Treatment of long-term covid patients is reminiscent of the years of AIDS-Liberation

Christian Lehmann is a doctor and author. As for “Liberation,” it chronicles a society long affected by the coronavirus. Today, it shows the lack of empathy among doctors in the face of 2 million patients with prolonged covid and the resulting isolation.

I set up as a GP in 1984 at the beginning of the AIDS years. The population was worried, we did not fully know the methods of contamination, and apparently we had no treatment to offer. The virus was not sequenced until 1985 and the first treatment, AZT, was not available until 1987. During these years of uncertainty, the medical profession was divided. We knew it was a sexually transmitted disease, we didn’t know about “dangerous practices”, yet we had to try to counsel patients and promote prevention measures. At the time some colleagues believed that we were doing too much with this pathology. Even if not everyone stated clearly, for many of them it was an illness that mainly affected homosexuals, drug addicts and Haitians, and therefore not the “normal” people they encountered on a daily basis (ah the power of denial). .

When a few years later, together with doctors my age, we decided to create one of the first city-hospital networks dedicated to AIDS, our elders advised us to go and beg for the anointing of a city dignitary, a delicately scarred caricature. of the Doctor in the films of Chabrol and Boisset. So we went to a medical training evening