The former Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn was indicted on Friday for “endangering the life of others” at the end of his 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 general prosecutor’s office of the CJR.
Agnès Buzyn, the first personality to be implicated in this vast case, was also placed under the more favorable status of assisted witness for “voluntary abstention from fighting a disaster,” said the same source.
The questioning of the former minister is a first in this vast dossier devoted to the way – still criticized today – in which the French authorities anticipated and then managed the daily coronavirus epidemic which killed at least 115,000 people in the country, according to Public Health France.
At the very beginning of 2020, Agnès Buzyn occupied a central role, at the head of the Ministry of Health (May 2017 – February 2020).
As the world began to fear after the alarming information coming from Wuhan, China, the one who is a hematologist by training spoke at the Elysee Palace on January 24, 2020 to say: “the risks of the spread of the coronavirus in the population are very low”. Before specifying that this analysis could “evolve”. In mid-February, she was replaced by Olivier Véran, leaving the government to run for mayor of Paris.
But a few days after her electoral defeat, while France was confined, she created an outcry by saying in Le Monde of March 17, 2020: “When I left the ministry, I cried because I knew the tsunami wave was in front of us”. “From the start I only thought of one thing: the coronavirus. We should have stopped everything, it was a masquerade”, she had told Le Monde, about the electoral process.
Comments confirmed in June 2020 before the commission of inquiry of the National Assembly on the management of the health crisis: she had indicated to have alerted the Elysée and Matignon in January on the potential “danger” of the coronavirus.
14,500 complaints received
Since then, the CJR, the only institution empowered to judge sitting ministers, has received many complaints related to Covid-19, “14,500” according to the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation François Molins, Wednesday.
Lack of protective equipment for caregivers and the population, mistakes on the need or not to wear masks, etc: nine of these complaints were deemed admissible by the CJR’s complaints committee, which acts as a filter, and allowed the opening of an investigation in July 2020 .
Since then, other complaints have been deemed admissible and joined to the investigation, while searches were carried out in mid-October 2020 by investigators from Oclaesp (Central Office for the fight against environmental and public health) and Oclciff (Central Office for Combating Corruption, Financial and Tax Offenses).
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