This cacophony of almost random forecasts isn’t unique to public commentary on viruses – almost any area of national debate is drowning in confident predictions, very few of which have much value. Most of those you read suffer from one of two problems: the forecaster probably isn’t telling you what they really think, and even if they were, what they think might not be any good.

Accuracy, even among professional forecasters like intelligence analysts, has often been a target rather than an achievement. So anyone trying to work out who to listen to in order to understand the future always had their work cut out for them.

That’s why in 2011 the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity agency, IARPA, invested in a massive forecasting competition to try and make concrete improvements. Teams would compete to forecast hundreds of topics over four years, from a range of subjects in different countries, with the winning strategies studied and shared with the wider intelligence world.

The bestselling book Superforecasting went on to describe the techniques used by the winning team (of which I was a member) in that competition. We didn’t get everything right, but we learned that it’s possible to do a lot better than foreign policy experts by moving away from the traditional methods employed.

There were three key structural lessons from the competition:

1. Keep score
2. Identify the best forecasters
3. Work as a team

The most important item on this list is keep score. Most forecasts that we come across in the media are made by in-house pundits or people rung up by television stations or newspapers for a quote, and these aren’t scored – there’s no penalty for being wrong most of the time. Old articles are rarely revisited and if they are, the pundit can normally wave away criticism and continue along the same line. Some pundits have made a career out of political analysis despite consistently being wrong in their predictions.

If there’s no reward for getting things right, then accuracy will drop down the list of incentives behind the forecasts. Instead pundits will say what they think will cheer people up, what will promote their career via wacky, attention-grabbing predictions, what shows loyalty to their friends or signals political values and ideals to others — or any of the million other reasons someone might predict something without actually expecting it to happen.

It’s not just that pundits and others in the public eye are bad at predicting, they’re mostly not even trying to. And these predictions can influence politicians and decision makers.

The way to build a successful forecasting system is to reward people for accurate forecasts and disincentivise bad ones. Just that little step, of keeping score and letting everyone know at the start that what they say will matter, immediately changes everything. Now when someone is tempted to predict great success for a project led by their pal, they might think about how embarrassed they’ll be if it goes wrong, and drop their confidence.

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Once people are actually trying to predict accurately, you can move on to step two — feedback. Scorekeeping doesn’t just incentivise people to be honest, it also gives them the opportunity to improve. Once you know what you’ve got right and got wrong, you can go back and review. As forecasts resolve, people tend to get better calibrated – that is, there develops a closer relationship between their confidence in their forecast and the outcome.

And once you have a regular run of forecasts, you can take one of the most important steps — stop listening to people who can’t or won’t predict accurately, and pay attention to the most accurate team members, the “superforecasters”.

One of our most striking findings was that the ability to forecast is a skill in itself, independent from subject matter knowledge. Successful forecasters aren’t perfect, of course, but a good track record of predictions is a strong indicator of future performance. And with these skills, superforecasters work for banks, governments and other organisations providing probability estimates for all kinds of risks as well as training analysts in forecasting.

In a system where forecasters are punished for getting it wrong and rewarded for getting it right, the most accurate people float to the top, and when they work together on a team, they become even more accurate.

The forecasts

Last week we gathered a small group of well-calibrated forecasters with good track records to look at the UK’s pandemic outlook over the next few months. With Britain facing both the worst period of the crisis but also an exit strategy with the vaccine roll-out, “when will this end?” is the most urgent question everyone is asking right now.

We can’t promise clairvoyance, but we made the best use of our team’s skills and produced the following set of estimates on three topics:

• How bad the daily death toll will get
• How many vaccines we’ll have administered at the end of February
• When daily deaths will first fall below 100

Superforecasters cannot predict exactly when the pandemic will be over, but these three questions act as proxies for the questions of how bad it will get, how soon an individual is likely to get a vaccine, and when the pandemic will recede. A double-digit daily death toll does not mean the end of the nightmare, but with large-scale vaccinations taking place it will certainly mean is in sight.

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These forecasts are presented as the median estimate of the group; the principle of the “wisdom of crowds”, the idea first suggested by Francis Galton that the median of any large number of guesses will usually be fairly accurate, applies to experienced forecasters as much as anyone.

