Former French Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn, who resigned in mid-February 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, was indicted on Friday for “endangering the lives of others” because of its management of the pandemic.
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Ms. Buzyn was indicted at the end of her hearing by magistrates of the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), which is investigating the management of the COVID-19 epidemic, we learned from the prosecution General of the CJR.
The former minister is the first personality to be questioned in this vast dossier devoted to the way – still criticized today – in which the French authorities anticipated and then daily managed the coronavirus epidemic which killed at least 115,000 people. in the country, according to Public Health France.
She was placed under the more favorable status of assisted witness for “voluntary abstention from fighting a disaster,” said the same source.
At the very beginning of 2020, Mrs Buzyn, a hematologist by training, occupied a central role, at the head of the Ministry of Health.
After leaving the government to run for mayor of Paris in the municipal elections, she created an outcry in March 2020 by confiding to the press, after her defeat, that the electoral process should have been stopped because of the threat of the epidemic.
Since then, several complaints – lack of protective equipment for caregivers and for the population, mistakes on the need or not to wear masks, etc. – have been lodged with the CJR which had opened an investigation in July 2020 into the offense. “Abstention from fighting a disaster”.
“It’s a great opportunity for me to explain myself and get the facts straight. I will not let the government’s action, my action as Minister, while we have done so much to prepare our country for a global health crisis which, I remind you, still lasts, ”she declared in the morning to the government. journalists arriving at the headquarters of the CJR.
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