PARIS — On Tuesday, French doctors and scientists called on authorities to take action against the insults and threats they have received often throughout the coronavirus outbreak, including death threats.
The physicians expressed their concern that someone from the realm of conspiracy theories might act against them, as well as other medical professionals, and criticized the authorities’ inaction.
Some physicians, like himself, receive threats “several times a day,” and some have hired bodyguards.
“What we’re afraid about aren’t so many personal threats,” Marty explained. “An anonymous doctor, an anonymous nurse, an anonymous scientist, the individuals struggling today in the face of the (COVID-19) problem… will be assailed by someone who takes action,” they say.
Medical experts were among those in the group, who frequently appears on television to explain the current condition of the epidemic to French citizens.
Threats were made, including one from a man in Toulouse who stated, “Listen, friend. The populace is becoming enraged… So slam the door on your huge trap. It’s as if you’re on the lookout for it.” “And the bullet in your brain that I’m going to plant, how are you going to stop it?” Tougher threatened one doctor who was not present on social media.
On a message to Karine Lacombe, the chief of infectious diseases at Paris’ Saint Antoine Hospital and a former frequent on news shows, vulgar remarks were scribbled. It said in part, “We’ve been watching you for a while: car, house, route, rubbish is destroyed.”
Every weekend, tens of thousands of people march in cities around France against the necessity for health cards to enter restaurants, cafés, and other meeting places, including some who reject COVID-19 vaccines.
The threats, according to Marty and others, come from people who are being “manipulated.” He estimated that a dozen to twenty persons are behind the threats, but. “We aren’t sleuths.”
In a Zoom call during the news conference, Damien Barraud, an anesthesiologist in Metz who denounces conspiracy theories tied to the virus on Twitter, claimed he received his first threat in April 2020.
However, “it’s intensifying now… becoming more serious.”
Lacombe emphasized the necessity for the political class to “take a stand at some point and not assume that freedom of expression, which of course must be preserved in France, is condoning certain verbal and physical violence.”