We also include our “80% confidence” interval as an expression of the uncertainty surrounding our forecast. For example, our central estimate that the death toll will peak at 1,278 with an 80% confidence interval of 892 to 5,750, means we think there’s only a 10% chance it’ll be less than 892 and only a 10% chance it’ll be greater than 5750. (The confidence intervals are represented by the blue rectangles, and the central estimates with the red lines.)

The worst of the pandemic

The median estimate of the group was for the 7-day average of daily deaths to peak at 1,278, but with an 80% confidence interval of 892 — 5,750

Alongside the predictions, we note down anonymous comments from the forecasters in the team to explain their reasoning. Among the notes accompanying this question, perhaps the most optimistic was that there is a “small chance we are at the peak now”.

On the other hand, the worst-case scenario is if the hospital system collapses and we are forced to “en mass palliate anyone over 60/65” and the most pessimistic predicted 5,000 deaths a day. The big factors were new virus strains and “poorly managed vaccination centres causing infections among the most vulnerable and highest priority population”.

However, with 160,000 infections a day currently in the UK and a fatality rate just below 1%, 1,400 deaths a day seems likely.

Another forecaster also predicted that a third wave was “likely” once the current lockdown ended, “with quite possibly the highest caseload yet, but [was] unlikely to have as many fatalities due to prioritised vaccination of elderly and otherwise-vulnerable” individuals.

A lot of this depends on whether the vaccine protects against any new strains, and how quickly those vaccines are rolled out.

The February Vaccine Target 

Millions of people are currently waiting for a letter informing them of their vaccination appointment, a jab that will end a year of house arrest and often extreme anxiety. The Prime Minister has promised two million jabs a week, and tens of thousands of lives, and millions of livelihoods, depend on getting the jabs out as soon as possible.

We asked the team to forecast how many vaccine doses will have been administered in the UK by the end of February and the central estimate was 12 million, with an 80% confidence interval of 6 million to 20 million.

Among the big questions are the supply and how much political pressure there will be for the distribution network to move faster. Two more vaccines, by Novavax and Johnson & Johnson, are also expected to get approval next month and that will also increase supply.

One forecaster predicted that “Boris’s current target was 13 million for end of February: best guess is they undershoot that slightly and ramp-up only really gets going in March/April…. this has been the consistent pattern of undershooting a bit throughout the pandemic.”

So with a median estimate of 12 million, you can find out when you and your loved ones are likely to receive theirs here.

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In which month will deaths fall below 100 a day?

By estimating when deaths fall below 100 a day we can get some idea of when the virus is close to beaten.

Our group estimated April as the most likely month for daily deaths to fall below this level, with an 80% confidence interval of March to August.

Among the key unknowns are new strains, and also whether hospitals get overwhelmed “which results in cascading preventable deaths”. We can estimate when deaths will fall based on first wave patterns, when it took “two and a half months to get from 1k per day to below 100 in the March-July lockdown”, although the vaccination programme might accelerate that. Generally speaking, it takes about three weeks to half the deaths, and so following an expected peak in January, death rates will half four times by late April.

At this point, one forecaster suggests, the government will open up the economy and deaths will continue around 100 a day because this will be regarded as tolerable. Another believes this figure may continue until September, by which time a combination of vaccination and infection will have introduced herd immunity.

The most “optimistic” forecast suggested that we may have got deaths down by March but that might be because “we screw up” and “have killed everyone who could possibly die from it and therefore the virus has nowhere else to go”.

The most pessimistic suggested: “If there is a less successful vaccination programme, multiple policy errors such as keeping schools open once teachers have been vaccinated but not paying attention to cases/repeated attempted opening up, or mutations of the virus, then it might be December before deaths get below this level.”

But another thought that new drugs — the most recent breakthroughs came late last week — will have reduced the fatality rate fairly soon.

January and February 2021 are going to be very traumatic months for tens of thousands of people in the UK. But to be forewarned is to be forearmed, and if you’re worried about the next few weeks you might want to gain a better estimate of how bad it will get, when your vaccine will come, and most importantly when the nightmare will be over.

And perhaps next time that Britain faces a crisis of this magnitude, we’ll have systems in place that incentivise people to tell the truth, identifying those with strong track records of forecasting, rather than turning to those who tell us what we want to hear.

