Patrick Cohen returns to the countryside. In “Mystifications”, the journalist invites us to go back in time. Central question, in these times of the rise of populism of all kinds: “What explains that part of the population today adheres to fanciful and misleading discourse? Nothing new under the sun, he tells us in substance. Witnesses, these controversial characters whose film deciphers the similar mechanisms at work, from Trofim Lyssenko to Didier Raoult, via Jacques Benveniste (the memory of water) and Claude Allègre (climatoscepticism).

The documentary obviously starts with the latest controversy, that of Didier Raoult’s anti-Covid-19 treatment with hydroxychloroquine, which made him an icon for antivax. Long before Covid-19, AIDS was the scene of such an illusion: in 1985, pulmonologist Philippe Even, oncologist Jean-Marie Andrieu and immunologist Alain Venet announced the development of a treatment based on ciclosporin (used during organ transplants). “We are [then] able to make a diagnosis, but we are in total medical helplessness”, recalls Professor Jean-François Delfraissy, immunologist who will be on the front line when Covid-19 appears in 2020, as president of the National Ethics Advisory Committee.

From rabies vaccine to Covid-19

Major economic issues are in the background: Franco-American rivalry for HIV, the omnipotence of pharmaceutical laboratories for Covid-19 – “Big Pharma”, according to the conspiratorial term that has come into common parlance. Already in 1888, Louis Pasteur was accused of “personal enrichment on the backs of the sick” after the creation of his institute. Antivax were born at the same time as the rabies vaccine…

The Lyssenko affair is “an archetype of politics that is infiltrating the scientific universe”, says Dominique Leglu, editorial director of Sciences et avenir. This simple Soviet agricultural technician’s theories about improving wheat yields – in the middle of the Holodomor, the famine caused by the Soviet regime in Ukraine – will lead to the deportation of many geneticists, “bourgeois scientists”, says Lyssenko in a speech in the presence of Stalin, in 1935. “The most heartbreaking episode in the whole history of science”, said, after the war, the Nobel Prize in Medicine Jacques Monod, in Albert Camus’s journal, Combat.

Common thread of these cases: the scientific “eminences” in question rarely make amends. When Patrick Cohen asks Philippe Even about “the consent of the sick” for ciclosporin, the latter replies: “You know, in the state they were in…” As for Didier Raoult, he was still writing, on August 9, on X ( formerly Twitter): “We’re right! We’re the good guys! We don’t get discouraged and we stick together! »