Apart from the fact that we wonder why people known to suffer from such allergies and therefore at risk of serious (potentially fatal) AEs were nevertheless vaccinated (we’ll come back to this later), this statement was intended to reassure the general population. Apart from the specific case of severe allergy sufferers, there would be no risk. This was a lie, unless you believe that the Minister’s direct advisers (who, like the Minister himself, have medical training) do not read biomedical journals and are therefore incompetent. In fact, in the Pfizer clinical trial published on 10 December 2020, despite the strategies employed by manufacturers to minimise AEs as far as possible (Mead et al, 2024) and despite the arbitrary exclusion of people who had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2 (Doshi, 2021), it is clear that the vaccinated group experienced a very large number of local (especially in young people) and systemic (especially after the second dose) AEs, in much higher proportions than the placebo group (Polack et al, 2020, Figure 2).² In the body of the article, it is stated in full that “the frequency of any severe systemic event after the first dose was 0.9%” and that “severe systemic events were reported in less than 2% of subjects vaccinated after either dose” (Polack et al, 2020, 210). By going from 2 per 100 to 1 per 100,000, the Minister has therefore divided the known reality at the time by two thousand...

Nine days after this press conference, on 12 January, the “Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Board” (set up ad hoc in March 2020) issued an important opinion. It was chaired by Jean-François Delfraissy, Professor of Medicine at Paris-Saclay University and coordinator of the H1N1 influenza research plan in 2009 at the request of the Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Health, Director of the National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (ANRS) since 2005 and of the Institute of Infectious Diseases at INSERM since 2008, Chairman of the National Consultative Ethics Committee since 2016 and already a government advisor at the time of the Ebola epidemic (2014-2015). In 2021, he will be made a Commander of the “Legion of Honour” (the highest French state honorary decoration). On 12 January 2021, the Scientific Advisory Board wrote that "the major challenge over the coming weeks is to vaccinate as many people as possible who are at risk because of their age, state of health or because they work in a healthcare profession, in order to reduce the occurrence of severe forms of the disease and save lives, particularly among people who have already been severely affected by the first two waves. Ultimately, this will also protect the healthcare system” (Conseil scientifique, 2021, 13). He added that he was impatiently awaiting the vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) so that he could go and vaccinate the very old and very sick in their homes (which was hardly possible with the Pfizer vaccine, given that it had to be kept at a temperature of -70°). The objective announced, in full agreement with the government, “should be to vaccinate at least 70% (12 million people) of this population by spring”, the Scientific Advisory Board continues. It goes on to estimate, on the basis of modelling and data from manufacturers' clinical trials, that “if 50% of these people had been vaccinated in the second wave, 14,000 hospital deaths would have occurred instead of 25,000” (ibid., p. 20). In this important opinion, the expression “adverse reaction” is simply absent. As if, once again, the thing did not exist or was a negligible residue, not to say contemptible.

We can see here that all these comments on vaccines made by doctors occupying important institutional positions and advising governments are more political than medical in nature. This, moreover, is what the RKI Files will reveal at the end of July 2024 (Simonelli, 2024). Some 4,000 pages of reports, thousands of letters and emails exchanged between doctors and scientists at the Robert Koch Institute (the equivalent of the French Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Board) and the German federal government since 2020, posted online by a whistleblower (a former employee of the RKI). Overall, these documents show that, far from “following the science” as it claimed, the German federal government has constantly put pressure on doctors and scientists to provide arguments to justify decisions that had already been planned.