Forty years later, we have a new virus to contend with. Although it doesn’t have a truly terrifying 30% mortality rate like smallpox, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is vicious enough to have killed 1.5 million people in less than a year, and has shut down economies worldwide. A major reason for those shutdowns, of course, was that we didn’t have a vaccine: there was no option but to attempt to stop people from spreading it by keeping them apart. But now we do have vaccines – several of them, and they’re accompanied by a much better understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 works. Imagine how satisfying it would be — after a 2020 filled with disease, death, lockdown, loneliness, bankruptcy and general misery — if we could eradicate this virus too. 

This might seem like we’re jumping the gun. After all, as we write this, nobody outside of clinical trials has actually been vaccinated against the coronavirus. But the most sophisticated vaccination programme in world history will begin within the next few days. How likely is it that we can get rid of this thing altogether?

First things first. Is eradicating our novel coronavirus even possible? This wouldn’t be the case for, say, the virus that causes influenza — mainly because there isn’t just one major flu strain, but many dozens, each of which is constantly and rapidly evolving. We have to come up with a new flu vaccine every year, and eradicating all the different strains just isn’t viable with our current technology. The Covid-19 coronavirus, on the other hand, evolves far more slowly, opening up the possibility that we could tamp it down with the right combination of vaccines and other measures.

Evolution is actually one of the prime reasons we should want to try to wipe out this new virus. Even though it might do so slowly, it’s still possible that it might evolve a new strain — one that’s deadlier and which the vaccines we’ve just developed don’t counter. This isn’t a far-fetched idea: the closely-related coronavirus that causes SARS has a fatality rate somewhere around 15%, and the even scarier one that causes MERS is worse than smallpox, killing around 34% of cases.

But even setting aside evolution, eradicating SARS-CoV-2 would have clear benefits. It would obviously reduce the suffering caused by the disease, and lessen the likelihood of flare-ups in specific parts of the world — most likely poorer countries where vaccines are harder to come by. It would also save us money in the long run. If the virus is always with us, we’ll always have to vaccinate against it: even if immunity from a vaccine is long term, it won’t be forever, and as populations grow, there will be more of us to vaccinate. Every penny not spent on regularly vaccinating people against COVID-19, after it’s no longer an issue, could be spent on improving health in other ways.

So there’s a clear rationale for eradicating the disease, and it might even be possible in theory. What about in practice?

To date, only two infectious diseases have ever been eradicated — the aforementioned smallpox, and also rinderpest, a particularly nasty cattle virus that can have a near-100% fatality rate, which was wiped out in 2011. That should tell us that removing a disease from circulation is an extraordinarily difficult task.

Smallpox had been endemic in Asia for perhaps 2,000 years. By the 18th century, it killed around 400,000 people in Europe annually. Wars, conquests and the slave trade introduced the disease into the Americas, South Africa and Australia, and records suggest that it destroyed entire tribes in what are now South Africa, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 19th century, and killed huge swathes of people living in urban settlements.

In the years before a vaccine, authorities quarantined ships to prevent the disease from being introduced into disease-free ports; when that became unviable, some communities practised variolation — a risky procedure where people were deliberately exposed to weakened forms of the virus to protect them from the fatal strain. However, Edward Jenner’s invention of the smallpox vaccine in 1796 — the first ever vaccine, in fact — was a game-changer, leading to the first real reductions in the incidence of the disease. As time passed, techniques used to manufacture, store and administer vaccines improved tremendously, and states initiated vaccination programmes to inoculate their citizens from the deadly disease.

Although smallpox was eliminated in some regions in the early 20th century, the prospect that it could be eradicated across the world was met with widespread scepticism, and was not even considered a serious possibility until 1958, when the WHO resolved to guide a worldwide campaign. The operation was a decentralised undertaking, and it took decades to secure funding and political support for eradication everywhere — for many years, it was simply not seen as a priority, or even an interest, to many governments or community leaders. Where money was available, the strategy began with mass vaccination and shifted towards tracing and containment as cases declined. Eradication was finally achieved in 1980, 184 years after the vaccine was first invented.

The problems that beset the smallpox eradication programme — poverty and a lack of funding — are also major reasons that other diseases haven’t yet been beaten. For example, the Rockefeller Foundation’s early 20th-Century effort to wipe out hookworm, a parasite that can create a drag on children’s development, was very nearly successful, but it didn’t quite penetrate far enough into the world’s least developed places, where poor sanitation and infrastructure help the worms spread.

