A “committee for monitoring and anticipating health risks”, which will succeed the Scientific Council and which will be composed of 19 members, is created by a decree published in the Official Journal of this Sunday, where the new health law is promulgated. The names of its members will be “communicated in the coming days”, the office of Health Minister François Braun told AFP. It is not excluded that certain members of the Scientific Council – whose mission ends on Sunday with the end of the state of health emergency – are part of it.
This committee, responsible for monitoring “the health risks linked to infectious agents affecting humans and animals, environmental and food pollutants, and climate change”, will in particular “issue recommendations when a projection reveals a health risk”. It will also have the mission of “issuing recommendations on the measures envisaged by the public authorities in order to fight against a health crisis” and “on the vaccination strategy implemented, if necessary, in the face of a health threat”, according to the decree.
19 members, appointed for two years
Established with the Ministers of Health and Research, it can be seized by one of them or self-seize. Its opinions will be made public. This committee will be chaired by a qualified personality, appointed by the Ministers of Health and Research, and composed of “16 scientific personalities or health professionals, a patient representative, a citizen representative”. “In the event of a health crisis”, its president may “propose to call on additional personalities for their specific expertise”. The members of the committee will be appointed “for a period of two years, renewable once”.
The Minister of Health declared on franceinfo on Wednesday that the committee would be “a bit of a commando team of very high-level scientists”. Its missions will go beyond covid, underlined François Braun. “We will have new tools, but we will be surprised by a new virus which will have other properties”, judged the president of the Scientific Council Jean-François Delfraissy, in an interview with Parisian Sunday. With “specialists in human, animal and environmental health”, the committee will allow “a broader approach”, he added.
Wearing a mask remains “very strongly recommended”
In addition, after the end of the emergency health measures linked to covid-19, the wearing of a mask may be imposed in hospitals, medico-social and care structures, but also in pharmacies and medical biology laboratories by the responsible for the structure, for those over six years old, according to an order in the OJ. Several hospitals have chosen to keep the mask compulsory, such as the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) or the CHUs of Bordeaux and Nice.
The Ministry of Health told AFP on Thursday that wearing a mask remained “very strongly recommended” until further notice. A group of patients, caregivers and scientists pleaded for the mask to remain compulsory in the hospital after July 31, in a column published Friday in L’Express.
letelegramme Fr Trans