The doctor and TV host Michel Cymes is the guest of Anne Roumanoff's program "It feels good".

He returns, a year later, to his media presence at the start of the Covid-19 crisis.

He explains his regrets and recalls the context of his past statements, as well as his absence from television sets in the months following the controversies.

On March 17, 2020, on the first day of France's first confinement, the doctor and TV host Michel Cymes presents a live program devoted to Covid-19 and the health crisis that is beginning.

A year later, he explains in

It's good to 

regret certain points of this program which created the controversy, and explains why he was subsequently absent from the TV shows.

"In this show, I let it be said that the mask, worn in the street, is useless, except for people who are carriers of Covid-19", recalls the doctor.

"At that point, I wonder if I'm sure about that."

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"I said things I didn't really believe"

Michel Cymes, however, does not contradict the government's words on this subject.

"We are on the first day of confinement. There are no masks in France, there are burglaries in hospitals, there are trucks which are being held up because they are carrying masks", recalls -he.

"So what am I to say? My scientific conscience makes me want to say that I don't understand this logic. And at the same time, I have the Minister of Health and all the officials who say that the mask is useless. "

Taken by the direct, the doctor does not object.

"What do you want? That I against them and that I create a riot in the street?", He wonders, not without regret.

Michel Cymes thus acknowledges having "said things in which [he] did not really believe, especially around the mask."

Following this program, the doctor wonders about the way he did his work as a popularizer of science.

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"My media presence gives me a big responsibility because people trust me. And I think I haven't lived up to the trust people place in me because I said things that happened. proved to be false, "said Michel Cymes, who puts things in perspective.

"At the same time, I am not the WHO, I was not in China, and nobody knew. But hey, I was in the window."

"At one point, I shut my mouth"

With a year of hindsight, Michel Cymes imagines that he would do things differently today.

At the time, he recalled at each end of the intervention that he was speaking from the scientific knowledge of the moment he spoke, and that this could evolve.

"I think today I would say that at the beginning, in the middle and at the end," he explains. 

After the show and the controversies, the doctor took a few months off the TV shows.

"I shut my mouth because there was a moment, when I was wondering if it was not me who had started the epidemic", he indicates in reference to the very many reproaches of which he then is about.

"I was told that I had talked about 'flu', which I never did. It was the Throne Fair with the rifle. And there were so many doctors and experts speaking out. that I was no longer needed. "

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Like all the doctors at his hospital, Michel Cymes was called in April to urgently lend a hand to the overloaded intensive care unit.

"We made an on-call list and I found myself in the intensive care unit 4 or 5 times, with my little resources, like my colleagues who were not resuscitators either," he recalls.

An experience that marked him.

"There were whole rooms full of people who had Covid-19. The atmosphere was completely apocalyptic. I had never known that."

Hope "at the end of the tunnel this summer"

Despite this apocalyptic moment and the runaway curves in recent months, Michel Cymes is optimistic.

"I be careful, because everything I say is repeated, distorted, etc. I'm not a diviner. We all messed up all the time during this pandemic. I thought that last summer, it would calm down in because of the weather, and that was not the case, "he anticipates.

But the doctor still gives a horizon.

"I think we will still see the end of the tunnel this summer, especially thanks to the vaccinations."

And the doctor insists on the importance of vaccines in the fight against the pandemic.

"I hope things will get better, and that when we go back to school we will have a more or less normal life."