Hookworm has even come back in extremely deprived parts of the US, where it was thought to be eliminated. A similar story can be told for yaws, a bacterial disease that causes ulcers and physical deformities, and which keeps returning in the very poorest parts of the world.

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A more optimistic story concerning a parasitic infection is that of Guinea worm disease, where a worm grows in the host’s flesh and creates an extremely painful wound, stopping them from walking or working, and making them vulnerable to further bacterial infection. Since there’s no vaccine for a non-viral disease like this, education is the main way to prevent it: The Carter Centre, established by the former US president, has been showing people good ways to clean and filter drinking water, among other strategies, and has been the main cause of global disease cases declining from around a million in 1989 to double figures in recent years. We’re many years behind our elimination target, however: the disease remains in very poor countries in Africa, such as Chad and South Sudan.

Poverty has also frustrated attempts to eradicate polio, which infected millions across the 20th century, resulting in death, paralysis, skeletal deformity or confinement to a coffin-like iron lung for weeks, months or years. The plan was to eradicate the three different kinds of wild poliovirus by the year 2000, but it proved trickier than expected. Nevertheless, the virus’s days are numbered: India was declared polio-free in 2014, then Nigeria as recently as August 2020. Presently there remains only one wild type of poliovirus, and it remains endemic only to the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

Other eradication attempts have run aground for other reasons. The effort begun in the late 1940s to rid the world of malaria, for instance, was a failure due not only to ballooning budgets, but to our old friend evolution: mosquitoes evolved resistance to DDT, the pesticide that had previously, and successfully, been used to exterminate them. Now, eradication is back on the table: in September 2019, a special commission put together by the medical journal The Lancet projected that with the right policies, we could still eradicate malaria within a generation.

So whereas there are reasons for hope about freeing the world from polio, Guinea worm and maybe even malaria, we haven’t finished the job on any of them yet, and we’re in some cases decades behind schedule. These are all reasons to temper our expectations about eradicating SARS-CoV-2. And we’re about to see another.

In a word, the problem is animals. The fact that other mammals can be infected with a virus makes it vastly more difficult to stamp out a disease, as the persistance of rabies shows. Vaccinating animals — especially wild and stray ones — is understandably far more difficult than vaccinating people. Indeed, the reason we can’t technically say that we eradicated the SARS or MERS viruses, despite their spread through humans being completely halted, is that they still circulate among non-human animals — and since there’s no vaccine for either disease, it’s quite possible that they’ll reappear in future. 

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We already know that the novel coronavirus can infect bats, cats (including lions and tigers), dogs, monkeys, ferrets, hamsters and shrews, among other species. In recent weeks, Denmark had to cull 17 million mink after outbreaks in humans were traced to infections among the animals on farms where they were bred for their fur (and in a rather grim sequel, thousands of them had to be dug back up again). 

Of course, the origin of the virus is bats — they’re one of the major non-human carriers (the technical term is “reservoirs”) of SARS coronaviruses. Virologists have for years made predictions that bats would be the source of new disease outbreaks: they carry a wide variety of coronaviruses, they’re widely dispersed around the world, often live near humans and can migrate easily, and the viruses they carry are likely to cause disease and jump to humans. That suggests that vaccinating just bats — and the particular species that carry human-infectious viruses, rather than all the other potentially-infected animals — would get us quite far.

When authorities began to control the spread of rinderpest, they did so by isolating infected farm animals and restricting their movement, culling them and disinfecting their habitats, all before a vaccine was developed. With COVID-19, we have a head start given we already have a vaccine — and it would be relatively straightforward to develop a bat-version. We could put oral vaccines in bait — a common strategy for controlling disease in wild animals.

There are also other ways to prevent SARS coronaviruses from jumping to humans once again. Most countries, for example, already mandate vaccinations and travel quarantines for animals entering the country. And we could focus on improving hygiene standards for handling wild animals — particularly of the flying mammal variety. In the future, it could even be the case that new vaccines will protect us against multiple strains of SARS coronaviruses at the same time.

