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[TV news excerpts] Heatwave. A heatwave. Heatwave, heatwave, heatwave, heatwave. The heatwave. A heatwave in May — it's an unprecedented event.
Analysis of France's heatwave response and political inaction ahead of 2027 elections with policy proposals.
Key Takeaways
- France is unprepared for extreme heatwaves despite repeated deadly events and scientific warnings.
- Political platforms largely ignore or inadequately address the needs of vulnerable populations during heatwaves.
- Explicitly naming and protecting at-risk groups like psychiatric and neurodivergent people is crucial for effective policy.
- Air-conditioning priority public spaces and systematic care staff training are minimal but essential measures.
- Voters must demand serious heatwave policies and hold politicians accountable ahead of the 2027 elections.
Summary
- The video discusses the unprecedented May 2026 heatwave in France and its severe human impacts, including deaths and health crises.
- It highlights the lack of political attention to heatwave preparedness and response in the context of the upcoming 2027 presidential election.
- The presenter critiques the absence of credible heatwave policies in political platforms despite scientific knowledge since the 2003 heatwave.
- Five baseline policy measures are proposed: air-conditioning for at-risk populations, naming vulnerable groups explicitly, targeted awareness campaigns, systematic training for care staff, and investment in climate-health research.
- The video analyzes proposals from major parties like Rassemblement National and France Insoumise, noting gaps such as the exclusion of psychiatric and neurodivergent populations.
- It exposes the contradiction in RN’s plan which includes AC but opposes increased public spending on healthcare and climate action.
- The presenter stresses the importance of naming vulnerable populations to ensure targeted protection and funding.
- The video calls on voters to critically evaluate party platforms on heatwave issues and encourages parties to adopt the provided policy measures.
- It emphasizes the need for structured, well-funded national climate-health research and better training for healthcare workers on heat risks.
- The video concludes with a call to make heatwave preparedness a visible political priority before the 2027 elections.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Heatwave Overview
- 02:05Political Context and Election Timing
- 04:00Baseline Policy Measures for Heatwaves
- 06:31Critique of Rassemblement National's Proposal
- 08:32Vulnerable Populations and Policy Gaps
- 10:47Importance of Targeted Awareness Campaigns
- 13:20Training Care Staff for Heatwave Risks
- 17:00Need for Climate-Health Research and Conclusion
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Suffocating heat in the city, 34 degrees, 58 degrees. The hardest hit are city-dwellers living right under the roof.
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Dramatic consequences: one death and serious cases of heat illness. Runners dying, children collapsing. The risk of wildfires, or how to handle the public during the extreme heat.
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Three people died while swimming. Children, and also people who work outdoors. Passengers trapped on a train in 60 degrees.
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A government plan to manage the heatwaves. We still haven't understood what it's doing about the heatwave right now.
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Daily coordination across every ministry, an endurance plan for the summer. Day-by-day measures, and at the same time rolling out prevention measures.
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Keep pupils hydrated, drink water all day, close the shutters. Is the government really offering anything new?
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The situation is unlikely to improve. We're expecting to break temperature records. France isn't ready.
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Looking after vulnerable people saves lives. Whether this heatwave is the last of the year or the first episode of a long hot spell, it'll fit, either way, into a kind of tragic continuity.
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We've just struggled our way, in May 2026, through one of the worst heatwaves in our history for this time of year.
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And one of its many peculiarities is that it happened at the start of a new season, but a new political season.
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As I write the words I'm reading out to you right now, we're 319 days from the first round of the 2027 presidential election, and not one declared candidate has spoken up about the eight people who've just died while the heatwave alert was issued yesterday.
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We're 45 weeks from the first round of the 2027 presidential election, and the politicians' platforms keep being written as if the summer of 2003 had never happened, and as if, since 2003, research and statistical studies hadn't kept on teaching us things
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about what should have been done nearly 23 years ago. We're 10 months from the first round of the 2027 presidential election, and the window in which a party could still decide to take this seriously closes a little more with every passing day,
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because we're one spring from the first round of the 2027 presidential election, but the tragedies of this one very likely won't show up in the next in the platforms put to the voters.
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They won't show up there — unless we try to move them, these platforms. Not just hoping the platform that moved the most ends up being the one that belongs to the party that wins, but hoping the first party to move forces the others
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to rethink how competitive their platform is on these issues. This video has two goals.
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The first is to show you that, as I told you in my previous video on this subject, it's possible, even fairly easy, to talk about the heatwave well and to put forward a program that's both credible and up to the scale of the issues this kind of event carries.
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And the second is to hand the parties that want to take it up a set of measures to champion right now and to put in their campaign manifestos.
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But to be crystal clear, when I say hand it to the parties, I really mean hand it over.
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Meaning it's a gift, free of charge. You don't even need to credit me or anything.
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Like, seriously, you just copy-paste the stuff in the description, you slap your name next to the measures and off you go campaigning.
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If the price for these issues to be taken seriously is ingratitude, that works for me.
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And obviously this video, let's be honest, is mostly aimed at you, meaning everyone who's going to vote rather than run in the 2027 elections.
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A big chunk of my audience, I'd guess. It'd be dumb to leave you out of the conversation, right?
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Because the central stake is also being able to judge the platforms and the speeches with a critical, informed eye.
