Paris : French prosecutors made preliminary charges against a former health minister over his actions during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, part of an investigation looking into how President Emmanuel Macron’s government responded to the crisis.
A spokesman for the court said Agnes Buzyn was charged Friday with endangering the lives of others by the Republic’s Court of Justice, a special French court that prosecutes abuses by government ministers. Ms Buzin, a hematologist, was health minister from May 2017 to February 2020, when Mr Macron tapped her as his party’s candidate in an unsuccessful bid to become mayor of Paris.
Ms Buzin is the first member of Mr Macron’s government to be charged in a seven-month investigation before voters face up for re-election in April. Mr Macron’s opponents have made the government’s management of the pandemic, which has killed 115,000 people in France, a central issue in the campaign. Investigators have searched the offices and homes of several members of the government, including former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.
Ms Buzin’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. The initial charge against him carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison. Under French law, preliminary charges allow authorities to deepen their investigation, allowing either the defendant to stand trial or the charges dismissed without trial.
In January 2020, before the pandemic broke out in France and Europe, Ms Buzyn downplayed the threat from the virus, which was then rapidly spreading through Wuhan in China. “The risk of spreading the coronavirus to the population is very low,” she told a news conference on January 24, two days after the World Health Organization said there is evidence that humans can transmit the virus to each other.
In March 2020, after coming third in the first round of the mayoral election, Ms Buzin faced criticism when she told the French daily Le Monde that “when I left the ministry, I was crying because I knew The tsunami was ahead of us” and called the election an excuse.
Prosecutors were also considering accusing Ms Buzyn of failing to prevent a disaster, a crime punishable by up to two years in prison under French law. But instead, prosecutors named him as a physical witness for their investigation on that charge, a court spokesman said.
It is not clear who else is under scrutiny in Mr. Macron’s government. Mr Macron’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
France’s response to the pandemic was stymied by some of the same failures seen in the US and other European countries. The country had few masks and other protective gear at the start of the crisis, leading to a shortage of doctors and nurses at the start of the pandemic. Ms Buzin and other health officials downplayed the risk of the virus, even though it was spreading under the radar.
The government was slow to close nursing homes; Mr Macron visited in March 2020 with a group of officials and journalists, just as cases continued to rise.
France ended up with one of the developed world’s highest Covid-19 deaths, though lower than the UK and Italy, and much lower than the US
During a hearing before the French legislature in June 2020, Ms Buzin defended her performance in the early months of the pandemic and her decision to leave the health ministry. She said she activated the country’s emergency health system to free up hospital beds that would be needed to care for Covid-19 patients.
“I believe I designed the health system and could have served as mayor.” he said. “But things didn’t turn out that way.”
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