French doctors and scientists call on authorities to take action against insults and threats, including death threats, which many have received during the coronavirus pandemic
PARIS – French doctors and scientists on Tuesday called on authorities to take action against insults and threats, including death threats, which they have frequently received during the coronavirus pandemic.
Doctors said they feared someone in the world of conspiracy theories would act, not only against them, but against other medical professionals, and condemned the authorities’ silence.
“For months now, some of us have been receiving death threats on a regular basis. Whether through social media … Twitter, email, phone or mail. We are targets, ”said Jerome Marty, a physician who runs a private consultation physician union, UFMLS.
Some doctors like him receive threats “several times a day,” he said, and some now have bodyguards.
“What we fear is not so much the threats to us,” Marty said. His biggest fear is that “an anonymous doctor, an anonymous nurse, an anonymous scientist, people struggling today in the face of the crisis (COVID-19) … will be attacked by someone taking action.”
Among the members of the group were medical professionals who often appear on television to explain the current state of the pandemic to French residents.
Verbal threats were played, one from an anonymous man in Toulouse who said, “Listen, friend. The people are starting to get angry … Close your big trap. It’s like you’re looking for it.” Harder was a threat on social media for a doctor who wasn’t there: “And the bullet in the head I’m going to plant, how are you going to stop it?”
The vulgar insults were written in a note to Karine Lacombe, head of infectious diseases at Saint Antoine Hospital in Paris, and once regularly on news programs. “We’ve been following you for a long time: the car, the house, the road, the garbage are being destroyed,” he said in part.
“What amazes me is the impunity that benefits people who lit the fuse on purpose, disrupt an established order, disrupt what scientists say, and shake the population,” Lacombe said. He also expressed surprise at the fact that the messages are being broadcast on social media and in weekly demonstrations of anti-health passes.
Tens of thousands of people opposed to the sanitary steps needed to access restaurants, cafes and other meeting places, including some who oppose COVID-19 vaccinations, march in French cities every weekend.
Marty and others claimed the threats come from individuals who are being “manipulated”. He said there may be a dozen to twenty people pushing the threats, though. “We’re not detectives.”
Damien Barraud, a Metz anesthetist who denounces the conspiracy theories related to the virus on Twitter, said in a Zoom call at the press conference that he received his first threat in April 2020.
But “it’s amplifying now … it’s getting more serious.”
Concerns about the threats grew with the publication last month in France Soir, a newspaper that has given voice to the doubters of COVID-19, of an unsigned comment that dismisses the medical establishment on the issue and named names of doctors and scientists. The comment, from its revision, concluded with a cryptic reference to “La Veuve,” a word once used to designate the guillotine. It was the last straw of the collective of doctors and scientists.
Lacombe stressed the need for the political class to “take a stand at some point and not believe that freedom of expression, which of course must be protected in France, means accepting that there can be some verbal and physical violence.”
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