Unfortunately, no such document “leaks” exist in France, revealing the exact nature of the relationship between the government and the "Scientific Advisory Board". Information is also lacking on the second political-scientific very small group set up by the French government, the Conseil d'orientation de la stratégie vaccinale (vaccination strategy advisory board), created on 3 December 2020 and attached to the Ministry of Solidarity and Health, and headed by another doctor familiar with political circles: Alain Fischer, quickly dubbed “France's Mr Vaccine” by the media. Fischer is in fact first and foremost a doctor (a paediatrician) and a researcher (in immunology, specialising in paediatric vaccines and new gene therapies) with a remarkable institutional record, ending his career as a professor at the Collège de France, member of the Académie des sciences, member of the Académie de médecine, member of the American Academy of Sciences and the Belgian Academy of Medicine, recipient of some fifteen research awards in several countries, member of the Board of the Fondation de la Recherche Médicale... But he is also a science entrepreneur in the sense of seeking funding to advance science. He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Jeantet Foundation, a member of the Board of Directors of the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation. Finally, Alain Fischer is an administrator and promoter of research in direct liaison with governments. This second career in politics began in the late 1990s. It is marked by a partisan commitment to the centre-left. From 1999 to 2001, he was an adviser on medical research in the cabinet of the Ministry of Research, working under ministers Claude Allègre and Léon Schwartzenberg. With the return of the political right to power (2002-2012), he temporarily withdrew from the political landscape, but returned as soon as the wind changed. In spring 2011, Alain Fischer joined the campaign team of Martine Aubry (Socialist Party) for the 2012 presidential election, as an adviser on health issues.⁵ Four years later, in 2016, he was appointed by Health Minister Marisol Touraine to head a steering committee for the citizens' consultation on vaccination, the stated aim of which was to “respond to the growing ‘mistrust' of part of the population” towards vaccination.⁶ And it was following his report, which went against the majority opinion of the members of the consultation group, that the government made eight new vaccines mandatory, in addition to the three already in place.⁷ Unsurprisingly, he took on a new political role during the Covid crisis.

On 11 February, the local press reported that after just one week of AstraZeneca vaccination in the Breton hospitals of Brest, Quimper and Morlaix, between 20% and 25% of vaccinated staff had gone on sick leave, to such an extent that the management of the hospital in Morlaix had decided to suspend the vaccination of its staff.⁸ On 24 February, a local France Bleu radio station also reported that some general practitioners (family doctors) were reluctant to inject the AstraZeneca vaccine. Firstly, they argued that new English and South African variants had arrived that were different from the original strain from which the vaccines were made. Secondly, they questioned the duration of supplies for booster injections, given that the government had announced the imminent arrival of Pfizer and Moderna products, and the doctors wondered how it would be possible to mix a first dose of one product (the “non-replicating viral vector” used by AstraZeneca) with a second and then a third dose of products based on a different technology (the messenger RNA used by Pfizer and Moderna).⁹ The comments, made by ordinary general practitioners on a modest local radio station, were extremely moderate and reasonable. But it dared to cast doubt on the grand political narrative that had been set up in advance, promising the disappearance of the epidemic thanks to mass vaccination that was as effective as it was harmless (Mucchielli, 2022a).

In addition, some of the healthcare professionals who were the first to receive deliveries of AstraZeneca’s product did indeed seem to shun it during the first few weeks, as Figure 1 shows.

The chronology shown in Figure 1 indicates that AstraZeneca injections stagnated until 24 February, then soared from the 25th. Was this the impact of Mr Fischer’s speech, and the DGS (Direction Générale de la Santé) memo that followed? For the government, which scanned the media and social networks on a daily basis and regularly commissioned opinion polls to monitor the level of “vaccine hesitancy”, it was essential to quickly extinguish the risk of a fire caused by the reluctance of doctors in the field. So "Mr Vaccine" came on the scene.

The day after the France Bleu report, Alain Fischer posted a short video on Twitter (future X) in which he lectured modest general practitioners. First of all, he claims that a very recent article proves that AstraZeneca’s vaccine “has shown a degree of efficacy equivalent to that of mRNA vaccines". He also claims that data from Scotland, which “have just been released” and which concern “all subjects vaccinated in Scotland, i.e. more than 400,000 people”, show protection against hospitalisation “of the order of 90% after one month”, which "essentially confirms the data acquired in clinical trials”. Mr Fischer concluded that "this vaccine is of good quality and can and should be widely used, particularly for the time being by healthcare professionals and by people aged between 50 and 65 with co-morbidities", that “these people absolutely need vaccines” and that “in people over 50, this vaccine is perfectly well tolerated”.¹¹ Mr Fischer concluded the science lesson he claimed to be giving to junior doctors in the field: “I would suggest that you reflect on your attitude and adopt a position that is favourable to this vaccination for reasons of efficacy and safety of use of this vaccine”. From a scientific point of view, these remarks call for three sets of comments.

