Controversial French ‘Pfizer Law’ is in Fact an ‘Anti-Raoult Law’

As shown in my previous article here, the supposed French ‘Pfizer Law’, which social media got so excited about last week, makes no mention whatsoever of mRNA vaccines and could certainly not be used, under any reasonable interpretation of the text, to criminalise criticism of them. But this is not to say that it has nothing to do with the COVID-19 response and the criminalisation of medical dissent. It has everything to do with the latter. But the actual target of the law is not vaccine criticism, but rather the touting of alternative therapies, as personified by Didier Raoult, the specialist in infectious diseases from Marseille who famously promoted the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

The law is, if anything, an ‘anti-Raoult law’.

This was evident in the debates in the French National Assembly which preceded the vote on the legislation. Thus, Olivier Véran, who was the French Minister of Health from 2020 to 2022, during the official course of the COVID-19 pandemic, took the opportunity to launch into a tirade against Raoult, denouncing him as a “guru” and a “charlatan” and insisting that “the misuse of hydroxychloroquine has taken far more lives than it has saved”. Véran recently returned to the National Assembly as a deputy following a cabinet reshuffle.

Véran also did indeed make a link with vaccination. Alluding to Marseille’s central La Canebière boulevard, he asked, “How many sick people in France will refuse a protective vaccine because they are locked in their false beliefs by the ambiguous statements of the charlatan of La Canebière?” This recalls the original context in which the off-label use of drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin first became an issue, since if effective treatment for COVID-19 were available and acknowledged, after all, no emergency or ‘conditional’ authorisation of experimental vaccines against it would have been needed.

But note Veran’s reference to people who are already sick. This reflects the wording of the relevant section of the legislation, which, as discussed and reproduced in my previous article, refers to persons already “suffering from a medical condition” and hence has no relevance to vaccination of healthy people against potential disease.

But why would someone who is already sick need the protection of a vaccine? Véran’s formulation appears to allude to the most common current recommendations for the use of COVID-19 vaccines in Europe, i.e. strictly for ‘at-risk’ populations like the elderly or persons who are immunocompromised due precisely to an existing medical condition.

This is in fact the only conceivable circumstance under which, given the wording of the legislation, someone might indeed incur criminal liability by advising against, for instance, vaccination against COVID-19: namely, if the advice is given to someone who is already suffering from a different illness and for whom, according to “the current state of medical knowledge”, not being protected against COVID-19 could have serious consequences.

But since there are many who appear to be determined to somehow salvage the original false reports on the so-called ‘Pfizer law’, let it be noted that even in this circumstance there would be nothing to prevent a medical practitioner or anyone else from still advising against the use of a specifically mRNA vaccine. Non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, like Novavax and Valneva, are also now available in the EU.

Véran’s use of the term “guru” to refer to Raoult is particularly significant and by no means accidental. As likewise discussed in my previous article, the legislation in question is in fact devoted to “sectarian tendencies”, but its effect is precisely to extend the notion of a “sect” to non-religious contexts.

Thus, the law is commonly presented as an initiative of Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, a sub-ministerial member of the French Government, and Agresti-Roubache has coined the expression “gurus 2.0” to describe the phenomenon it is supposed to combat. “More and more small groups and ‘gurus 2.0’ are federating real communities of followers online,” she warned in her speech to the National Assembly the day before the vote.

Agresti-Roubache would again take the floor the next day, after Véran’s speech, but she would say nothing about Raoult. And then it was the turn of Marine Le Pen of the opposition National Rally (the former National Front), who would vigorously defend him. “So, let’s talks about Professor Raoult,” she began. “Tell me: weren’t there some ministers who were treated by Dr. Raoult? … Wasn’t there a President of the Republic who went to pay homage to Professor Raoult? And now you’re dragging him in the mud.”

What member of the Government was Le Pen referring to? Well, believe it or not, none other than the Sub-Minister for Citizenship Sabrina Agresti-Roubache! In March 2020, Agresti-Roubache fell sick with Covid and was treated by Raoult with hydroxychloroquine. Agresti-Roubache, who is from Marseille, was still a private citizen at the time. She credited Raoult’s treatment with making her symptoms disappear virtually overnight!

A contemporaneous interview with Agresti-Roubache on the topic can be found here. Three weeks later, French President Emmanuel Macron would make a surprise visit to Raoult at the professor’s hospital in Marseille, afterwards describing him as a “great scientist”.

Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and find him on Bluesky.