Philippe Douste-Blazy

Philippe Douste-Blazy   (politician, cardiologist)
Born	1 January 1953 Lourdes, Hautes-Pyrénées
Nationality	French
Alma mater	lycée Pierre-de-Fermat, Paul Sabatier University
Parents	Louis Douste-Blazy
Member of	WEF/Global Leaders for Tomorrow/1995
Interests	France/VIPedophilia
Party	Union for French Democracy, Union for a Popular Movement
French Health and Foreign Minister - arrested in Morocco on suspicion of underage prostitution.  UNITAID/Chairman In office 2006 - Present  France/Minister of Foreign Affairs In office 2 June 2005 - 15 May 2007 Appointed by Dominique de Villepin  France/Minister of Health In office 31 March 2004 - 2 June 2005 Appointed by Jean-Pierre Raffarin  France/Minister of Culture In office 18 May 1995 - 2 June 1997 Appointed by Alain Juppé  Member of the National Assembly for Haute-Garonne's 1st constituency In office 2 April 2001 - 30 July 2004  Mayor of Toulouse In office 23 March 2001 - 29 April 2004

Philippe Douste-Blazy is a French United Nations official and former centre-right politician. Over the course of his career, he served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Special Adviser on Innovative Financing for Development in the UN and chairman of UNITAID.

He was selected a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 1995. He was arrested and evicted from Morocco on suspicion of underage prostitution.

He was previously French Minister for Health (1993–1995 and 2004–2005), Minister of Culture (1995–1997) and as Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Dominique de Villepin (2005–2007). He was mayor of Lourdes 1989–2000 and mayor of Toulouse 2001–2004.

Originally a member of the Centre of Social Democrats (CDS), the Christian Democrat component of the Union for French Democracy (UDF) party, he later joined the Union for a Popular Movement.

A cardiologist by profession, he became Professor at Toulouse Sciences University in 1988.

Arrested for underage sex in Morocco

Morocco is up in arms following an accusation that an unidentified French cabinet minister engaged in sexual relations with underage boys in the resort town of Marrakesh. Luc Ferry, a former French education minister, ignited the affair – and probably inadvertently – on May 30 during a television debate on the reluctance of French media to report on the private lives of politicians. Wanting to give an example, he cited reports about a fellow minister participating in an orgy with Moroccan children but said he wouldn’t reveal the minister's name for fear of being sued for libel.....Ferry, a celebrity philosopher and former education minister, alleged that the unnamed minister had been arrested in Marrakesh on suspicion of pedophilia but was quietly flown back to France in a cover-up. He asserted that his allegations were confirmed by "the highest authorities of the state" including a former prime minister.

In a blog post that was quickly taken down, Thierry Desjardins (Chief Editor of Le Figaro 1990-93 and Deputy Editor of the BBC 1993-2000) stated this that unnamed minister was Philippe Douste-Blazy.

Early Life

Philippe Douste-Blazy was born in Lourdes in 1953 to Louis Douste-Blazy, a professor of medicine. In 1982 he completed his medical studies in Toulouse and then worked as a cardiologist in Lourdes and Toulouse. As part of his professional activity, he became a member of the Association of Cardiologists of France. In 1988 he took over a professorship for medicine in Toulouse; The focus was on epidemiology, health economics and preventive measures. In 1989 he was elected head of the Association for Research into the Cholesterol Problem.

In the same year he began his career as a politician, when he was elected Mayor of Lourdes. In the same year he won a seat in the European Parliament. There he belonged to the Christian Democratic EPP Group, was a member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Protection.

In the parliamentary elections in March 1993, he won a seat in the French National Assembly, where he represented a constituency of the Hautes-Pyrénées department, in which Lourdes is located. He then resigned from the European Parliament. From 1993 to 1995 he was Deputy Minister of Health in the Balladur Cabinet. In 1994 he was elected a member of the General Council of the Hautes-Pyrénées department. In December 1994 he also became Secretary General of the CDS under the party chairman François Bayrou. In addition, he was press spokesman for the French government from January to May 1995 .

Government Minister

After Jacques Chirac was elected President, Douste-Blazy became Minister for Culture in the Juppé I cabinet in May 1995 and remained that until June 1997.

As the successor of his party colleague Dominique Baudis, Douste-Blazy was elected mayor in the local elections in Toulouse in March 2001. After changing the constituency, he was then elected member of the Haute-Garonne department in the National Assembly (re-elected in the regular parliamentary election the following year). In the course of the 2002 presidential election, Douste-Blazy moved from the UDF to the center-right collecting party Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP), initiated by Jacques Chirac, and became its first general secretary (until November 2004).

In March 2004 he became Minister for Solidarity, Health and Family in the Raffarin III cabinet. He gave up the mayor post in Toulouse, but remained president of the Greater Toulouse Municipal Association until 2008. From June 2, 2005 to May 18, 2007, Philippe Douste-Blazy was Foreign Minister in Dominique de Villepin's government.

United Nations

While serving as foreign minister of France, Douste-Blazy became chairman of the Executive Board of UNITAID, the International Drug Purchase Facility hosted by the World Health Organization which France co-founded in 2006.

On 19 February 2008, Douste-Blazy was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as Special Adviser on Innovative Financing for Development, with the rank of UN Under-Secretary-General. From 2008 until 2009, he was a member of the High Level Taskforce on Innovative International Financing for Health Systems, co-chaired by Gordon Brown and Robert Zoellick. He is also the chairman of the board of the Millennium Foundation for Innovate Finance for Health.

His main responsibilities as the Special Adviser included promoting UNITAID and other sources of innovative financing for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), advising the United Nations Secretary-General on innovative financing solutions to the implementation of the Monterrey consensus, coordinating with the High-Level Group on the MDGs, and liaising with various UN and non-UN related institutions, such as the main Bretton Woods institutions, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), the United Nations Development Group and the Millennium Communication Campaign.

Douste-Blazy was also in charge of organizing the first World Conference of Non-Governmental Donors, with a special focus on the financing for development provided by citizens, local and regional authorities, foundations, non-governmental organizations, economic and social representatives, faith groups and the private sector. It is hoped that these innovative sources of funding could compensate the insufficient official development assistance in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Ahead of the 2012 presidential elections, Douste-Blazy announced in January 2012 that he no longer supported Nicolas Sarkozy and instead was lending his support to centrist candidate François Bayrou.

Other

Douste-Blazy is a member of the board of directors of the Marseille University Hospital headed by Professor Didier Raoult, where he and other doctors supported the professor's research and requests in April 2020 to authorize the use of Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) for all symptomatic forms of Covid-19 and to make it available so that city doctors can prescribe it.

The French National Centre for Scientific Research Ethics Committee named him in an opinion published in September 2021 among the actors who have participated in a “populist” drift of science, because of his signing of a petition launched with Christian Perronne in favor of of hydroxychloroquine. In October 2021, he recanted and said he regretted signing.

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References

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