"How France lost the weapons to fight a pandemic" by Norimitsu Onishi and Constant Méheut New York Times, May 17, 2020
PARIS — When President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly declared “war” on the coronavirus in March, he solemnly promised that France would support “front-line” health workers with “the means, the protection.”
The reality was that France was nearly defenseless.
As usual, so at least some things are still normal.
The government’s flip-flopping policies on past pandemics had left a once-formidable national stockpile of face masks nearly depleted. Officials had also outsourced the manufacturing capacity to replenish that stockpile to suppliers overseas, despite warnings since the early 2000s about the rising risks of global pandemics.
That has left France — unlike Germany, its rival for European leadership — dependent on foreign factories and painfully unable to ramp up domestic production of face masks, test kits, ventilators, and even thermometers and over-the-counter fever-reducing medicines to soothe the sick.
Yeah, Germany always rolls those guys.
Today, as it has begun loosening one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, France has become a case study in how some countries are reconsidering their dependence on global supply chains built during the past two decades on the mantra of low costs and quick delivery. Even now, France has no guarantees that it can secure enough supplies in the coming weeks to protect against a potential second wave of the virus.
As your way of life is irreparably alters, the globali$t $y$tem they spent decades building is in ruins.
Time to put the Yellow Vests on again!
“In times of crisis, we can no longer switch from one production zone to another to get our essential products,” said Louis Gautier, the former director of the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security, a powerful interministerial unit inside the prime minister’s office that coordinates the response to large-scale crises, in an interview. “The issue of strategic stocks and secure supplies has to be reconsidered. A new model has to be invented.”
Hmmmmmmm.
France had long identified masks as indispensable in a pandemic, yet the government had mostly stopped stockpiling them during the past decade, mainly for budgetary reasons. Domestic production collapsed at the same time the country’s pharmaceutical industry was also moving overseas.
Related: "French pharmaceutical group Sanofi promised Thursday that it would make its COVID-19 vaccine, when ready, available in all countries, hours after the company’s CEO said the United States will get first access. Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson’s comments that a vaccine would go first to the US prompted an angry reaction from the French government. “Equal access for all to the vaccine is not negotiable,” French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said in a tweet. Hudson told the Bloomberg news agency that the US government has the right to the largest pre-order of an eventual COVID-19 vaccine “because it’s invested in taking the risk.”
Also see: Only COVID-19 Vaccine Can Save Economy
And France:
France had decided “that it was no longer necessary to keep massive stocks in the country, considering that production plants were able to be operational very quickly, especially in China,” the health minister, Olivier Véran, said in Parliament in March, but the scope and speed of the coronavirus defied that logic. Still reeling from its own outbreak, China, the world’s leading maker of masks, was overwhelmed with orders. India, a top exporter of medication, temporarily banned exports for fear of shortages.
They exported crap, as usual, and there were concerns right from the start from our national heroes.
As the globalized supply chain broke down, French health officials lost critical time as the national government — as well as cities, towns, and even wards — scrambled to buy supplies directly from China and elsewhere. The government organized highly publicized airlifts of masks from China, betraying both its desperation and its dependence.
France has suffered more than 27,000 deaths and one of the world’s highest fatality rates, 60 percent greater than in the United States. “We will have to rebuild France’s agricultural, health, industrial, and technological independence,” Macron said in a recent address.
To many critics, France’s defenselessness in the face of the virus was the logical conclusion of the hollowing out of France’s manufacturing base, a transformation that has deepened inequality and fueled violent protests, like the yellow vest movement.
Another fundamental $hift is in $tore!
In the early 2000s, Germany had a slight edge over France in manufacturing and exporting PCR test kits — the most widely used today to detect the virus — and oxygen therapy equipment, according to United Nations data, but by 2018, Germany had a $1.4 billion trade surplus for PCR test kits, whereas France had a deficit of $89 million.
While Germany was able to mobilize its industry quickly to fight the pandemic, France was paralyzed. It couldn’t carry out large-scale testing because it lacked cotton swabs and reagents, low-value but crucial elements that had been outsourced to Asia.
“France has deindustrialized too much since the 2000s; it’s paying for it today,” said Philippe Aghion, an economist who teaches at Harvard and Collège de France.
