AstraZeneca: emotional democracy got the better of the vaccine

While waiting for the "new decisions" promised by Emmanuel Macron, nothing is still known about the intentions of the European Medicines Agency concerning the AstraZeneca vaccine.

No, everyone (public opinion, political leaders, health authorities) is suspended from this opinion.

For a year now, we have become accustomed to talking about the waves of the epidemic (the first, the second, perhaps the third today).

The AstraZeneca vaccine case is not a wave but a gigantic tidal wave that has just swept away everything in its path: the strategy to fight Covid, the logistics of vaccination, and the certainties of defenders vaccine.

We are not the only ones in this situation.

Germany, after other European countries, had preceded the French decision.

Which then became inevitable.

All these European countries have yielded to the tidal wave, all bear the responsibility for what will remain as one of the worst episodes of this year in the fight against Covid.

And Germany maybe more than others.

This beautiful mechanism that was our envy (masks, respirators, the vaccination plan), this German-style organization has stalled.

The country gave in as, hours earlier, Berlin claimed the AstraZeneca vaccine was safe.

And what explains this turnaround, and especially its brutality, its suddenness?

Emotion.

A huge wave of emotion transported by the media and amplified by social networks, a wave that grew as it crossed each country, until it became irresistible.

A tsunami which, on a subject as fragile and sensitive as health, swept away everything, left no room for reflection.

It was necessary to act and react quickly, under the pressure of immediacy, under the dictatorship of emotion.

We were familiar with citizen democracy, participatory democracy with its worrying gropings, here is where emotional democracy is sweeping through us, the one which confiscates power from politics and entrusts it to that part of the brain which does not think but reacts.

No need, in this context, to try to weigh the number of deaths that would be caused by the cessation of vaccination against the few victims of side effects of the vaccine.

Fear sells well on social media.

Terrible observation of a total loss of control over a public opinion carried away by its emotions.

Not all countries have given in, like England, which is vaccinating with all its might with AstraZeneca.

That is true.

Probably because this country, like the United States, has a culture of risk, not that of fear or the precautionary principle.

For once, these democracies were more mature than ours.