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Exactly what we don't have on heat-related issues in France. And as it happens, that's handy, because the kind of heatwave discourse that would, to me, just be common sense and responsibility, I've already laid out in this video.
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In that video, after looking back at the 2003 heatwave and at the erasure of the absolutely devastating impacts this kind of event has on psychiatrized and neurodivergent people, I put forward five policy measures that, to me, were nowhere to be found
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in the discourse of our representatives at the time. Namely: air-conditioning the places that house at-risk people, explicitly naming vulnerable populations in the National Heatwave Plan, specific awareness campaigns, systematic training for care staff, and then investment in climate-health research that's
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serious — and, on top of that, French. And I think these five measures can, for the purposes of this video, make up five minimum baseline criteria to judge what parties say or don't say about the heatwave phenomenon.
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Because yeah, I know what you're thinking. It seems like super, super minimal stuff to be asking for, and if you campaign for a party, you'll probably tell me this stuff is already in your party's proposals, and that I didn't reinvent the wheel, et cetera, et cetera.
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Well, exactly — let's check. So, first criterion: air-conditioning the places that house at-risk people.
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The only two parties that come anywhere close to a program able to tick this box are the Rassemblement National and France Insoumise.
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Since the summer of 2025, the RN has pushed what Marine Le Pen calls a major equipment plan for air-conditioning, relayed by her new ally Éric Ciotti, who tabled a bill in July 2025.
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A bill to make air-conditioning mandatory in priority public spaces, with a mention of schools, hospitals and retirement homes.
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On paper, it really does look a whole lot like my measure. Except the RN asks for AC in schools, hospitals and nursing homes.
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So no specific emphasis on psychiatric services. No mention of specialized residential-care facilities, no mention of medicalized care homes, no mention of group homes, and none either of supported-living residences.
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The bodies we talked about last time — long-term psychiatrized people, autistic people, institutionalized people with profound multiple disabilities — are mentioned nowhere in the bill.
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They exist by implication, at a stretch, in the "priority public spaces" category, but they aren't named.
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And not being named — we saw it last video, we proved it, we hammered it home — never once means being budgeted for, targeted, or protected.
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It's actually the exact opposite. And let me remind you that 41% of people under 60 who died in a healthcare facility in 2003 were people suffering from mental disorders, and that nearly half of the young people who died in institutions had a psychiatric diagnosis.
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So not naming these facilities is a framing rooted in sanism and ableism. And when you head a party that has explicitly defended eugenic policies in its past and that today proposes to rank the beneficiaries of public policy by criteria of origin,
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well, you've forfeited the right to play the oversight card or the clumsiness card. And there's still one more thing worth pointing out.
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The RN carries this proposal inside a political project that, otherwise, structurally refuses any rise in public spending on the medico-social sector, refuses investment in public hospitals, and has spent a large part of the last two decades muddying our grip on the reality of climate change.
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So even if we agreed to believe Le Pen's big equipment plan is sincere, you'd have to explain how this measure coexists with the rest of the program, and no one, as far as I know, has explained that.
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And now, over to France Insoumise. In July 2025, the parliamentary group published, on Clémence Guetté's website, a complete heatwave plan, built around five bills and thirteen emergency measures.
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And one of these measures sets the goal of installing AC across all public hospitals, in nursing-home rooms and in schools.
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This measure fits into a coherent programmatic frame.
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Except, well, so, on this particular criterion, we're in exactly the same scope as the Ciotti bill.
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Public hospitals, nursing homes, schools. Not a word on psychiatric services. Not a word on MAS, on FAM, on group homes, on supported-living residences.
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Not a word on people on antipsychotics or antidepressants. Not a word on these very bodies we've been trying to name for two videos now.
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And honestly it's even bleaker when you read the whole plan, because France Insoumise's heatwave plan is 31 pages, 5 bills and 13 emergency measures.
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It talks about construction workers. It talks about taxi drivers. It talks about homeless people.
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It talks about people who have to look after their kids. It talks about golf courses, it talks about mega-basins, it even talks about the situation in prisons.
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But across the 31 pages, the words psychiatry, neuroleptic, ESAT, disabled workers, or FAM don't appear a single time.
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It's not that the omission is materially worse in its consequences, it's that the contrast, here, is appalling.
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Once again, the populations we leave out aren't just populations in danger, they're the populations most in danger.
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FI's plan is the most complete plan any French party has written in 2025 on the heatwave — maybe even ever.
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The most left-wing plan, the most detailed, the most argued, visibly bent on naming every social and economic vulnerability the heat exposes.
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Every vulnerability except one — always the same one, the one that dies first. And the worst part isn't even that it's a deliberate omission.
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And honestly I don't even think the insoumis decided to make psychiatrized people invisible. I think it's worse than that.
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I think these bodies have dropped out of the left's field of vision, to the point where even a heatwave plan that claims to name every vulnerability can be written, proofread, signed, filed and published without anyone thinking: "Oh wait, hang on,
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we forgot the people most concerned of all." It's a plan in the image of the French left: that is, ableist and conspicuously neglectful of psychiatrized people.
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So bottom line, we have two parties talking about air-conditioning facilities, and neither one names the facilities where people have died most since 2003, and neither party names the bodies that die most and get counted least.
