Subject: (Editorial): Murder by Bureaucracy 
Date: Published: 8/5/92 (88 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial):
    Murder by Bureaucracy

    If the verdict comes back guilty, it will qualify as one of the
 most awful serial killings in modern times.  It is a crime that
 epitomizes the darkest features of our bureaucratic age.  Yet outside
 of France, the scandal of the tainted blood has received only
 passing attention.
    In April 1985, Michel Garretta, the director of the French
 National Blood Transfusion Center, attended an AIDS conference in
 Atlanta.  He heard officials from the U. S., Canada and several other
 nations explain why they were testing their blood supplies for
 traces of HIV infection.  He also received updates about a widely
 accepted heat treatment that inactivates the AIDS virus in blood.
 Yet when he returned to France, he decided that French blood
 supplies didn't need the American-pioneered tests or treatment
 procedures.  On June 26, 1985, he ordered "the normal distribution of
 non-heated blood products as long as they were in stock."
    For six months, French patients received untested and untreated
 blood.  Half of the nation's 4,000 hemophiliacs are believed to have
 contracted the virus that causes AIDS.  More than 250 have died thus
 far.
    At his trial, now in its fourth week, Dr. Garretta admitted that
 he knew about the possibility of tainted blood:  "Everybody knew
 about it, including me...."  He and his three co-defendants --
 also leading public health figures -- blame political higher-ups for
 not making the proper executive decisions.
    The politicians blame the scientists.  In testimony last week,
 Edmond Herve, former junior health minister, admitted that by
 mid-June of 1985 he knew that contaminated blood was being
 distributed.  Georgina Dufoix, social affairs minister at the time of
 the infections, claims that she was "responsible but not guilty."
 That phrase ought to be carved in stone as the motto for
 technocracies everywhere.
    The trial itself is a wrenching event.  Several dozen
 AIDS-infected hemophiliacs pack the courtroom, many with the sunken
 eyes and gaunt faces that denote AIDS in its final stages.  About 15
 hemophiliacs are likely to die while the trial is in progress.
 Relatives of the still-living and dead hiss and scream as government
 officials testify.
    The question that has sparked such furious discussion in France
 is why those charged with safeguarding public health did nothing,
 even as doctors were sending letters warning them of the
 catastrophe?  
    The defendants are not malicious characters.  The problem is that
 through those fateful months, and during the ensuing years as the
 government sat on the scandal, the French functionaries responded as
 if the government bureaucracy was a house without windows.
 Responding to the internal stimuli of their bureaucracy, they
 couldn't see what they were doing to the people outside.
    The 19th-century French philosopher Charles Maurras distinguished
 between the pays legal (the legal country, meaning the state
 apparatus) and the pays reel (the real country).  During the recent
 French truckers' strike that disjunction between the apparatus and
 the people was underlined.  The technocrats who issued the new
 traffic regulations seemed never to have met a trucker, certainly
 they never consulted them.  When the truckers protested, President
 Francois Mitterrand denigrated them as "the serfs of today."  Here in
 the U. S., farmers, ranchers and others whose land is being seized or
 controlled by Washington's wetlands rules or wilderness-areas
 campaigns find themselves similarly treated like serfs.
    In 1985 the technocrats in the French health ministry had a
 bureaucratic imperative to safeguard their newly opened $5 million
 blood lab, which would have been made obsolete by the admission that
 new tests were necessary.  Moreover, as technocrats they were charged
 with serving that abstraction called "the national interest."  A
 French hemophiliac doesn't care where the procedure that tests blood
 was invented.  But the national interest dictates that the test
 should be "made in France."  The prosecution has accused the
 defendants of blocking the tests in part to give the French Pasteur
 Institute time to develop its own procedure.
    Chauvinism no doubt played some role in these deaths.  But the
 defendants themselves are not the villains we are used to.  They are
 not sadists or greedy; they are well-mannered successful people with
 good records.  But these mere men operated a system of great power
 and authority.  None individually were responsible; the system was
 assigned responsibility.  And now they all claim that they were not
 at fault.  The hemophiliacs are dead because they were not seen.  As
 public technocracies spread, perhaps this is the sort of defendant
 we had better get used to.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]