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There are several other factors that affect whether a disease is eradicable. One is how easy it is to detect: if you can precisely pinpoint who has the virus, you can get them quarantined as soon as possible. That’s not really a check in favour of the eradication of Covid-19, since its symptoms — particularly the cough and the fever — can easily be confused with those of other viruses, such as the flu. On the other hand, better diagnostic tests are being developed all the time, and we might soon end up in a situation where super-rapid, super-accurate, super-cheap tests can help us rapidly isolate people carrying the virus.

Another factor is how easy the disease is to prevent. Although the initial evidence suggests that at least two of the vaccines for Covid-19 developed so far are extremely effective at preventing symptoms, we don’t really know yet whether they also prevent transmission of the virus, and indeed whether they prevent infection itself. Luckily, there are good scientific reasons to think this latter will be the case. We’re also getting better at preventing spread through non-pharmaceutical means: not just lockdowns, but less invasive interventions like masks, ventilation of rooms, social distancing, and contact tracing, all of which improve as we learn more about the mechanics of how the virus spreads. 

This is another area where technical advances will likely help us in future. At the moment, our vaccines are (literally) a shot in the arm. Nasal vaccines, which vaccinate the upper as well as the lower respiratory tract, are more likely to stop transmission as well as symptoms in the vaccinated person, and could well be developed in the months and years to come (we’ll also need an oral vaccine for those wild animals).

Ventilation technology will also probably improve, allowing us to spend more anxiety-free time indoors (as in so many things, hospitals in East Asia learned this lesson well after the original SARS outbreak in 2003). Even simpler technologies, like new types of masks that are more tolerable to wear and thus more likely to be effectively used, could help slow the spread.

Finally, is it possible to eliminate the virus in particular regions of the world? If so, it increases the plausibility of doing it on a wider scale. For COVID-19, the answer seems to be a cautious yes: there are regions that, right from the start of the pandemic, have had extremely low transmission thanks to effective tracing, quarantine and other policies.

For example, from the perspective of the UK, with our population of 67 million and 80,000 deaths, it seems unbelievable that Vietnam (population 96 million) has had a mere 1,358 confirmed cases and 35 deaths. That’s not full elimination by any means, but it — along with the extremely impressive performance of other Asian and Australasian countries, even without a vaccine — goes to show that good policy really can drive the virus down to near-negligible levels.

And that’s probably the best we can hope for: getting things to the point where, like SARS and MERS, the virus is effectively gone, even if not fully eradicated. The fact we have a vaccine means we’re already in a better position than for those two other coronaviruses; but that the virus is so contagious, and has already spread to every corner of the globe, makes things more difficult. The good thing is that the strategies mentioned above will all reduce the burden of disease, with all its associated costs to life and to our economies, even if they fail to completely extirpate the virus. For that reason, aiming for eradication is the smartest strategy.

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Even if we can’t win the peoples of the world their freedom from SARS-CoV-2, all our technological advances might render it far less risky to be infected. The model here is HIV: even though there’s no vaccine or cure, with the right drugs the virus is no longer a death sentence. We’ve already seen the novel coronavirus become less deadly as our medical treatments have improved; better steroids, anti-virals, and perhaps even synthetic antibodies could reduce the fatality rate even further.

The Covid-19 pandemic has given us plenty of reason to despair, but all the scientific progress we’ve made in a few short months gives us a lot to feel optimistic about, too. The urgency of the pandemic has meant that we’ve accelerated reviews by regulatory agencies, poured vast funding into research and development, and developed not one but multiple effective vaccines at an unprecedented speed. 

When all the world’s attention is focused in the right way, we’ve seen that the most vexing problems can suddenly become solvable. For millennia, humans had been unable to exterminate any infectious disease. And yet just in the last century, our technology and ambition allowed us to declare victory against two of them, and set us on track to defeat several more. Once the first wave of mass Covid vaccination begins, we shouldn’t rest on our laurels. We should do our very best to free ourselves of this virus forever.

The news of the Pfizer and BioNTech breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against Covid-19 was greeted across the world with cautious relief and delight. In France, there was some delight — but also suspicion and even anger. International research by Gallup last year reported that one in three French people believed all vaccines to be dangerous — the highest percentage of the 144 countries surveyed. This week, an Ipsos survey suggested that 46% of French adults will refuse — or say they will refuse — the Pfizer jab or any other kind of anti-Covid jab. (Compared to 36% in the United States, 30% in Germany, 21% in Britain and 16% in India.)