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You'd think that's already bad enough, but that's only because we're talking here about the ones who at least ask for AC.
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Because I have the honor of announcing that the Palme d'Or of the 2025 heatwave festival, for its public-health irresponsibility, for its catastrophic ranking of the stakes of climate breakdown, and for proving, with force and method, that bourgeois preoccupations are always thought up behind the backs of sick bodies,
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goes, very ironically, to the ecologist party. The ecologist party, which informs us that air-conditioning, well, isn't even a good solution, and that it's even a paltry, borderline far-right plan, because it burns too much electricity, it creates urban heat islands,
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it contributes to climate breakdown, and the real solution is greening cities, shading schoolyards, thermal renovation of buildings and installing sun shading.
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And you know what? On substance, long-term, the ecologists are completely right. Generalized air-conditioning really is an ecological disaster.
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It burns a huge amount of electricity and it shifts the problem instead of solving it.
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And yes, a France where everyone runs AC to escape a climate we keep on wrecking is a France headed for ruin, and blah blah blah, all that.
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On that, I completely agree. I mean, fuck, it's easy to say that when you're not the one dying of heatstroke in a psychiatric ward.
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While we thermally renovate the French housing stock, while we green the cities, while we put sun shading on the south-facing façades, while we plant trees that'll take 20 years to grow, there are people.
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And these people live in MAS where the temperature climbs to 34 degrees. They live in FAM whose corridors aren't air-conditioned.
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They live in group homes built in the 1970s with zero thermal logic. And these people can't wait 20 years.
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They're dying now. Right now, already. But even more so in 10 years. And we don't know how many more, but we've got damn good reasons to think it'll be a lot more.
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And like in the whole history of health policy, the buffer between long-term planning and emergency action is the death of psychiatrized and disabled people.
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When their share gets overtaken by that of able-bodied people, I promise you their tune will be completely different.
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Rethinking a city's planning to create cool islands is great. But one, there's a hell of a lot of people in this country who aren't allowed to leave their room to get to them, those cool islands.
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And two, it takes a generation. Passive solutions are long-term structural solutions, and we need to start putting them in place — urgently, even.
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But never at the cost of the lives of people we can save right now, immediately.
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And sure, it's easy to pile on the ones who actually speak up, but let's not forget the Socialist Party took no position and the government announced no structural measure of this kind.
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In fact, the 2026 budget even plans to cut medico-social funding. So I'll let you imagine whether we're buying AC units with whatever cash is left.
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In any case, if I have to sum up my read of the current proposals through the lens of the first criterion: no party makes a complete, responsible proposal.
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Two come close, but leaving in the shadows precisely the bodies this criterion exists to protect.
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And now, if you hold a role in a political party or you campaign for a political party, you'll find in the description below the video a ready-to-use bill that ticks this first box, because this first criterion is the first
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measure in a set I've called the CRAME law, which stands for Coordinated Reinforcement for Action against Summer Mortality.
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It's exhaustive on scope. So I suggest you take it, draw on it, or rewrite your own based on it.
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To file it as is, if a party ever decides to, you'll just need to draft the extra articles on penalties, on appeals, and on the private homes of the most at-risk people.
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For those people, you could imagine a targeted financial-aid scheme modeled on MaPrimeRénov', the home-renovation subsidy.
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But for the rest, it's all there. And so, on to the next. The second criterion is the explicit naming of vulnerable populations in the National Heatwave Plan.
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And for this one, you'll see, it'll go quick. As a reminder, the National Heatwave Plan, officially called, since 2021, the National Heatwave Management Plan, is the reference document defining how France prepares for heatwaves — who it alerts, who it protects, who it monitors and who it supports.
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And the version currently in force, the 2024 one, is organized around four target audiences.
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The general public, young people and vulnerable people, workers and businesses, athletes and spectators at cultural events.
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In the "vulnerable people" category, the plan names four groups. People aged 65 and over, people aged 60 and over recognized as unfit for work, people recognized as disabled, in generic wording with no detail on psychiatric disability, and pregnant women and infants.
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On top of that, a very vague mention of people taking certain medications that can amplify the effects of heat.
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And that's it. In the French public policy that defines who we protect during heatwaves, in 2024 as in 2026, long-term psychiatrized people are not named, autistic or hypermobile people are not named, people with profound multiple disabilities are not named.
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And once again, MAS, FAM, ESAT and supported-living residences aren't mentioned as facilities to monitor specifically.
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As for people on antipsychotics, they aren't mentioned specifically either. They vanish into the fog of "people taking certain medications." And as we said in the previous video on the subject, the fog here isn't just a harmless generalization, since Nordon, Falissard and Verdoux showed in 2009 that, all else being equal,
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taking antipsychotics doubled the risk of dying during a heatwave. So in that respect, antipsychotics aren't just any medication.
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So criterion 2 is to propose a change to the National Heatwave Plan so these populations are explicitly named, listed, counted, and so the facilities housing them are subject to specific vigilance.
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It's a measure that costs nothing. Literally, not one euro. It's administrative drafting — three pages to add to a plan that already exists.
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Something that could be issued as a decree within 15 days if a government wanted to, and that would have concrete consequences on care, since, as we've also said, naming isn't a rhetorical act, it's a political act.
