The real reason behind Macron's anti-science outburst? He'll do anything to talk down Britain

 The self-styled premier statesman is desperate to distract attention from his political troubles at home and abroad

Source - Daily Telegraph - 31/01/20

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Why has Emmanuel Macron gone full Trump on the Oxford vaccine? Back in 2017, when this largely unknown technocrat managed to win the greatest accumulator bet in the history of modern French politics to become the 8th president of the Fifth Republic, he started referring to himself as “Jupiter”.

Persuaded that he could win over anyone to his side by his signature mix of relentless charm and cold intelligence, he set out to become Europe’s premier statesman. The UK was leaving, so would, soon, chancellor Merkel; Macron, who had campaigned under the blue-and-gold EU flag alongside the French tricolour, saw an opening.

Four years later and Europe’s self-styled leading light now sounds more like some weird anti-vaxxer spouting off in a sinister Facebook group. Speaking to the European Medicines Agency this week, Macron slated the AstraZeneca vaccine with figures pulled out of cyberspace, as “unproven and possibly dangerous for the elderly”, and overall “completely ineffective”.

In short he sounded like The Donald at his most petulant. Indeed, as was so often also the case with Trump, these comments are really the result of  über-pique: Macron hates being shown up by the just-Brexited British, whose dire fate he predicted for years upon leaving the EU, and whose animosity was such that Angela Merkel had to prevent a French-led attempt at the last minute to boobytrap the Christmas exit deal.

The similarities emerging between the unlamented departed US president and Macron are ironic given the vitriol poured on the former and the praise long-heaped on the latter by many elegant liberals who took Macron’s commitment to Brussels as proof of good character.

The French President’s ability to lose friends began, appropriately enough, with Trump. His desperate attempts to build a new Relation Spéciale soon came spectacularly to naught when Macron tried to set up an impromptu Rouhani-Trump meeting in the sidelines, in an attempt to save the Iran nuclear deal. His efforts, well, bombed. An attempt to rebrand the Paris Climate Accords as "Making the Planet Great Again" also failed.

After a Macron swipe at Nato two months later, calling it “braindead”, even the unflappable Angela Merkel lashed out. “I understand your desire for disruptive politics, but I’m tired of picking up the pieces. Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can then sit down and take tea together.”

It is to Boris Johnson’s credit that he has managed to hold his tongue under worse provocation.

But Macron’s unpopularity with foreign leaders is nothing compared to his unpopularity among French people. The latest polls on the second round of the 2022 presidential election show him winning against Marine le Pen by a whisker: 52 per cent to 48 per cent (unlike his 66-34 decisive 2017 victory). It isn’t that Le Pen wows the French: they still find her unconvincing (the adjective that comes first is “incompetent”).  It’s that they can’t stand him. He’s mismanaged last spring’s lockdowns, his ministers lied repeatedly about PPE, his health czars drew no lessons from the first wave, and our vaccination programme is a case study in how to come last.

That’s also the real reason why, while Boris Johnson was starting the UK vaccination campaign on December 8, French health officials, from the State French Medicine authority INSERM, the type who never utter a word that hasn’t been triple-vetted by their hierarchy, were still saying that the British Prime Minister was being “gravely imprudent with a vaccine that hadn’t sufficiently been tested”. “The British will be our guinea pigs,” Marie-Claude Kieny, a Directrice de Recherche at INSERM in charge of the science side of vaccinations, once told me dismissively during a TV debate.

There are few things my nation hates more than being ridiculed: this time, our vaccination fiasco has been doubly compounded by the wider European fiasco in vaccine procurement. Macron’s outburst against AstraZeneca – thankfully, given France’s high rates of anti-vax sentiment – may not be making too many headlines in Paris, but the French now remember unfondly all those blue and gold EU flags at Macron rallies.