Preventing new sanitary crisis

How can French society prepare for future epidemics? The brutality with which the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted not only the healthcare system, but also the economic organisation and social life, should lead us to ask ourselves this question without delay. How can we detect the signals, sometimes weak, indicating an emerging epidemic more early on? How can we react as quickly as possible, by linking local responses and global surveillance? The current pandemic also shows that while free access has certainly helped to avoid exacerbating social inequalities in health, it is not enough to reduce them; yet, given the externalities, effective access for all to tests, masks and care is a necessary condition for containing an epidemic. Should community health approaches be developed and encouraged? Is this the best solution for “reaching out” to the populations that are geographically or socially furthest from the healthcare system? How can we get a system of pharmaceutical innovation back into working order so that we can react quickly to a future shock, the precise nature of which we do not know today?