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Naming a population in a plan is committing to act for that population's protection specifically.
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Fog, from the standpoint of accountability toward public action, is a very well-honed strategy. It lets you avoid any accountability at all, since no one will be able to say: "I was explicitly named and the State didn't protect me."
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And so, in short, you can guess it, in 2025 and 2026, no party has proposed this change to the PNC.
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And I looked. I looked at the Rassemblement National. The RN pushes an AC plan, but nothing on the PNC.
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I looked at France Insoumise. There's a heatwave plan with a fairly broad population, but ultimately very close to the PNC's, which isn't discussed.
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I looked at the ecologists, who have the "plan grand chaud" presented by Léa Balage El Mariky on 26 May 2026, and which covers homeless people and emergency housing.
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So no revision of the PNC, but okay, extrapolating, you can imagine they'd logically add that population.
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I looked at the Socialist Party, where there's absolutely no proposal — they're really deep in petty infighting and they're not doing politics right now.
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I looked at Les Républicains, you know, just in case. And there, well, we've got Bruno Retailleau outright, who was still Interior Minister in July 2025 and declared: "Let's stop asking the State for everything, it's a matter of responsibility."
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So no proposal. And same for the PCF, Reconquête, Place Publique, Debout: nothing. Not a line, not a mention, not a press release.
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I'll grant that the Lecornu II government is indeed preparing an overhaul of the PNC.
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On 27 March 2026, Santé publique France published a technical note titled "Status report and proposals for evolving the surveillance and prevention systems of Santé publique France as part of setting up the future national plan for preparing for and managing extreme temperatures."
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Except, well, it's just a technical note. It's written by epidemiologists, not by politicians. It proposes no direction on which populations to name, and no minister, no party has politically taken up this note to drive a reform.
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The future plan is being prepared in offices, with no political direction, no political naming, and worse, no debate.
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So let me recap, on criterion 2. No party, in France, in 2025 or 2026, has proposed that the National Heatwave Plan explicitly name psychiatrized people, autistic people, people with profound multiple disabilities, people on antipsychotics, and the medico-social facilities housing them, as populations
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and places to monitor as a priority during heat episodes. And the worst part — I'm repeating myself, sorry — is that this criterion 2 is the simplest to implement of all the measures we'll see.
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Literally just adding paragraphs to a document that already exists. It's free. And that's precisely why it interests me so much.
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It's because it's so obvious and so free that it lets us see, concretely, that what's been done up to now is a set of framing choices.
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It's not a question of resources or technical complexity, it's a question of vision. I think a good chunk of you are thinking I'm being a pain in the ass over nothing with my revision of the PNC's target groups.
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I also sincerely think you're wrong, and I'll keep maintaining that deciding to see or not see certain bodies is a major political subject, that naming or not naming certain bodies is a major political decision that needs to be made,
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and that needs to be made publicly, and that for now, in 2026, this political question isn't on a single party's radar, and to me, that already says something about how we intend to run public policy.
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You'll find in the description below the video the second measure of the CRAME law, which contains the paragraphs to add to the National Heatwave Plan so these bodies are named.
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Three pages — three pages to vote through or add to your platform so that France truly and unambiguously commits to the populations it's been explicitly abandoning since 2003.
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And three pages I urge you not to separate from the ones about the third criterion.
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And so the third criterion is specific awareness campaigns. Now, I'll start by heading off the objections coming my way.
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There are people in the comments already typing: "But there are already campaigns? Don't you even know Santé publique France runs campaigns every summer since 2003? Have you been living under a rock?" And yeah, I know. That's exactly why I say specific.
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So yes, indeed, Santé publique France runs campaigns every summer. You know them — the posters at the pharmacy, the flyers at city hall, the radio spots.
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So it's always: drink water, close the shutters, don't go out at the hottest hours, call your elderly relatives.
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That's what we call general-public communication. And yeah, it's true, it exists. Except, first, it's aimed at an average public, calibrated on the average body, with average advice, and it's rigorously unsuited to the bodies we've been talking about for two videos,
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and it has gaps in four places in particular. First, on medications. Santé publique France did publish a document titled "Heatwave and Vulnerable Adults" that lists neuroleptics, tricyclic antidepressants and benzodiazepines as medications at risk in the heat.
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Except this document is meant for health professionals. The general public has no access to it.
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No poster in a pharmacy says: "If you take neuroleptics, your heatwave mortality risk is doubled." No TV campaign says: "If you take antidepressants, your thermoregulation is impaired." So yeah, the information exists, but it doesn't reach the people concerned.
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As a reminder, we're talking about 600,000 people on antipsychotics in France, plus several million on antidepressants.
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Official campaigns list the classic symptoms: thirst, headaches dizziness nausea confusion. Except the confusion that precedes heatstroke doesn't look like what people picture when you say confusion.
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Sometimes it looks a bit more like what I described in the video where I explain what happened to my eye.
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It can be a blanking-out of your inner monologue, a diffuse irritability, an inability to handle the unexpected.
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And in neurodivergent people, these signs are extremely hard to tell apart from what you'd see during a bad autistic day, or during a psychological decompensation, or a phenomenon of paradoxical decompression.
