France’s Covid woes continue as its scientists fail to come up with a remedy

When François Bayrou, one of your closest political confidants, charged with coming up with an integrated plan to take France into the future, says that the failure of French science to come up with a working Covid vaccine is a humiliation and a sign of national decline, you know you’re in trouble.

And when Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-right Rassemblement National – a reheated version of the old Front National, which hasn’t come up with a new idea for at least the last ten years – moves ahead of you in the opinion polls, you know that the trouble you’re in isn’t about to go away anytime soon.

Emmanuel Macron is about to move into the second month of his last full year as President with approval ratings hovering around 40 per cent and with Le Pen nudging ahead of him as the favourite to win the first round in next year’s presidential elections.

Given that Le Pen and her cohorts are more or less out on their own on the far right, whereas the President can look to support from both centre-left and centre-right in the inevitable second round, the smart money would normally be on Macron to come through and win a second term. The problem is that unless his government gets a decisive handle on Covid in the course of the next few weeks and months, someone new – as untried and untested as he was in 2017 – could yet emerge to make Round One the decisive contest.

Bayrou’s baleful verdict on French science is harsh, but perhaps necessarily so. The head of the MoDem Party, junior partner in the governing coalition, was giving voice to something that is usually only whispered around the country – that France is falling behind the rest of the world in the key areas of science and technology.

The fear is exaggerated. France is still up there in most categories – pure science, mathematics, precision engineering, aerospace and artificial intelligence. But it has more rivals now than ever before, as have all EU countries and the UK. Asia has risen dramatically in the rankings, and the US, while challenged, remains the global number one.

But when push came to shove with the advent of Covid-19, French bio-technology fell by the wayside. The bets it made, via the famed Pasteur Institute and the country’s largest pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, both ended up as beaten dockets. Had they won, or even come second, France would have basked in the acclaim. As it was, ignominy beckoned.

On the other side of the Channel, meanwhile, the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca, led, ironically, by a Frenchman, Pascal Soriot, working with Oxford University, came up with a potential game-changer, an easy to make, easy to store vaccine with an effectiveness of more than 70 per cent. In America, drugs company Moderna, founded just ten years previously and also headed by a Frenchman, Stéphane Bancel, produced an entirely different vaccine, equally or more effective, while Pfizer-BioNTech, a Partnership between the US giant and a German-based immunotherapy company, came close to cornering the market with its ultra-deep freeze vaccine, currently manufactured in a dozen or more factories around the world.

Tant pis. Too bad. These things happen. And Sanofi – headed by (wait for it) Paul Hudson, an Englishman – can at least comfort itself with the knowledge that it has been tasked with producing 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine. But tell that to the French media or Opposition politicians, who have greeted their country’s pharmaceutical defeat as if it were the scientific equivalent of Waterloo.

Where are the great French scientists of yesteryear? they want to know. And why are the few that are any good working for the Anglo-Saxons?

Not that this is the end of the story. Far from it. Having failed to win the vaccine race, France then found that, like all other EU countries, it was at the back of the queue for the easily made AstraZeneca product. Britain, it turned out, closely followed by the US, had got in first, placing huge orders. Efforts by the European Commission – a novice, it must be said, in the field of large-scale medical procurement – to barge in were rebuffed. Though the vaccine was being manufactured in Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the UK, Europe was told that it would be mid-February before it became widely available.

Cue much gnashing of teeth and accusations of vaccine nationalism. Cue also attempts by the Commission to slow up the export to the UK of the Pfizer product made in Europe.

While all this was going on, Covid itself, and in particular what is referred to as the variant Britannique, was continuing its steady advance across France. The numbers are worsening with each passing day. In the 24 hours to lunchtime today (Thusday), 26,916 news cases were reported, along with 350 deaths. More than 2,000 of the latest cases were victims of the new strain. In total, 74,456 people have died of Covid-19 in France since March of last year.

Just over 60 per cent of French intensive care beds are now occupied by coronavirus patients, and a decision may be taken over the next few days to transfer patients between regions to relieve pressure on certain hospitals.

It had been expected that the health minister, Olivier Véran, would announce a third national lockdown, but in the event, while not ruling out further measures, he said that the six pm curfew would remain in place, along with the strict requirement to wear masks in public and maintain social distancing.

The Government’s fear is not simply that Covid will claim many more victims in the days ahead, with large-scale vaccination only now getting underway. It is also worried that discipline is breaking down across the country, especially among the under-30s, whose social lives have declined to near zero over the last ten months. Outbreaks of violence have already occured in several cities, along with a rising incidence of illegal “raves” and parties. The concern is that the situation could easily get out of hand, resulting in widespread clashes with the police and gendarmerie, both of which have issues of their own when dealing up close with angry mobs.

For Macron, the whole business is a mess. He didn’t stand for election to end up as a health dictator, but, like Boris Johnson, he has been left with no choice. If he hopes to win a second term, he must demonstrate over the next three months that he has brought Covid under control and prepared the French economy for the hoped-for recovery to come. The measure of his failure to date is that voters are starting to turn once more to the discredited certainties of Marine Le Pen, a messenger without a message, whose only appeal is likely to be, “at least I’m not him”.

Not fair? In politics, who ever said anything about fair?