Then, governments reinvested the full panoply of propaganda techniques long described in the social sciences: instrumentalizing fear to create a state of suggestibility (constant dramatization of the epidemic, repeated announcements of its imminent return, etc.), the use of a series of “experts” and “white coats” to “tell the science” in the media, the use of the “rigged choice” technique as a form of blackmail (as French Health Minister Olivier Véran put it: “Would you rather be vaccinated or reconfined?”), the rhetoric of the scalded frog (announcing that anti-covid vaccination will be reserved for the frail and nursing staff, when in reality the aim is to gradually inject the entire population, including children and pregnant women), an similar communication techniques (Mucchielli, 2022a, 94-99).

When psychological pressure wasn’t enough, governments used their police forces (for example, to enforce confinements, and in this respect France went particularly far in repression to contribute to this “experiment in mass obedience” [Boulakia, Mariot, 2023]). They also used every administrative and hierarchical mechanism to punish and intimidate dissidents. In France, this included the administrative persecution of the Marseille IHU for three years, and administrative sanctions (Professor Perronne was dismissed as head of department at the Garches Hospital, as was Professor Parola at the Marseille IHU), the countless threats and sanctions issued by the French Medical Council (Conseil de l'Ordre des Médecins) against General Practitioners treating their patients with hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin or ivermectin, or taking too close an interest in the undesirable effects of anti-covid vaccination. And in the opposite direction, the government has favored and rewarded those who would relay its propaganda, nurturing what I call courtly phenomena (Mucchielli, 2022d and h). J.-F. Delfraissy, Chairman of the “Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Board”, was made Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur on January 1, 2022, with all other members of this group receiving the same distinction. Former French Health Minister A. Buzyn was also made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, despite her indictment in September 2021 by the Cour de Justice de la République (CJR) for “endangering the lives of others” in her handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. Among those promoted, we also note C. Chidiac, Chairman of the Infectious Diseases Commission of the Haut Conseil de la Santé Publique, which issued the opinion of March 5, 2020 excluding hydroxychloroquine and promoting Remdesivir, even though 97 of the 114 members of this commission received money from Gilead. In a personal capacity, he claims to have received almost 100,000 euros from the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, including Pfizer, Gilead, Janssen and AstraZeneca. Also honored were J. Reynes (head of the COVIDOC study at Montpellier University Hospital, which was halted before completion, officially due to a lack of patients, but in reality because the initial results confirmed the efficacy of the treatment proposed by the Marseille IHU), K. Lacombe (media regular, supporter of Gilead’s Remdesivir at the start of the crisis), N. de Lamballerie (member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the REACTing network, which provided the bulk of the members of the Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Board), É. d’Ortenzio (scientific coordinator of the REACTing network), F. Ader (head of the DISCOVERY trial at Lyon University Hospital at the request of the Ministry of Health, a trial which was also strangely halted before completion) and F. Crémieux (sent in June 2021 to manage Marseille’s hospitals and bring the IHU into line). Add to this the self-promotion, within INSERM (2020), of those who also served political power best during the crisis. The “Inserm Grand Prix” was awarded to D. Costagliola, the “Prix Recherche” to F. Ader (already mentioned) and to F. Mentré (methodological leader of the DISCOVERY trial), the “Prix Opecst-Inserm” to Y. Yazdanpanah (REACTing, Covid-19 Scientific Advisory Board) and even the “International Prize” to Anthony Fauci, a key figure at the interface between the government, the federal administration, industrialists and major foundations (starting with Bill Gates’), whose corruption is attested to and who played a central role in the imposition of the doxa (Kennedy, 2021).