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Now, what I call paradoxical decompression, you know, is that famous thing where you feel ten times worse once you've finished the work than during it.
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Like getting sick the moment your holiday starts, that kind of thing. Which is pretty much what happened to me, by the way.
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Anyway, all that — no campaign talks about it. Nobody's calling for the people concerned to be taught to recognize the early signs of things that can turn serious.
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Me, I talked about an eye, and honestly, what happened to me wasn't fun, but it could've been a lot worse.
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And I'm not some uninformed idiot, for fuck's sake. I've got the data, me, and that means I probably reacted way better than the vast majority of people in my position.
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And it's no point of pride to say that, it's infuriating, it's not okay. The data I've got, you should already have had it too.
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Next, so, third, there's the question of how accessible the information is. Current campaigns are calibrated for a reader of average schooling level, with a video scrolling in the background of a 30-second spot.
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People with an intellectual developmental disorder, people with profound multiple disabilities, people who are illiterate, visually impaired, hard of hearing, cut off from information, people in extreme precarity — all those people get nothing that's accessible to them.
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There's no Easy Read version, no easy-to-read-and-understand version. No pictograms, no adapted communication, no specific informational material in sign language, and even less material geared to the needs of the people who rely on it to communicate.
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And so no braille leaflets handed out either, to keep at home or in facilities — emergency protocols to consult when you need them.
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We've got nothing. And fourth, again, the question of psychiatric comorbidities. Heat worsens psychic disorders. It's documented.
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ER visits for psychiatric decompensation go up during heatwave episodes. Episodes of intense traumatic triggers and flashbacks often spike sharply, but without anyone making the connection, because we rarely link it to that.
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No campaign names these risks, which are secondary risks, and no campaign tells the people concerned to be extra vigilant, advises contacting their psychiatrist or mental-health centre as a precaution, gives tools for flagging these vulnerabilities to those around them in advance.
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Nothing, nothing, and still nothing. So there it is — you've got to understand that when I say specific awareness campaigns, I don't mean more campaigns in general.
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I mean campaigns targeted at, on one hand, the bodies that suffer the most, and on the other, the bodies that die first, with messages tailored to their specific needs and vulnerabilities.
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Now, what do the parties propose on this? I looked, I looked, I looked. Again, I looked a lot, and I'll run through the list real quick.
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RN, nothing. LFI, nothing. The Greens, nothing. The PS, nothing. The government, nothing. Nobody, nothing, nowhere, ever — it doesn't exist.
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Our bodies, nobody gives a damn, and the beautiful part is it's unanimous. Now obviously this'll surprise no one.
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Me, the parties I'm aiming at with my thing are, after all, mainly the left-wing ones.
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It'd surprise me — and I wouldn't reject it, I'd think it was great — but it'd surprise me for right-wing parties to take up my ideas.
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And I get the sense that on the left, the parties have a kind of slightly weird contempt for the concept of awareness campaigns, as if raising awareness weren't a real measure with real impact.
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The left's answer to this kind of criticism, for a good while now, is that awareness campaigns are tools for individualizing structural problems.
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Meaning that the State, by running a campaign to tell you to drink water during the heatwave, throws you back on your individual responsibility instead of investing in structural solutions.
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The classic example is when the State tells you to eat five fruit and veg a day, it throws you back on your responsibility instead of regulating the food industry.
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Same when you're advised to exercise rather than to protect sedentary, sit-down jobs. And all that's fair enough.
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Awareness campaigns are often an alibi that lets the State avoid touching the structural causes.
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Except this criticism, when it becomes a posture, turns against the very people it claims to defend.
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Because yes, the State must reform the list of at-risk medications in the PNC, but while it does, the 600,000 people on antipsychotics in France need to know their treatment doubles their risk of dying during a heatwave.
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The campaign doesn't replace public policy, it complements it and anticipates it pretty well. And here, what really stunned me — not to say shocked me — is the total silence of the left during the heatwave we just went through in May.
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The fact that the left is so good at holding rallies, at spreading ideas and concepts, at fighting the culture war, and at producing dense, accessible public discourse, but didn't do it during this May 2026 heatwave to tell people both that this is exactly what awaits them every summer from now on,
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and to tell the most vulnerable how to protect themselves now, in the emergency. I admit I don't get it.
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As if information about health, or even just taking care of your health when you're a person in some kind of health precarity, weren't political.
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Because the left didn't stay totally silent. Tondelier spoke, Bompard spoke, Balage El Mariky spoke, but none of these statements was aimed at the people who suffer.
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They were only statements against the government and against the RN. And that's fine, it's called being in opposition, it's normal.
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But if you want to get it into people's heads that you're not just positioning yourselves to win electoral contests, and that you're really there to improve people's lives, I don't know, I figure that, short of talking to them, you should at least
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be able to propose, somewhere in your platform, that one day you'll do it. In my view you should do both, but hey, I don't know, maybe that's too much to ask.
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We could, for instance, take inspiration from what Izquierda Unida did in Spain during the first lockdown.
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The party that was at the time in the Spanish left-wing coalition had published on its site a tutorial for making your own mask, with a downloadable pattern and sewing instructions.
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Here we actually had a political party positioning itself as a public-health actor, relaying the healthcare system.