Secondly, Mr Fischer refers to "recently disclosed data”, which would confirm the AstraZeneca clinical trial and constitute proof of the “90% efficacy and safety" of his product. Here again, Mr Fischer, who prides himself on mastering the bibliography in real time, could not have been unaware of three publications. The first was a research article published in the Lancet on 7 January 2021, comparing the results of the first randomised studies carried out in England, South Africa and Brazil (Voysey et al, 2021). This article indicated that, taking into account the protocol of the trials and their initial results, 1) the efficacy of the protection varied from 60% to 70% (and not 90% as claimed by M. Fischer), 2) it was limited to the prevention of symptomatic Covid after positive tests, but could say nothing about severe forms and the criteria for hospitalisation, 3) for lack of data, nothing could be said about efficacy in people aged over 55 (the very people for whom Mr Fischer considered it an “absolute” priority), nor about the safety of the product (again for lack of sufficient data). The second publication is the opinion of the French National Authority for Health (HAS), published on 2 February 2021. This, in turn, reviewed all the available clinical trials, found that efficacy (again, within the limits of the single criterion of symptomatic Covid after a positive test) was between 37% and 74% depending on the trials, criteria and calculation methods (HAS, 2021c, 31), pointed out that it “had not been studied in children, in women during pregnancy or in immunocompromised individuals" (ibid., 33), and concluded that efficacy could not be established in “people with co-morbidities, people aged 65 and over, asymptomatic forms, carriage and transmission of the virus and severe forms of Covid-19” (ibid., 49).¹² In addition, the HAS pointed out that the duration of long-term protection after 1 or 2 doses was also unknown, as was the compatibility of this product with mRNA products. We can see here that the opinion expressed by general practitioners in the field was in line with the current state of knowledge, contrary to the statements made by Alain Fischer.

Lastly, Mr Fischer was apparently also unaware (third publication) of the article published on 29 January by the journal Prescrire (known in France for its independence from the pharmaceutical industry) on the AstraZeneca clinical trial. It states that the data from this trial are particularly ‘fragile’ and ‘incomplete’, mainly because the golden rules of the randomised double-blind trial were not respected (Prescrire, 2021). In fact, the product was not initially tested against a placebo but against another drug (a meningococcal vaccine), the effect (and probably the objective) of which is to “reduce differences in the frequency of adverse events common to vaccines”. The manufacturer subsequently changed the trial protocol when it became clear that one dose was not enough and that a second dose was needed (which, however, would be tested against a placebo!). In addition, the trial was not carried out in duplicate but as a single blind study, with the investigators aware of the products injected into the two groups of patients being compared. In addition, the many changes made to the study design led to the exclusion of almost half of the 21,000 initial participants. Worse still: “Some patients in the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine groups were mistakenly given a half-dose during the first injection. It has been suggested that the vaccine was more effective in these patients. However, confounding factors invalidated this analysis. For example, the patients who received the half-dose were younger than those who received the full dose” (ibid.). Finally, with regard to severe forms of Covid, the review states that the numbers compared are too small to demonstrate protection. It even states that “these trials were not designed to assess the efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine in people aged 65 or over”. Finally, with regard to the reality of adverse events, the journal Prescrire reviewed this trial and all the data produced by AstraZeneca on its product, indicating that 1) local AEs were much more frequent in the vaccinated groups, 2) systemic AEs (fever, pain, headache, fatigue, malaise, nausea, vomiting, etc.) were also more frequent in the vaccinated groups, and 3) local AEs were much more frequent in the vaccinated groups.) were also more frequent in the vaccinated groups, and 3) serious adverse reactions (such as myelitis - inflammation of the spinal cord - and facial paralysis) were just as numerous in the vaccinated groups as in the control groups. Prescrire concluded that “the level of evidence in the data [from AstraZeneca's clinical trials] is low overall” and that, ultimately, “the uncertainties surrounding the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine are greater than those surrounding the two mRNA vaccines already available in the European Union”.