Strangely, opposition appears to have increased as the vaccine looked more likely to appear. An Ipsos survey in September found that 41% of French adults would refuse any Covid jab. With “herd immunity” estimated to require 60 to 70% coverage of a given population, the pandemic appears to have a long and prosperous future in France.

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Anti-vax feeling has been spreading throughout the developed word in recent years (much less so in poorer countries, which know a thing or two about infectious diseases). But why should the opposition be so powerful in France? Are the survey figures reliable?

Laurent-Henri Vignaud, a French historian who has studied the rise and fall of anti-vax movements, is sceptical. It’s not always a good idea, he suggests, to take the French public at its word — and certainly not on this subject. “The only other countries broadly as anti-vaccine as the French are the Russians and the Mongolians,” he says. “Countries where government is widely held in disrepute. What we are looking at here, I think, is a transfer of suspicion. For many years 30-40% of the French have been vastly sceptical of all politicians and all media.”

He concludes that, “this deep pessimism has spilled over to the question of vaccines”. Wide-scale rejection of mainstream politics exists in other countries, but takes an especially acute form in France, where the traditional centre-Left/centre-Right pattern of politics has all but collapsed. The poor performance of recent governments offers a partial explanation. But France’s aggressively suspicious attitude towards authority is not a new phenomenon.

As he describes it, there is a core of people who are viscerally anti-vax, “people who use arguments on natural health or because they believe conspiracy theories of the far-Right or the far-Left”. But there is another group, he says, who are simply sceptical or negative about whatever the government proposes. “But I doubt they will all refuse in the end to take a Covid vaccine?” he says.

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Lucie Guimier, a public health expert who has studied French anti-vax movements, also makes an important distinction — between hard-core anti-vaxxers and those with legitimate doubts about a new form of vaccine created in such a short time. She told France 24: “Usually it takes 10 years to develop a vaccine. Some doubts are perfectly justified … Many people remember the hasty campaign of vaccination against the H1N1 virus in the winter of 2009-10. France suffered 60 cases of narcolepsy. Obviously that stays in people’s minds.”

There is another factor which has enflamed and muddled pro and anti-vax arguments in France since the beginning of the Covid pandemic: the Raoult factor.

Professor Didier Raoult, the Professor Dumbledore of Marseille, is an internationally recognised expert in infectious diseases and progenitor of the widely-debunked, but far from dead, Hydroxychloroquine craze. He has become a secular saint for many “anti-system” people in France, both on the hard-Left and the hard-Right. Their adoration is immune to the Professor’s appalling track record in predicting the course of the pandemic.

Raoult wrote a book in 2018 which argues that some vaccines are useful and even essential — but not all. In other words, he is not an anti-vaxxer but in recent months he has often sounded like one. “Looking for a Covid vaccine is an idiotic quest,” he told BFMTV in April. “The chances of a vaccine against a newly emerging illness becoming a useful tool of public health are close to zero…”

In another interview with Le Parisien in June — before a second wave of the pandemic began to swell in France — Raoult said the virus had mutated into something relatively innocuous. “For daring to say such things,” he added, “I will be targeted by the laboratories which are working on vaccines.”

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Whether intentionally or not, such comments feed the conspiracy theories that teem on French-language Facebook and Twitter. More than 1,100,000 people follow 90 different French-language Facebook dedicated to Professor Raoult. There is a growing overlap between such groups and the most virulent anti-vax movements. The Jean Jaurès foundation reported in July that 89% of Raoult supporters on Facebook accept the proposition that “the ministry of health is in league with the pharmaceutical industry to hide from the general public the noxious effects of vaccines”.

Anti-vaxxers in other countries tend mostly to be people who believe in natural or holistic medicine or have swallowed the discredited allegations of people, such as the struck-off British doctor Andrew Wakefield, that vaccines have generated a boom in autism or other so-called “modern” diseases. In France, opponents on health grounds intersect with, and are supplemented by, large bodies of people on the far-Left and far-Right who believe that vaccines are a capitalist conspiracy between government and industry (Big Pharma) or part of a giant plot to subjugate the population to group-think (Big Brother).