Speaker A
And all that at a moment when, like today with the heatwave, supplies were short, institutions were overwhelmed, and vulnerable populations needed concrete, immediate tools.
Speaker A
So that proves it's doable, and not even that complicated. So to conclude on criterion 3: no party, in 2025 or 2026, has proposed a specific awareness campaign targeted at psychiatrized, autistic, multiply disabled or antipsychotic-treated people, and nothing either on the services and facilities that house them.
Speaker A
No general-public campaign names the doubling of the risk of heatwave death on antipsychotics. None teaches how to recognize the early signs of heatstroke in a neurodivergent body.
Speaker A
And none is accessible in easy-to-read-and-understand form. And here again, like for criterion 2, these campaigns would cost a few hundred thousand euros, a few million would probably be realistic.
Speaker A
You'd produce flyers, spots, posters, in consultation with the relevant associations. Look, it's not the defense budget.
Speaker A
It's a public-communication budget that's frankly ridiculous on the scale of a State, and that costs nothing to announce in a platform, above all.
Speaker A
It's not stuff we're going to ask you to cost out, honestly. You'll find in the description below the video the third measure of the CRAME law, which details the scope of the campaigns to produce, the audiences to reach, the channels to use,
Speaker A
and the people to involve in designing them. It's a few pages to read and pick up so that the people who die first get at least some information meant for them.
Speaker A
And so we move on to the fourth criterion: systematic training for care staff. To make sure I show I know what already exists, and that if I'm talking about this it's not for nothing, I'll say it straight: yes, I know there's stuff that exists.
Speaker A
There are protocols, there are blue plans in nursing homes, there are fact sheets in the wards, there's already plenty of stuff that exists.
Speaker A
I know all that, but the fact that stuff exists doesn't mean it's enough. And I'm sure of one thing, because I was told it a lot after my last video on the heatwave, which is that care workers won't be the ones to contradict me on this.
Speaker A
There really are trainings on the heatwave, and honestly it's a fair bit better than what existed 20 years ago.
Speaker A
Since the order of 12 February 2024, in force as of 1 January 2025, nursing homes have a mandatory blue plan that must be built into the facility's project, approved by the regional health authority, reviewed every year before the summer season,
Speaker A
and that provides for staff training on the heatwave. And since the decree of 27 May 2025 on protecting workers from heat, the employer is required to ensure "adequate information and training of staff." So that's progress, it's better than before.
Speaker A
Except you run into exactly the same problem as with the awareness campaigns. This training, when it exists, is calibrated on the average body, on the basic gestures, on the general conduct to follow.
Speaker A
Usually: drink water, ventilate, monitor body temperature, call emergency services if needed, et cetera. It's all good, it's useful, no problem, but it's far from enough, and in particular, I found at least five blind spots in these trainings.
Speaker A
First, heatwave pharmacovigilance. No systematic training teaches care staff to recognize which medication disrupts thermoregulation, by how much, and with what precise clinical consequences.
Speaker A
Concretely, a psychiatric nurse caring for a patient on neuroleptics during a heatwave should be able, without thinking, to identify that this patient is at doubled risk of heatwave death, and to know which sign to watch first.
Speaker A
Today, that training barely exists anywhere on a systematic basis. It depends on the personal curiosity of the care worker or on the investment of this or that head of department, given that both have pretty little time to manage that kind of personal initiative.
Speaker A
Second, and it's probably the worst blind spot, the clinical distinction between heatstroke, neuroleptic malignant syndrome and psychiatric decompensation.
Speaker A
These three pictures can present extremely similarly. You get hyperthermia, agitation, altered consciousness or neurological signs.
Speaker A
Except the response is completely different for each, and a diagnostic error can kill the person in your care.
Speaker A
In 2025, there's no mandatory, systematic training on that distinction for psychiatric care staff. Again, it depends on the quality of initial training and the choices of each facility.
Speaker A
It's a silent scandal, like others we know of on this topic. Third, the specific care of autistic and traumatized people in a state of hyperthermia.
Speaker A
An autistic person in heatstroke may be unable to communicate what they feel in the expected ways.
Speaker A
They may be in sensory overload, which worsens their state. They may also have impaired interoception that means they don't perceive thirst or thermal discomfort.
Speaker A
And the standard care response — with possible physical restraint, verbal checks, a quick exam — can be counterproductive, even very dangerous.
Speaker A
No systematic training teaches staff these specifics. Fourth, the care of people with profound multiple disabilities.
Speaker A
Forced hydration, monitoring urine output, adapting positioning, or managing swallowing difficulties during heatstroke — again, these are precise and sometimes life-saving medical techniques that get no systematic national training.
Speaker A
Fifth, the training of non-care staff who work with vulnerable populations. Home-care workers who go into the homes of people on psychotropics, ESAT workshop supervisors who oversee disabled workers, prison guards in cells at 40 degrees, day-shelter staff for homeless people.
Speaker A
All these people are on the front line, and no systematic training prepares them to recognize the early signs or to refer people correctly.
Speaker A
So that's what I mean by systematic training for care staff. Not more trainings in general, but trainings targeted at caring for specific bodies in the heat, mandatory for everyone who works with those bodies.
Speaker A
Now, as always, what do the parties propose? Obviously, I looked, I really combed through every platform and everything that came out in the press.