It should first be noted that, as in the case of Pfizer’s phase III clinical trial, the study arbitrarily excludes all people who had already had a Covid test before the start of the vaccination campaign. Here we are comparing two groups of people (vaccinated or not) who had never been officially infected before and who all had a positive PCR test for Covid at the start of the observation period. Secondly, as has unfortunately become the rule in the presentation of results concerning vaccination, to estimate the efficacy of vaccine protection, the authors systematically calculate only relative and not absolute values. This totally distorts reality (Cotton, 2023, 44sqq). It is therefore necessary to recalculate hospitalisation rates in order to compare vaccinated and non-vaccinated patients, using statistical reasoning that remains anchored in reality (absolute values). Finally, and most importantly, if we simply compare their statistical data and the comments they make about it, we are struck by the fact that they fail to mention two facts which obviously do not “fit” with the message they are trying to get across. The first is that the advertised “vaccine protection” does not actually appear until one month after the injection, with the preceding weeks being marked by higher rates of hospitalisation among those vaccinated. The “94%” claimed by Mr Fischer is therefore doubly misleading. Firstly, it is a confidence interval of between 75% and 94%. Secondly, and more importantly, these rates actually vary greatly depending on the date on which they are observed, with maximum levels only being reached one month after the injection. But what happens before and after?

Let’s look at the data published by the authors of the article in table 2. In the control group (831,226 people not vaccinated), there were 7,698 hospitalisations categorised as Covid as the sole or main cause. This gives a hospitalisation rate of 0.91% for the unvaccinated. Here are the same rates for those vaccinated by Pfizer and AstraZeneca during the 6 weeks of observation (Figure 2).

Thus, an honest account of the data available at the time would have been to say that the two vaccines studied here only partially and very temporarily reduce the risk of hospitalisation, and on the contrary increase it during the first two to three weeks with AstraZeneca. The circle is beginning to close because, in fact, all the scientific literature available on the subject indicates that most adverse effects, whether serious or not, occur precisely during the first two weeks following the injections (for ex. Seneff et al., 2022; Yamamoto, 2025).

Note for the reader: the first dotted vertical line corresponds to the start of the anti-covid vaccination campaign, the next two to the dates of the second English lockdown.

However, the French government’s propaganda will have no effect. In March 2021, most countries announced the withdrawal of AstraZeneca’s product in view of the frequency of cases of thrombosis, some of them fatal, reported just about everywhere: "For a week now, hardly a day has gone by without a country suspending all or part of the AstraZeneca vaccine in circulation. Austria got the ball rolling on 8 March, when it suspended the use of a batch of vaccine following the death of a nurse. Since then, other countries have followed suit. Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands have gone further, freezing all batches of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, followed by Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Outside Europe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia and Thailand have postponed their vaccination campaigns", reported Le Monde on 15 March.¹⁷ At the time, French President E. Macron said he "hoped" that the campaign of injections with AstraZeneca’s product could resume after the expected opinion of the European Medicines Agency (EMA).¹⁸ The latter was embarrassed, as the European Commission, led by its President Ursula Von der Leyen, had rushed to conclude contracts for the advance purchase of vaccines and had signed the first of these contracts with AstraZeneca in August 2020 (even before the first results of the phase III clinical trials were available). The contract stipulated that "all Member States will be able to purchase 300 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, with an option for a further 100 million doses, which will be distributed in proportion to the population".¹⁹ The cart before the horse, with motivations that are probably not simply good intentions.²⁰

The EMA eventually suspended and then re-authorised the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, while gradually extending the list of serious adverse effects (starting with Guillain-Barré syndrome).²¹ However, there are major differences and inconsistencies between European countries. In addition, the media coverage of the “AstraZeneca affair” in early 2021, combined with the weight of competition between manufacturers and US protectionism, will be fatal for the product. The company will revise its manufacturing investment plans and will be in conflict with the European Commission for several months over the delivery of doses.²² In the meantime, AstraZeneca had also changed the name of its product (to “Vaxzevria”) in the hope of getting round the stigma.²³ This was not enough. AstraZeneca permanently withdrew its product from sale at the beginning of May 2024.²⁴ In the meantime, a number of European countries, including France, had disposed of their stocks in favour of the COVAX international solidarity scheme designed to supply poor countries!²⁵

At the end of summer 2021, this product was no longer part of the vaccination strategy. As a result, Alain Fischer quietly changed his mind: “I'm keeping the door ajar for Janssen, but not for AstraZeneca”.²⁶ Unfortunately for him and for all of us, Janssen’s product was no better. Subsequent scientific research showed that the risk of hospitalisation following vaccination with COVID-19 was around five times higher with the Janssen vaccine than with the Pfizer vaccine (Botton et al 2022), that (like AstraZeneca) it caused an increase in cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome from the first dose (Le Vu et al, 2023), that it is the most common vaccine to cause vasovagal syncope, 164 times more often (8.2/0.1 cases per 100,000 injections) than influenza vaccines (Chrétien et al, 2022), that it is much more involved than the other three mRNA and adenovirus vaccines in the occurrence of severe thrombocytopenia and thromboembolism (Who, Dimova, 2022) and that it is particularly responsible for severe Bell’s palsy (Van der Boom et al, 2023). All in all, this is clearly the vaccine causing the most serious AEs of the four offered in France.

