key: cord-0780263-3ouxd7rv
authors: Charlier, P.
title: Antigone syndrome and other side effects of the Covid pandemic
date: 2021-06-07
journal: Ethics Med Public Health
DOI: 10.1016/j.jemep.2021.100681
sha: fb4e6e23a472abdd6ed643ceb3082a834eecff4e
doc_id: 780263
cord_uid: 3ouxd7rv

nan

always occur immediately and in a way directly linked to the infectious agent, but often in a sneaky way, at a distance, by perverse and harmful effects induced by the consequences of the spread of the virus/bacteria and the means implemented to fight against it.

In this paradigm shift, in several parts of the world, the human species must face situations that cause it to lose its societal and moral balance: in Brazil, the lack of sedative drugs forces health professionals to tube patients in full consciousness, which is additional trauma (and severe pain) [3] . In India, after having favoured the sale of vaccines to foreign countries, the nation is now totally overwhelmed by the new wave of the pandemic, and cremation pyres improvised in car parks and public places are now burning 24 hours a day. Recently, the twenty-seven countries of the European Union are threatening the United Kingdom (i.e. main producer of the Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer vaccine) with a ''vaccine war'' by validating the strengthening of the mechanism for controlling exports outside the Schengen area. All over the world, in hospitals and clinics, many surgical interventions (sometimes vital), care (sometimes essential such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy), or even diagnostic examinations (screenings by colonoscopy or mammography, for example) have been deprogrammed without having yet been carried out, constituting a loss of opportunity for patients (mainly in oncological and transplant contexts): we must expect a -delayed -rebound in mortality linked not to the Covid itself, but to the delay in diagnosis and/or taking in charge of these chronic diseases . . . with a decrease to be observed in life expectancy globally on a global scale.

The onset of this pandemic was the perfect opportunity for tens of thousands of healthcare professionals to write and then submit articles to biomedical journals, resulting in a monstrous inflation of scientific . . . or rather pseudoscientific publications. Some journals have published (and some continue to this day) to only publish articles dedicated to Covid-19, sometimes with significant bias in the selection of these publications. From the start, 30 (serious) publishers decided to offer free access to their articles uploaded to the Pubmed and PubmedCentral sites, which was commendable [4] . But the fact that the Pubmed platform (National Library of Medicine) decided to index almost systematically articles related to the Covid epidemic (initially to facilitate research and therapeutic initiatives) set up a second bias, by opening the door to an indexing of poor quality articles published in predatory journals: an a posteriori re-examination of these indexes will be necessary (perhaps through platforms comparable to Retraction Watch? If not through a specially dedicated section of the WHO?), so as not to ''validate'' poor quality publications through this indexing and maintain mediocrity that distorts the efficiency of research and biomedical science.

In France, the figure of 100,000 deaths was largely exceeded during the month of April 2021, making this pandemic one of the most important of the last 100 years (25,000 and 30,000 deaths respectively from the Hong-Kong flu in [1968] [1969] [1970] and Asian flu in [1956] [1957] [1958] 200 ,000 deaths from the Spanish flu in 1918-1920).

Despite everything, by habit, by challenge, by (inappropriate) survival reflex, by trauma (anxio-depressive effect of confinement) or by simple weariness (''pandemic fatigue''), plus the ''macabre toll'' (this number of daily deaths delivered every evening on television by the health authorities) increases, the more behaviour slackens: we no longer count the masks badly or not worn in public spaces, illegal meetings, risk-taking . . . and even calls for civic disobedience or to civil or military insurrection! While the situation seems stabilized in some states (Israel could represent a kind of a leader, in terms of management and neutralization of the pandemic), but it could be destabilized by the appearance of new variants, what will we bequeath to the next generation? Weakened and traumatized survivors, infected people suffering from the long Covid syndrome, victims of the coming economic and social crisis, and caregivers marked by these successive waves (experienced as so many tragic ordeals).

In this management of a dramatic present, and of a future for which it is unfortunately reasonable to be pessimistic, ethics applied to public health policies has fully its place.

The author declares that he has no competing interest.

@marcgoldstein 11:16 PM. 9 air. 2021. Twitter Web App

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