Speaker A
And so: RN, nothing. LFI, despite the size of its heatwave plan, nothing at all.
Speaker A
Greens, nothing. PS, nothing. LR, nothing. PCF, nothing. On 11 June 2025 the current government presented a psychiatry plan with 26 measures that plans to train 100 extra psychiatry residents a year and to scrap the numerus apertus to train more doctors.
Speaker A
That's good, but this plan, at no point, connects with the heatwave. No measure in the 2025 psychiatry plan addresses the care of psychiatrized people during extreme heat.
Speaker A
As if the two subjects, mental health and the heatwave, had no link between them.
Speaker A
And I think I no longer need to explain how dumb it is to think that way.
Speaker A
And here again, it's a scandal — but one nobody gives a damn about. Let me remind you, because it's no small thing, that mental health is the 2025 National Cause.
Speaker A
Yannick Neuder, the Health Minister, made a couple of lukewarm announcements on psychiatry. The HAS published a 2025-2030 program on mental health and psychiatry.
Speaker A
Everyone talks about better training, better care, better support. And in the middle of all that, the question of how we specifically look after these people when it's 38 degrees in the shade, well, it isn't asked — when it ought to be central.
Speaker A
Once again, the subjects are there, the people who should be protected are identified, the data is available, but the political link between mental health and the heatwave doesn't exist in the platforms, in the plans, or in the laws.
Speaker A
So on criterion 4, let me recap. No party, in 2025 or 2026, has proposed a systematic program to train care and medico-social staff in the specific care of psychiatrized, autistic, multiply disabled and thermoregulation-disrupting-medication populations during heat episodes.
Speaker A
The nursing-home blue plan exists, but it stays very generic. The 2025 psychiatry plan exists, but isn't connected to the heatwave at all, and the parties' platforms, themselves, are totally silent on that link.
Speaker A
You'll find in the description below the video the fourth measure of the CRAME law, which details the mandatory training content, the professional audiences concerned, and the ways to implement it.
Speaker A
A few pages for next to nothing, a trifle, just something that would mean that in France, the people caring for the most at-risk bodies know exactly what to do so those bodies don't drop dead on their watch.
Speaker A
And so we reach the fifth and final criterion: investment in French climate-health research. Same as for the last two, I'll defuse the objections first, and here, as it happens, it should sound something like: "But there's already research — you've got Inserm, the CNRS, Santé publique France
Speaker A
putting out epidemiological bulletins. What more do you want?" Well, I'll tell you exactly what more I want.
Speaker A
But first, what already exists. Inserm, a member of the European Sphera consortium on climate and health, has a program called "Preparing for Climate Change." There's also a research infrastructure called France Exposome, led by Inserm with the EHESP, Ineris, INRAE and several universities,
Speaker A
which studies, well, the exposome — that is, the whole set of environmental exposures of a person across their lifetime.
Speaker A
On top of all that, there's a Climate PEPR called TRACCS for climate modeling. There are PEPRs on digital health, on mental health, on emerging infectious diseases, on zoonoses.
Speaker A
So there you go, broadly, yes, there's already research. Except there is, in France, to this day, in May 2026, no national research program dedicated specifically to the climate-health nexus.
Speaker A
No climate-health PEPR, no priority program to study heatwave excess mortality among incarcerated, psychiatrized, autistic, multiply disabled, antipsychotic-treated or psycho-traumatized people.
Speaker A
No national cohort dedicated specifically to the effects of heat on neurodivergent bodies. No longitudinal study on the medications that disrupt thermoregulation in at-risk populations, when we have a list of 16 categories of medications involved and several million people on those treatments.
Speaker A
The only solid reference point in French on psychotropic excess mortality is still the Nordon-Falissard-Verdoux study.
Speaker A
And let me remind you that this study dates from 2009 and is about a heatwave 23 years old, and the weather parameters that caused it were less severe — or rather less intense — than May 2026's.
Speaker A
Meteorologically, May 2026 is worse than August 2003. The only difference is the month. It's hotter in August. So the heatwaves are worse.
Speaker A
So it's pretty wild to realize that, after all this time, and even as the researchers themselves sign op-eds demanding resources, the French political power couldn't care less.
Speaker A
It's not as if we didn't have competent people in France to do research on this.
Speaker A
We do, we've got them. It's just that we give them neither the steering nor the money.
Speaker A
And if it's like the audiovisual sector and the guys are waiting for billionaires to fund it, I think we can wait a very long time.
Speaker A
In November 2024, academics from the Sphera consortium, including Robert Barouki, who's a biochemist at Inserm, published a public op-ed asking the European Commission for more resources to study the health effects of global warming.
Speaker A
The figures they cited were notably 70,000 heat deaths in Europe in 2022, 47,000 deaths in Europe in 2023, and 570,000 deaths worldwide since 2003 from extreme climate events.
Speaker A
And their conclusion was, and I quote: "Funding research on the climate-health nexus is crucial to preserve public health and ensure the resilience of our societies." So French researchers sign a public op-ed in the press to tell their own country, Europe and the world
Speaker A
that they don't have the means to do what needs doing. And what does France do in response? Well, it cuts.
Speaker A
On 13 March 2026, the CNRS board votes, at the request of Prime Minister Lecornu, a 20-million-euro saving on its 2026 budget.