Fernand Braudel (1985) warned us: “Capitalism triumphs only when it identifies with the State, when it is the State”. And here we are. Across the Atlantic, corruption by the pharmaceutical industry is at an all-time high. One of the reasons, as classic as it is unspeakable is of course the fact that, in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry is by far the one that gives the most money to political candidates (Wouters, 2020).² What about in other countries? In France, we remember the Cahuzac affair, during which this former Minister of the Economy declared that payments had been made by Pfizer to a Swiss bank account in 1993 and were intended to finance the electoral campaign of Michel Rocard (then First Secretary of the Socialist Party and front-runner in the 1994 European elections), it is also worth pointing out that “the pharmaceutical industry has financed all the political parties” in France.³ The investigation of the case never went any further as could be expected. In the United States, corruption has penetrated deep into the health administration over the last thirty years, as its financial dependence on industry has grown. The same problem applies to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), 85% of whose budget is funded by the pharmaceutical industry (Béguin, Brisard, 2016). And far from diminishing with publicly available documentation of this fact (such as a major report by the European Court of Auditors [Court, 2012]), the problem has only worsened. Appointed Director General of the EMAin November 2020, Emer Cooke has spent most of her career in the pharmaceutical industry, notably AstraZeneca (whose vaccine she authorized in early 2021, before it was withdrawn from the market in the face of significant adverse effects), and was even employed by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, their main lobby, before joining the administration. And the problem doesn’t just concern this agency. The affair of the private SMS messages exchanged between European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and Pfizer’sCEO to negotiate the purchase of vaccines for half a billion Europeans suggests that the entire European administration is riddled with corruption.

The reality is there for all to see: the world’s largest video platform, YouTube, has admitted to deleting 800,000 videos containing “disinformation” in the first two years of the crisis (Liester, 2022). For its part, Facebook has not been outdone (nor has the smartphone social network Instagram, which Facebook has owned since 2012). Mark Zuckerberg’s company announced in early 2021 that it had censored 167 million messages linked to the pandemic between March and October 2020. At issue in particular was the treatment of Covid with hydroxychloroquine, as noted by its “supervisory board” in January 2021.⁵ Here’s another concrete example: in France, a group called “Recensement effets indésirables vaccin Covid Officiel” was created on Facebook in mid-July 2021, and gathered 200,000 subscribers in barely three weeks, just long enough for Facebook to close the page down (Mucchielli et al., 2022a, 383). In return, the digital giant made no secret of the fact that it would, on the contrary, put its powerful resources at the service of propaganda, for example by offering 100 million euros worth of advertising space “to health authorities and associations promoting vaccination or prevention campaigns around the world”.⁶

This censorship exercised by digital giants on behalf of political power has been observed for several years in the United States, in direct connection with the trauma constituted by Trump’s election in 2016 among the upper classes (Stjernfelt, Lauritzen, 2020). It was first the fight against terrorist propaganda and far-right “hate content” that justified the development of censorship techniques by these Internet giants in collaboration with states in the second half of the 2010s.⁷ Then, it gradually extended to other forms of censorship of more political content, to the point of exercising a kind of thought police (Badouard, 2020, 12).

YouTube makes no secret of its main censorship rules. On May 20, 2020, it added a “Regulation concerning incorrect medical information on Covid-19” to its “Community Regulations”, which until then targeted issues that were traditionally considered criminal offences in the off-line world, including incitement to hatred, calls to violence, child pornography, and identity theft amongst others. It states: “YouTube does not allow content that propagates incorrect medical information contradicting that of local health authorities or the WHO regarding Covid-19. (...) on the following subjects: treatment, prevention, diagnosis, transmission, social distancing and self-isolation instructions, existence of Covid-19”. With regard to treatment, “content claiming that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments” was considered “incorrect” and therefore censored. Entire areas of medical research were therefore banned from discussion on YouTube. The same would soon also apply to the vaccine (the singular allows them to be reified). In particular, it is forbidden to talk about serious side effects or to publish “content that claims that vaccines against Covid-19 do not reduce the risk of catching this disease” (ibid.).