Politicians and journalists thus gradually succeeded in reassuring the public, the ultimate target of the vaccination campaign. Between the official launch of the campaign in December 2020 and April 2021, opinion polls showed that the proportion of respondents who said they did not want to be vaccinated halved (from 58% to 30%) and became a minority (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Responses to the question “Do you intend to be vaccinated against Covid-19”?

In addition to the gradual suspension of several tens of thousands of healthcare workers, firefighters and medico-social workers, there were major street demonstrations against this new vaccination requirement, which was both contrary to fundamental human rights and created huge new discrimination between citizens (Schouler, 2022). It also caused rifts and conflicts in all spheres of society, including the family. Yet such state violence was largely unnecessary in view of the trend in vaccination rates, and potentially very dangerous in view of the adverse reactions that have been accumulating since the beginning of 2021 in the reports received by pharmacovigilance services (Banoun et al. 2022). To silence or render invisible this opposition, political and media propaganda reached its peak (Mucchielli, 2022a). The spectre of “vaccine hesitancy” (which could be understood as legitimate caution calling for dialogue) was then replaced by the demonisation of the “anti-vax” figure (who designated an enemy to be eliminated without discussion) (Szymanski, 2022; Caroselli, Schiano, 2023).

Finally, let’s add to this picture the political arguments in the strict sense of the term, which are even weaker and more fallacious, but omnipresent in public debate, consisting of demonising the figure of the “anti-vax” by likening him to an extreme right-wing militant. This argument was regularly used by politicians, journalists and some doctors to discredit the large-scale street demonstrations that followed the vote to make vaccination compulsory in August 2021. Unfortunately, it can also be found in works that claim to be scientific (e.g. Chappey, 2025). Even in a well-documented work on resistance to vaccination with a much calmer style, when it comes to examining “Their arguments” (Jourdain, 2021, 117-135), the author ends up denouncing counterfeiters and does not say a word about the question of adverse effects, which is central to the arguments in question. In short, in principle, there can be nothing objective or indisputable about the criticisms of mass vaccination policies. As a matter of principle, all criticism of vaccines should be excluded from legitimate discussion. This is where the taboo comes in.

Historians of medicine, however, are often more circumspect. They are familiar with and distance themselves from the retrospective mythologising of Pasteur and the act of vaccination (Cadeddu, 1991; Geison, 1995). They know that while vaccines are pharmaceutical products, vaccination is often a political operation (to paraphrase the historian Anne-Marie Moulin), just as they know that “in the collective immunisation record, vaccination has had unequal successes depending on the disease, and sometimes bloody setbacks” (Moulin, 1996, 16; see also Fressoz, 2012, chap. 2; Bourdineaud, 2023, 199-213). In fact, one of the lessons of history is that vaccination is a particularly difficult technique to control and that adverse effects are consubstantial with the act of vaccination. The first of these effects (known as “vaccine failure”) has always been the unintentional inoculation of the pathogen responsible for the disease that was intended to be prevented. The historian of medicine Jean-Noël Biraben (1979), for example, clearly demonstrated this when he analysed the first vaccination campaigns in France, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, against what was then known as “petite vérole” (now smallpox). The best-known case (which should be) is - oh sacrilege - that of Pasteur himself and his rabies vaccine (Decourt, 1988; Geison, 1995). Finally, it should also be remembered that the vaccine ideology once wreaked havoc in the colonies, where France claimed to be bringing its beneficent  ‘civilisation’ to the  ‘primitives’, and where mass pharmacological experiments sometimes turned into health disasters (Monnais-Rousselot, 1999; Hooper, 2000; Lachenal, 2014; Le Cour Grandmaison, 2014; Peiretti-Courtis, 2021; Green, 2022).