I gue$$ things are pretty much normal in France.
In a still-unpublished study, Aghion and economists at the Free University of Brussels found that overall, countries with the capacity to manufacture test kits and related instruments, like Germany and Austria, had so far suffered fewer deaths during the pandemic.
In France, shortages have affected even basic goods. Drugstores ran out of thermometers. Supplies of paracetamol, a common pain reliever sold as Tylenol in the United States, became so dangerously low that authorities restricted its sale.
They had panic-run buying, too, huh?
The last European factory producing the medication was in France, near the city of Lyon, but it closed in 2008, according to France’s National Academy of Pharmacy. The association has long warned of a growing dependence on foreign drugmakers, noting that 60 percent to 80 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients in Europe are imported, compared with 20 percent three decades ago.
“Nothing has been done at the government level to stop this,” said Marie-Christine Belleville, a member of the academy.
Warnings, in fact, had been issued for years.
In the aftermath of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) pandemic in Asia in 2003, French officials analyzed the risks in a series of reports and built up a national stockpile of masks and other protective equipment manufactured by domestic suppliers — in keeping with a Gaullist tradition of maintaining a strong domestic defense industry that also exports Rafale fighter jets, submarines, minesweepers, and frigates to the world, but soon afterward, many politicians began criticizing the policy of stockpiling masks and medication as wasteful. About 383 million euros spent in 2009 on acquiring 44 million vaccinations against the H1N1 flu caused a political scandal after less than 9 percent of French people were vaccinated.
Ah, Obama's $wine flu swindle that resulted in over 100,000 deaths, and the French fore$wore vaccination, huh, and how about that fine Military-Indu$trial Complex in France?
The Globe's web version of the article went beneath the skin:
In 2006, a government pandemic plan recommended a series of measures, including creating stockpiles of masks. A year earlier, France’s Health Ministry signed a five-year contract to buy 180 million masks a year that Bacou-Dalloz, then the biggest mask-maker in France, would produce at a factory in Plaintel, about 280 miles from Paris.
It's called a going concern, Planned-emic or no.
Details from the contract, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, reveal the government’s strategic thinking at the time. Securing a domestic supplier would help France avoid being “exclusively dependent on importations that would be disrupted in the context of a pandemic.”
That means someone leaked it to the NYT, but by using the word "obtained" it makes it sound like they dug it up while investigating.
Can't get any more distorting or disingenuous than that.
The contract would ensure the government’s “renewal of its stockpile of masks” as older stocks reached their expiration dates, and during a pandemic, the government could requisition the plant’s production. The government order “monopolized the Plaintel factory’s entire production capacity,” said Jean-Jacques Fuan, a former director of the plant.
By 2008, the government issued a white paper that for the first time cited pandemics as a potential national threat, ranking it fourth behind terrorism, cyberwarfare, and a ballistic missile attack. “In the next 15 years, the arrival of a pandemic is possible,” the paper warned. It could be highly contagious and lethal, it said, and could come and go in waves for weeks or months.
HOW PROPHETIC!
In 2013, the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security issued new pandemic directives emphasizing “overall savings” and reducing the importance of maintaining a stockpile. Surgical masks would be stocked, but not the more sophisticated FFP2 masks that, the report noted, cost 10 times as much. The directives also transferred the responsibility — and costs — for securing and stockpiling masks to public and private employers. This contributed to the severe shortages that France has suffered in recent months.
Oh, the PRIVATIZATION led to $EVERE $HORTAGES, and now leaders are doing a complete 180 to TOTALITARIAN COMMUNI$M!
