Editorial of the “World”. Is there a cure for mistrust? For want of having found the answer to the question, the executive power is groping by declining the experiments of participatory democracy. After the citizens’ convention for the climate in 2020, Emmanuel Macron wanted to set up a “collective of citizens” responsible for providing recommendations on the national vaccination campaign against Covid-19. Reflection of a political power paralyzed by the scale of the anti-vaccine movement in French opinion, this initiative raises more questions than it is likely to resolve.
Under the aegis of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, this panel must be composed of thirty citizens (and five alternates), drawn at random from Monday, January 4. They are supposed to be representative of the diversity of French society in terms of age, sex, level of education, socio-professional category and place of residence. This collective must also reflect all sensitivities, from the most favorable to the vaccine to the most skeptical. The objective is to raise the concerns and questions of the French to “feed the executive and legislative power” in the conduct of the vaccination campaign.
The scientific council and the National Health Conference have since demanded months of better involving the population in health decisions, in order to obtain greater support for the fight against the pandemic. The announcement of this citizen collective, unfortunately, comes late, when the choice of vaccines and the identification of priority audiences have already been decided.
Excessive caution
So that the threat of a third wave becomes clearer everywhere in Europe, the government, as if it had the luxury of time, errs by excess of caution on vaccination, takes infinite precautions to reassure the French on the procedures. The citizens’ collective is part of this approach, and as such presents multiple risks: first of all, of losing sight of the main objective, which remains the speed and effectiveness of the vaccination campaign. Then, to miss a dynamic that is built from the first weeks. Worse, finally, that of maintaining mistrust, by dint of superfluous questions, and provoking the exasperation and frustration of those who, on the contrary, only ask to be vaccinated. The ripple effect generally comes from the opposite approach, the vaccination of volunteers encouraging that of refractory.
The initiative of a collective of citizens drawn by lot raises another series of questions, on its democratic nature. Participatory democracy can be useful for advancing political issues like the environment, but is it adequate for public health? This new body, with its imprecise status, will further blur the readability of the vaccine strategy, in which multiple bodies, where representatives of patient associations sit, are already involved.
The experience of the citizens’ climate convention has shown that, to avoid misunderstandings, this type of participatory engineering requires special attention to the composition of the group, its governance and the status of the recommendations made by the citizens solicited. The urgency and scale of the task facing the public authorities today in the face of the pandemic require rationality and efficiency. Democratic experiments can wait until the end of the emergency.