In the list of lessons that can be drawn from the crisis, there is also this one, which is bad news for democracy: journalism is dying before our very eyes.⁸ The first explanation is the upheaval of its traditional business model due to the arrival of the Internet at the end of the 20th century. In France, over the past twenty years, most dailies and weeklies have lost around half their print readership, and some are facing the prospect of outright disappearance. Faced with this situation, three new sources of funding have arisen: 1) billionaires and multinationals eager to build communications and media empires; 2) certain governments, such as France’s, keen to increase their influence over the media, 3) digital giants seeking ever-greater control over the flow of information and the advertising revenues that go with it. Newspaper companies jumped on the bandwagon. But by saving their jobs, journalists were accepting a profound transformation of their profession that would lead them to lose the little independence they had won in the 20th century, and to sacrifice the ethics of their profession.

The Covid crisis was a revelation of these changes. Stripped of any investigative capacity in the field, journalists have become totally dependent on information flows fed by industrial and political propaganda and filtered by press agencies and “infomediaries” (intermediaries between producers and consumers of information). The first consequence is the reinforcement of journalists’ almost exclusive dependence on the Agence France Presse (AFP) newswire, an agency whose independence from political power has been very problematic from the outset. The second consequence is the increasingly important role played by fact-checking in newsrooms, a symbol of the new “communication journalism” that began to invade the entire field of journalism in the second half of the 2010s (Doutreix, Barbe, 2019; Joux, Gil, 2019).

Fact-checking is low-cost journalism, which is hastening the death of the profession, as it relies solely on reading documents online and making phone calls to produce an article claiming to unravel the truth from falsehood on any issue, all without ever leaving the office. The price to pay is the adoption of a very particular way of processing information: use of the most easily and rapidly accessible sources, artificial construction of majority and deviant opinions, hysterization and polarization of debate, formatting of content, censorship of information contradicting the discourse being promoted, etc. Two concrete examples with the case of France’s most famous daily, Le Monde, whose fact-checkers christened themselves the “Décodeurs” in 2017. First, let us look at how these journalists sought to discredit drugs that were not profitable for the industry. The case of hydroxychloroquine is well known, and has obviously focused the efforts of French journalists (Mucchielli 2022a, f and j). Let us talk here about that of ivermectin, a particularly effective antiparasitic, which in 2015 earned its two co-discoverers William Campbell and Satoshi Omura the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. On April 13, 2021, in an article entitled “Is this a proven treatment for the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic or a false hope?”, the fact-checkers made a grand claim: “such a question, on which the lives of thousands of patients in France and millions worldwide may depend, deserved rigorous treatment by the ‘Decoders’” (on this case, see Lolo [2021]). In reality, however, the “rigorous treatment” turned into a farce. Out of 53 scientific articles available at the time, these journalists retained only 4, their argumentation quickly becoming political (ivermectin has been supported by far-right personalities, so it must be rejected) and ending, of course, on a comparison with the Marseille IHU protocol (the “great Satan” of French journalists). Second example: the question of wearing surgical masks in the public space. On May 21, 2021, fact-checkers published an article entitled “Didier Pittet and the transmission of Covid-19 by aerosols: a position that runs counter to the scientific consensus”. What was it about? On June 25, 2020, President Macron called for “an independent mission to assess the French response to the health crisis caused by the epidemic”. Didier Pittet, Head of Infection Prevention and Control at Geneva Hospital and Professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva, was entrusted with the task, along with an economist from the OECD, an emeritus research director at the CNRS, a chamber president at the Cour des Comptes and a public health doctor from Bordeaux University Hospital. But, lo and behold, in its final report, the independent mission demonstrated... independence. The report considers that “current knowledge does not allow us to scientifically prove the effectiveness of wearing a mask at population level to control the epidemic”. At the time, this contradicted the government’s line, which, after explaining at the start of the epidemic that masks were useless, subsequently made them a central element of its communication, succeeding in imposing them as a major sign of obedience and, for the most frightened, a kind of talisman. However, far from welcoming this independence and opening up a contradictory debate, the “Décodeurs” instead sought to discredit the report in order to better preserve the government’s political line. The rest is tragi-comic. To “prove” that the mask is in fact indispensable, the journalists first cite seven examples of places where “airborne contamination has been demonstrated”, thus proving the usefulness of the mask in all circumstances. There are two problems, however, when it comes to verifying the verifiers’ work. Firstly, the hyperlinks provided point to one and the same source: the blog maintained by a medical-scientific journalist on the website of the daily newspaper Le Monde. A handy endogamy to avoid being contradicted. Then, and this is even more serious, some of the articles quoted as “sources” say, when one takes the trouble to read them, the opposite of what they are quoted for. In other words, readers are being manipulated (Boris, 2021). As for the so-called “scientific consensus” obviously invoked by journalists, we can see that this is no more than a rhetorical argument, an argument by authority. There is no such thing as a “scientific consensus” on wearing a mask in the public space, as most independent studies conclude that it is ineffective (Langevin, 2022).