And while there is an abundance of work on the opponents/resistors/resisters to vaccination, respect for the principle of symmetry requires us to question the vaccine ideology that developed throughout the 19th century and became established in France under the Third Republic.

This is the story of a long process of “ideological conditioning” of the population to the principle of mandatory vaccination, which the sociologist Claudine Marenco (1982, 1984) had the courage to study. “Throughout the 19th century, the battle for vaccination resembled a crusade”, she wrote (1984, 136). And this crusade did not begin at the end of the century with Pasteur's work, with the creation of the Central Committee for Vaccination in 1803. In studying it, Marenco shows how “the system of vaccinating children in France gradually imposed itself on the population to the point of becoming an unquestionable institution". In addition to health objectives, the aim was “to impose a model of civilisation on resistant populations, to which vaccination contributed in the same way as compulsory secular public education" (ibid., 143). Finally, under the Third Republic, the politicisation of vaccination took on a supreme dimension when it was defined as “a patriotic act” and relied on the national education system to ensure its success. Vaccination thus became “part of the ideological framework of the schools of the Third Republic as a symbol of science" (ibid., 157), and history textbooks made a major contribution to establishing Pasteur as a “genius” and a “lay saint”, a “new hero replacing the traditional models of the soldier and the saint” (ibid., 158-159). The accompanying discourse is fundamentally moralistic: “hygiene represents ‘good’ overcoming ‘evil’” (ibid., 156). Finally, vaccination is presented as a moral imperative of solidarity: “vaccination is not only a duty for oneself, it is a duty for others (...) The negligence of one person threatens the community. The idea is so strong that it is absurd, and forms the basis of the reasoning that was widely used to justify compulsory vaccination, and is still used today, according to which a single 'non-vaccinated' person is likely to endanger a whole group of vaccinated people” (ibid., 156-157). Finally, by studying school textbooks, Claudine Marenco has shown the primacy of the ideological dimension of the principle of vaccination, which became compulsory in 1902: “if school books all mention vaccination, it is not to inform, to explain: nowhere is it presented as a means of protecting against a dreadful disease, nowhere is the history of its discovery mentioned, the principles on which it is based, the techniques used to implement it, its effects on morbidity and mortality. Vaccination, which is systematically associated with Pasteur, is part of a Manichean discourse opposing Progress, Science, Civilisation and the merits of the Republic (i.e. the Good) to the Evil represented by obscurantism, ignorance, barbarism, slavery and the ‘unfortunate regimes’ of the past. (...) Compulsory vaccination and education are, in a way, passports to the status of good republican citizen” (ibid., 161). Under the Third Republic, vaccination thus became a “civilising mission” and  “ideological conditioning”. It was in no way an education in the sciences. The content was never discussed, and the medical act itself was reduced to “a shot”. An “act of faith”, vaccination thus becomes “a magical practice, conjuring up omnipresent obscure threats” (ibid., 162). Such are the moral-political structures of vaccine ideology, which were fully reactivated at the time of the Covid crisis.

History seems to be repeating itself, at least in part. The Covid crisis has given a new lease of life to the old scientistic myth of humanity freed from its suffering by Science, the embodiment of both intellectual and moral progress. Knowledge of human beings and the precision of the technological tools available in vaccine medicine are certainly not the same at the beginning of the 21st century as they were in the middle of the 19th century. But the ideological structure has logically retained its simplicity. As another example, the public speeches (which were very well attended during the Covid crisis) and the recent book by Philippe Sansonetti (2017), a professor at the Collège de Franceand the Institut Pasteurwith undoubtedly great technical skills in vaccinology, are still based on this Manichean rhetoric opposing the radiant future of a disease-free world thanks to vaccines and the apocalyptic past threatening to resurface in a world without vaccines. On one side science, progress and happiness, on the other obscurantism and suffering. In short, heaven and hell. In such a system of thought, there is no knowledge of health history (historical epidemiology shows that most of the major infectious diseases of the past disappeared in the West due to improvements in living conditions and hygiene among populations, before the introduction of most vaccines [see, for example, the summaries by Bystrianyk, Humphries [2015], and Lorgeril [2018]), there is no room for reflection on the industrial partner essential to the implementation of vaccine policies (i.e. on the technical and financial issues involved in vaccine production), there is no real mastery of scientific information (people are so sure of themselves that they don't really need to confront the bibliography on retrospective evaluation of vaccine efficacy and safety in general populations), and there can be no real consideration of anything in empirical reality that contradicts this representation of the omnipotence of science and the fundamentally beneficial nature of its association with politics. Consequently, the question of the adverse effects of vaccines logically constitutes a blind spot, a cognitive dissonance as Leon Festinger (1957) would probably have said.