Sub-groups of both movements argue that modern vaccines are actually just a form of medical Trojan Horse. The whole pandemic is a hoax, they say. It will permit a mass programme of vaccinations that will place electronic micro-chips under our skin to control us for either Profit or Power — or both. Professor Raoult’s genius is to somehow appeal to all these groups (while not actually being anti-vax).

Typical comments found online in recent days include: “I’d rather die than inject myself with this filth,” “My health is not for sale,” and “This is all a government plot.” Longer comments include: “Wake up! Vaccines are poisons. It’s through vaccination that people die, become sick, autistic, handicapped. Get with the programme.” And: “I’d rather kick the bucket than give my genetic code to all these businesses. That’s what’s happening here. They want to put us all into a genetic filing system.”

This anti-political, anti-state virus predates the internet but thrives online. A good comparison is the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement, which began two years ago with authentic grievances and rapidly splintered through competing Facebook groups into weird and inoperable conspiracy theories.

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In recent days, many of the most outlandish French Covid theories have been spliced together in an 143 minute online documentary film, Hold-up, which, according to the news agency Agence France Presse, contains 30 inventions or distortions.

Laurence-Henri Vignaud, who has studied anti-vax movements in France and elsewhere that date back to 19th century, points to the unwitting emergence of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates as a kind of Raoult-in-reverse: a man who unites in baseless hatred all the strands of anti-vaxdom in France. Because of his charitable foundation’s drive to provide vaccines to the developing world, Gates has become “both the capitalist who sells useless vaccines and the geek who wants to put microchips under your skin”. “For the anti-vaxxers Bill Gates is wonderful,” Mr Vignaud said. “He combines Big Brother and Big Pharma in one person.”

All the same, Vignaud is convinced that if the Pfizer or other vaccines prove safe and effective, a large percentage of the French population will ultimately allow itself to be jabbed. He points to the fact that since 2018, vaccination of children against 11 diseases has been compulsory in France. Very few parents have broken the law and refused to have their kids treated.

That raises another question: should vaccination against Covid-19 be compulsory in France, not just for children but for adults? It’s a measure that has never been taken before, for any disease. Some in the United States suggest that vaccination should be compulsory for key workers, especially in the health sector. The British Government says that compulsory vaccination for all has not been ruled out.

This week the French health advisory body, the Haute Autorité de Santé, began a consultation exercise on this subject. The authority said that in its own “provisional” opinion,” compulsory vaccination was unjustified. The French Government therefore faces a potentially hazardous decision. Would compulsory jabs feed the online paranoia and strengthen anti-vaccine feeling in France? Or would it — like the 2018 law making some vaccines compulsory — sort out the hard-core opposition (small) from the permanent grumblers (many)?

Even compulsory vaccination of medical staff might meet resistance. Martin Hirsch, head of the Paris hospital service, points out that something like one in five French nurses has declared themselves to be dubious about vaccines. “When anti-vaccine arguments are starting to stick even amongst nurses, you know that these conspiracy theories have gone much too far,” he told France Info radio. “The anti-vaxxers have done great harm to public health in this country, including within the hospital service.”

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Is France's secularism worth dying for?

By John Lichfield

There is, I believe, a greater problem — and one for which no vaccine is possible. France’s epidemic of doubt in politicians and institutions is sometimes justified but often spirals into wilful negativity — a kind of cynical credulity — which is prepared to believe the worst against all evidence. As Mr Vignaud points out, there is a widespread but not universal belief in France that politicians and/or capitalist enterprises are fundamentally corrupt and work against the interests of ordinary people.

This is not confined to France — although in the developed world, only the United States is worse afflicted. But France is different from the US, in that the French can distrust the state in the comfortable knowledge that they can rely on it for protection (as French people have done during the Covid crisis, despite some blunders).

Laurent-Henri Vignaud is probably right: when faced with something as tangible as a deadly new disease, much of the instinctive French scepticism will fade away. The marginal doubters — some of whom have perfectly reasonable questions about a new vaccine — will be separated from a hardcore of health and political obsessives. Most French people will, in the end, queue for their anti-Covid jabs.

And yet France’s epidemic, or endemic state, of obsessive national pessimism will survive. The threat to the country’s political health may be more disturbing than the anti-vax threat to its physical health.