PROGRAMMES IN FRANCE

The COVID-19 storm hit our activities, programmes and advocacy hard in 2020. Its strong winds scattered our volunteers for a while, left many of us stuck in front of our computers and forced our field teams to reorganise and increase their outreach activities in order to reach those who had become more excluded than ever, more invisible than ever, and who were still being illegally turned away at our borders.

But the epidemic also brought us closer to our partners and enabled us to extend our coalitions of common causes to other NGOs, associations and collectives. Our relations with institutions also became stronger and clearer - without us becoming the emergency operator they have often wanted us to be, or a public service for the poor.

The pandemic has in fact revealed and amplified pre-existing crises:

— By increasing social inequalities and leaving a considerable proportion of the population unemployed or dependent on welfare or food aid. The first to suffer were migrants and people living in poor districts. They have paid a heavy price in the epidemic, with excess mortality and untreated organic and psychological pathologies with lasting symptoms.

— By psychologically undermining our youth, who will live to resent the governors who left them at the mercy of a damaged, soulless world and are stealing their future.

— By revealing and accentuating the flaws in a ill- prepared health system, the inefficiency of public health practices and prevention policies, the fragility of hospitals weakened by decades of budgetary restrictions, a neglected primary health care system poorly coordinated with hospitals, but also the role of France’s Regional Health Agencies, better trained to restructure the hospital network than control an epidemic. The health crisis has thus highlighted the glaring lack of democracy in health care and the extent to which health system users have been forgotten.

— By exposing the hardening of the government’s migration policy, which has not hesitated in restricting access to health rights for foreigners in the midst of an epidemic, carrying out brutal camp evacuations, scaling up the "hunt for migrants" and turning people away at the borders in defiance of the most elementary fundamental rights.

— By further discrediting public discourse and intensifying people’s mistrust of politics. The government's management of the fight against the virus has been marked by negligence, lies, authoritarianism, orders and counter-orders, all under cover of a "state of health emergency" and leading to the deprivation of fundamental freedoms for everyone and forced labour for some.

— By highlighting the link between the global pandemic and the destruction of the planet - a link that created the conditions for the current zoonotic disease to develop and will do so again if the world takes no action.

This pandemic is a full-scale reality check. It has shown us that, in the name of public health, any policy that does not take into account the health of a part of the population is making a serious ethical error that will have major economic, human and health consequences.

In the name of collective health, health coverage must be simplified and made universal and free for all people residing in the country. In the name of health as a common good and the fight against COVID-19, it is essential to offer dignified reception and living conditions to migrants and to regularise their status, as other European countries have done.

The "whatever it costs" will not be reimbursed by everyone equally. We must remain vigilant and active to ensure that public health of an acceptable quality does not become the biggest loser.

These wishes and proposals are probably utopian. But as Édouard Glissant wrote: « l’utopie est ce qui manque au monde, le seul réalisme capable de dénouer le nœud des impossibles. [Utopia is what is lacking in the world, the only reality capable of untying the knot of impossibilities]. »