As far as anti-Covid vaccines are concerned, it’s important to stress this one last time: the great “experts” chosen by politicians, whose words were omnipresent in the public debate during the Covid crisis, did not give an honest and impartial account of scientific knowledge. We have commented at length on the case of Alain Fischer, who was promoted to the position of chief expert on anti-Covid vaccination, and to some extent on that of Jean-François Delfraissy, Chairman of the “Covid-19 Scientific Council”.²⁹ Finally, let’s mention that of infectiologist Karine Lacombe, a leading female figure in the media throughout the Covid crisis (who will be made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in December 2020). We have already mentioned (supra, note 16) her statements during the AstraZeneca affair, aimed at minimising the question of adverse effects as much as possible. Let’s now return to the supposed “altruism” of anti-Covid vaccination, which lies at the heart of vaccine ideology. From a scientific point of view, we have known at least since October 2020 that mRNA and adenovirus vaccines against Covid were not designed to prevent transmission and that clinical trials were not designed to test this (Doshi, 2020). In France, the HAS also said as much in its initial opinions of February 2021. And the Pfizer representative (Janine Small, “President of International Developed Markets”) had no difficulty in acknowledging this the following year during a debate organised at the European Parliament.³⁰ However, this did not stop Karine Lacombe declaring the opposite on 6 May 2021 on BFM-TV, to justify the extension of vaccination to the entire population: “We now know that vaccines prevent transmission of the virus (...) so this will really help to cut the chain of transmission of the virus. So we need a paradigm shift here. In other words, we’re not just going to protect the weakest, but we’re also going to protect those who are the most likely to transmit the virus, especially teenagers”. To give even more weight to her appeal, she added: “We are waiting for the results of the therapeutic trials that have been published, which show efficacy and very good tolerance. So of course, vaccination should be available from the age of 12. (...) if possible this summer”. The infectiologist was probably referring to the US CDC publication (Wallace et al., 2021) reporting the results of “a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II/III clinical trial that has been expanded to enrol approximately 2,200 participants aged 12 to 15 years”. This article itself referred to the data contained in the report published by the FDA in support of its emergency authorisation on 10 May, which Ms Lacombe clearly did not read (or has decided to ignore). In this report on Pfizer’s clinical trial on adolescents, apart from the fact that there was no question of measuring transmission, it was found that mild AEs occurring within 7 days of the first dose were present in 86.6% of vaccinated patients compared with 24% of non-vaccinated patients, that systemic AEs occurring within 7 days of the second dose were present in 82.4% versus 40.7% of non-vaccinees, and that 4 serious AEs requiring hospitalisation (i.e. 0.2% of the 2,200 participants) occurred in the vaccine group versus none (an appendicitis that was difficult to attribute to the vaccine and resolved very quickly) in the placebo group (FDA, 2021, p. 24-30). Strictly speaking, this does not mean that the vaccine was “very well tolerated” and should therefore be administered as a matter of urgency to all adolescents.

A month later, the first cases of myocarditis following injections of Pfizer’s vaccine were described in the medical literature (Tano et al., 2021; Singh et al., 2021), the prelude to a long series of scientific publications. On July 19, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will add a new “safety signal” recognising myocarditis and pericarditis as potential adverse effects of mRNA vaccines, particularly in young men under the age of 30 after the second dose (EMA, 2021). Back in the media after the summer, Karine Lacombe repeated: “I recommend vaccination from the age of 12” (RMC, 14 September 2021). What’s more, she claimed that “adolescents are at risk of developing serious forms of Covid”, which has also been refuted by all the research available since 2020. Of all the standard statistical variables used to measure severe forms of Covid-19, the most decisive is precisely age, but old age... In reality, the risk of hospitalisation is nil before the age of 16 and virtually nil below the age of 20 (see, for example, DREES, 2022, p. 14). Decidedly...