the International Cancer Research Center. The latter had classified the same substance “probable carcinogen” in March 2015. Seven years later, the controversy has not moved, and a new European expertise ends with a view to the re-authorization of the famous Herbicide in December 2022.
In January, the National Commission on Public and Environmental Health and Environment Alerts (CNDASPE) took up its responsibilities by requesting that European expertise conducted, since 2014, on the famous product. The Government has, to date, given any public response to these requests, to establish two groups of qualified personalities for, on the one hand, judging the validity of the scientific choices made in the context of the expertise and, on the other hand, analyze the possible conflicts of interest of the European experts who participated.
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