Senior doctor resigns from France’s anti-conspiracy theory commission

A senior doctor named as a member of a new French commission to investigate online conspiracy theories and hate speech resigned on Thursday, citing a "smear campaign" against him.

Published: 7 October 2021 12:35 CEST

Guy Vallancien with Emmanuel Macron, who set up the anti conspiracy theory group. Photo: Gabriel Ferrandi/AFP

The panel, announced by President Emmanuel Macron in late September, includes 15 experts from various fields who were asked to produce a report by the end of the year on how to combat conspiracy theories, disinformation and online hate speech.

Professor Guy Vallancien, a urologist with celebrity clients, said he was resigning from the commission after a “shameful, appalling and untruthful smear campaign”.

“I decided to leave and I told the president’s office. I could have stayed but it would have created tensions within the commission and there’s no point. There were no good solutions,” he explained.

Vallancien’s nomination had been publicly criticised by famed French whistleblower Irene Frachon who helped to reveal deaths linked to a popular weight-loss and diabetes pill called Mediator which was sold for decades in France.

Frachon accused Vallancien of being one of a number of high-profile doctors who had “over many years tried to discredit, play down or even deny the seriousness of the human costs of Mediator”.

Marianne magazine also revealed how he was recently sanctioned for issuing a false medical certificate, while L’Express magazine reported how he was director of a medical school embroiled in a scandal over the neglect of human bodies donated for research.

Vallancien denied any responsibility for the scandal at the Universite Paris-Descartes, which emerged in 2019.

The conspiracy commission is being chaired by well-known sociologist Gerald Bronner, who has linked his task of producing a report to the government’s desire to combat disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

“I have the impression that this decision (to create the commission) is because the president is particularly vigilant about the problem of the anti-vaxx movement,” he told L’Express.

Macron is also known to be worried about the impact of online disinformation ahead of the presidential and parliamentary elections next year.

Last year, he warned that Russia was “going to continue to try to destabilise” Western democracies, following allegations of interference from Moscow in the last polls in 2017, which Russia has denied.

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France has in recent weeks been shaken by a series of attacks on schoolchildren by their peers, in particularly the fatal beating earlier this month of Shemseddine, 15, outside Paris.

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party has accused Attal of not doing enough on security as the anti-immigration party soars ahead of the government coalition in polls for the June 9th election.

Speaking in Viry-Chatillon, the town where Shemseddine was killed, Attal condemned the “addiction of some of our adolescents to violence”, calling for “a real surge of authority… to curb violence”.

“There are twice as many adolescents involved in assault cases, four times more in drug trafficking, and seven times more in armed robberies than in the general population,” he said.

Measures will include expanding compulsory school attendance to all the days of the week from 8am to 6pm for children of collège age (11 to 15).

“In the day the place to be is at school, to work and to learn,” said Attal, who was also marking 100 days in office since being appointed in January by President Emmanuel Macron to turn round the government’s fortunes.

Parents needed to take more responsibility, said Attal, warning that particularly disruptive children would have sanctions marked on their final grades.

OPINION: No, France is not suffering an unprecedented wave of violence

Promoting an old-fashioned back-to-basics approach to school authority, he said “You break something – you repair it. You make a mess – you clear it up. And if you disobey – we teach you respect.”

Attal also floated the possibility of children in exceptional cases being denied the right to special treatment on account of their minority in legal cases.

Thus 16-year-olds could be forced to immediately appear in court after violations “like adults”, he said. In France, the age of majority is 18, in accordance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Macron and Attal face an uphill struggle to reverse the tide ahead of the European elections. Current polls point to the risk of a major debacle that would overshadow the rest of the president’s second mandate up to 2027.

A poll this week by Ifop-Fiducial showed the RN on 32.5 percent with the government coalition way behind on 18 percent.