--more--"
Related:
"French nurses and doctors faced off with President Emmanuel Macron on Friday at a leading Paris hospital, demanding better pay and a rethinking of a once-renowned public health system that found itself quickly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of virus patients. “We are desperate. We no longer believe in you,” said a nurse who confronted Macron at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, saying she’s using a long-expired surgical mask. “We are the shame of Europe.” “That’s not true,” the president countered — but he could barely get a word in as medics peppered him with grievances. Apparently anticipating such tensions and fearing they could further hurt Macron’s image, the president’s office didn’t allow a single video, photo, or radio reporter on the visit. Macron acknowledged mistakes in reforming the national hospital system, which has faced decades of cost cuts, leaving medical facilities in one of the world’s richest countries short of staff, masks, and breathing machines needed to fight the virus crisis. “For months I was asking for equipment, and we had only three days to fight against the virus,’’ Martin Hirsch, head of the Paris hospital network, told Macron. As the virus raced across France in March and saturated several hospitals, Macron had to deploy the armed forces to build the country’s first-ever peacetime field hospital and move patients and doctors around in military transport jets and specially fitted high-speed trains. The French hospital problems long predate the virus crisis, and emergency room workers held strikes and protests for months last year demanding more hiring and funding after years of job losses."
I'm coming to discover that MUCH of the WORLD feels the SAME WAY about our ruling elite cla$$.
WE NO LONGER BELIEVE YOU no matter what the ISSUE!!
Political minions and puppet slaves of evil elite psychopaths is what they are and they deserve the same fate!
Beyond that, the costs cuts in a rich country leave one astounded when it is FRANCE, And ONCE AGAIN we see COVID being USED to COVER a MULTITUDE of $INS of the ruling elites and governments wherever they reside!
"France was also cautious, calling for a coordinated European effort on opening. At the same time, French officials could make decisions ‘‘that protect the French” regarding countries “where the virus is still active,” Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said Saturday. As hundreds of French beaches reopened, Castaner warned that the government would not hesitate to close them again if rules are not respected, including a ban on sunbathing. Local authorities were charged with deciding which beaches would reopen as part of a staggered plan to end a strict two-month lockdown that began March 17. Under the rules, beachgoers can take a dip but cannot lay in the sun or picnic in the sand. Social distancing rules must be maintained, and groups must be limited to 10 people."
You need the sun and the Vitamin D it provides to build a strong and healthy immune system -- proving these evil government f**ks WANT YOU SICK!
Also see:
"Amazon has reached an agreement with French unions to reopen its warehouses in France after a lengthy battle over safety measures to protect workers against the coronavirus, capping the most prominent labor showdown the retailer has faced during the pandemic. The reopening “is a positive step forward for French customers, for our French employees and for the many French SMEs who rely on Amazon to grow their business,” Amazon said in a statement, referring to small and mid-sized enterprises. French unions hailed the decision as a victory for workers....."
Maybe not:
"A prominent engineer and vice president of Amazon’s cloud computing arm said Monday that he had quit “in dismay” over the firing of workers who raised questions about workplace safety during the pandemic. Tim Bray, who had been a vice president of Amazon Web Services, in a blog post criticized a number of recent firings, including of an employee in a New York City warehouse, Christian Smalls, who led a protest in March calling for the company to provide workers with more protection. His firing has drawn the scrutiny of New York’s attorney general. Bray also cited the firing last month of Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, who circulated a petition that called on Amazon to expand sick leave, hazard pay, and child care for warehouse workers. They had also helped organize a virtual event for warehouse employees to speak to tech workers at the company about workplace conditions. Bray called the fired workers whistle-blowers and said firing them was “evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture.” Amazon declined to comment. It previously said it fired Smalls because he had violated policies by leaving a quarantine to protest. Amazon told Costa and Cunningham they had violated a policy that forbids Amazon workers from asking co-workers to donate to causes or sign petitions. The company has rolled out various safety measures, such as temperature checks and mandatory masks."
He better stop Braying about it or he could meet with an "accident."
Time to LOCKDOWN again:
"France has reported about 70 cases of people infected with the virus in the country’s schools since they started reopening last week, after two months of lockdown. French Education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said the affected schools have been closed again. He did not break down the numbers by students or teachers. Given the incubation period for the virus, people are “likely” to have been infected before the reopening of the schools, he said, speaking on French radio RTL on Monday. France reopened about 40,000 preschools and primary schools last week, with classes capped to 15 students. About 30 percent of children went back to school, Blanquer said, as the government allowed parents to keep children at home. This week France is reopening junior high schools in regions less affected by the virus."
Related:
Several surfers are found dead in the Netherlands
The New York Times says they washed up on French shores and were presumed to have COVID!
UPDATE: Belgium, France arrest dozens over UK migrant truck deaths