This media treatment has taken hold just about everywhere in the West, as evidenced by the European Journalism Trust Initiative initiated in 2018 by Reporters Without Borders. Agence France Presse is also part of this initiative, its “AFP Factuel” service having taken on a very important role within the agency in recent years. And through this project, which brings together most of the traditional media, the latter have also formalized their partnerships with Google and Facebook. This enormous information machine is therefore being rebuilt almost entirely on this new “prescription model”: “a traditional pyramid model from the knower to the layman, unable to evaluate the content he consumes for himself” (Doutreix, Barbe, 2019, 61).

Finally, journalists accepted the rhetoric of “war” without understanding what it meant. In fact, during the health crisis, they functioned in the same way as during periods of (real) war, i.e. by becoming propaganda agents. During wars, there is no search for truth and no debate. There are only those who are “with us” and those who are “against us”, and you have to choose sides. Legacy media journalists have chosen theirs. Of course, journalists are also victims of all forms of state and industrial propaganda, but they are willing victims. Far from embracing an ideal of independence and the search for truth, they have been actors in propaganda, many even believing themselves invested with a kind of educational mission. History had warned us: “in the period following the Liberation, confidence in an impartial, protective State, the driving force behind national recovery, actually reinforced the idea of the usefulness of propaganda in giving the necessary impetus to collective projects. When it enlightens and guides towards progress, it helps to consolidate democracy. Such an outlook is the result of a long history of virtuous propaganda (...) which has made propaganda, through its various vectors - first printed, then visual and audiovisual - a kind of school for the people” (Delporte, 2006: 31, emphasis added). Journalists thus become activists, making it their mission to identify and ostracize the ‘enemies’ of ‘the cause’. Howard Becker has long described this behavior of the “moral entrepreneur” launching a “crusade for morals”: “what he discovers seems to him bad without reserve or nuance, and all means seem to him justified to eliminate it. Such a crusader is fervent and virtuous, often even imbued with his virtue” (Becker, 1963: 171).

During the health crisis, journalists thus more than ever became the new “watchdogs” of the doxa (Halimi, 2005). This began with adopting the very language and categories of thought with which rhetoric and propaganda are constructed: “scientific consensus” versus “conspiracy”, “science” versus “obscurantism”, “progressives” versus “extreme right”. Good guys versus bad guys. The thought patterns of little children.

Whether through conformism, naiveté, complicity, ideological positioning or simply cowardice, it’s clear that far from enabling any kind of contradictory debate in the public arena, the legacy media have, on the contrary, contributed massively to its closure, ensuring the predominance of the covidist narrative and manufacturing the population’s consent more than ever (see also Chomsky and Herman, 1988).

Last but not least, we need to reflect on how the scientific community itself behaved during a crisis in which everything was done in the name of ‘Science’, without respecting its methodological rules, accumulated knowledge or ethics (Langevin, 2022; Bourdineaud, 2023; Mucchielli, 2023, 205-223). The crisis also revealed the extent to which scientists were unprepared to understand an ideology that constitutes the infantile disease of Western science: scientism (Andreotti, Noûs, 2020). Most are also unaware of the way in which corruption gangrenes the medical sciences. In a word, it also seems urgent for the scientific community to critically analyze itself. I will try my hand at this in a forthcoming text.