Speaker A
The CNRS CEO, Antoine Petit, talks in an internal letter about an initial 2026 budget with a 239-million-euro shortfall and over 500 million euros in costs the State hasn't offset since October 2024.
Speaker A
And meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron goes and gives a speech at the One Health summit in Lyon in April 2026 to say that all progress rests on free, open and independent science.
Speaker A
Would you like a little more contempt with your institutional gaslighting? You really have to take this in: we cut research at the exact moment it's absolutely necessary and vital for us to understand what's killing people and how to protect them from it.
Speaker A
And then, of course, research in general is a mess, you know. No point hoping the subjects that are the most politically annoying to carry get prioritized.
Speaker A
When you look at research budgets in France, they follow the France 2030 national acceleration strategies, that is, whatever can produce an economic return.
Speaker A
Digital health, biotherapies, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, basically anything that can make France a "European leader" in something, and so obviously not what can save the lives of suffering, neurodivergent people in 10 years.
Speaker A
Because we already know, let's be honest, that the vitality of these bodies, in the current political calculus, isn't worth the same as the future vitality of the European industries to be built.
Speaker A
So we need something else. We need a national climate-health research program that's as structured, as funded, as visible and as political as the other priorities are.
Speaker A
We need to fund longitudinal cohorts on the bodies we've been trying to defend for two videos.
Speaker A
We need systematic epidemiological studies during each heatwave episode, with breakdowns by population and by treatment.
Speaker A
We need clinical research on thermal-emergency protocols adapted to neurodivergent bodies. We need social-science research on the lived experience of the heatwave inside medico-social institutions.
Speaker A
We need participatory research involving the associations and the self-advocacy collectives of the people concerned.
Speaker A
And faced with these needs, faced with these necessities that everyone in the research world has been demanding for years, let's see what the political parties propose.
Speaker A
Okay, same as for the other criteria, I'll run through the list real quick. At the Rassemblement National, the only move there is is a 2025 budget amendment demanding the research-funding law be respected. Nothing on climate-health.
Speaker A
At LFI, in its 31-page heatwave plan, 13 measures and 5 bills, the word research appears just once, and only to cite the National Institute for Research and Safety at Work.
Speaker A
No measure addresses climate-health research. The ecologists, same thing, but for them honestly, I find it baffling given the name of their party.
Speaker A
But anyway, their Big Heat plan doesn't mention research. The more you dig, the more it's a tiny little heat plan, you know.
Speaker A
The PS proposes nothing. The PCF couldn't give a fuck. Ruffin draws comics. Attal does outright self-promo in the middle of the heatwave, and the government he was part of made cuts.
Speaker A
Reconquête, Place Publique, Debout, all of it — obviously, nothing, no surprise. And it's not for nothing that I finish on this criterion, because it's almost the most damning of the five.
Speaker A
Because for the other four, you could at least tell yourself it was oversight, negligence or just ignorance about these issues.
Speaker A
But for climate-health research, it's active betrayal. France has the researchers, it has the institutions, it has the data.
Speaker A
And at the very moment these same researchers step up publicly to demand resources, France cuts their budget.
Speaker A
Meanwhile, Germany has long funded a dedicated program, the UK co-pilots the "Advancing Research on Climate and Health" initiative with Canada.
Speaker A
And us, we've got Lecornu cutting 20 million from the CNRS and Macron giving speeches on free and open science.
Speaker A
And on the fringes of all that, we've got an opposition that proposes nothing. Jack shit. Just wonderful.
Speaker A
So on criterion 5, let me recap. No party, in 2025 or 2026, has proposed a structured, funded national climate-health research program that would specifically cover the populations listed in the previous video and in the other criteria of this one.
Speaker A
So, if you write or contribute to political platforms, and you think, like me, that it would be — if not urgent — at least minimally relevant to bring it up to the scale of the issues I'm talking about,
Speaker A
you'll find in the description below the video the fifth and final measure of the CRAME law, which details the priority content of a national climate-health research program, the institutions that could be responsible for it, and the multi-year funding arrangements.
Speaker A
A few pages so that at least the most contemporary questions of life or death can be taken seriously in France, as scientific objects worthy of funding.
Speaker A
For the CRAME law as a whole, I'm also including in the description a shorter version, a so-called "programmatic" version, which sums up the law's contributions, the point of each measure, and the various points to add to a political platform,
Speaker A
for anyone who'd want to defend this vision. But before you go, there's something we need to say to each other.
Speaker A
We've seen five criteria, five demonstrations and five times the same conclusion. No political party in France, in 2025 or 2026, names the people who die first, proposes the protections they deserve, or funds the research that concerns them.
Speaker A
It's not one party with a hole in its platform, it's the whole of the French political offering with a hole shaped like a psychiatrized, an autistic, a multiply disabled, a traumatized, prisoners, people on neuroleptics — and so on.
Speaker A
Five criteria, five different angles, and five times the same gap. At some point, we've got to say it: ableism is no longer a gap, it's a political project.
Speaker A
And the beautiful part is that this project is coherent across the entire political class.
Speaker A
We're a bit over 300 days from the first round of the 2027 presidential election.
Speaker A
In a few weeks, the platforms will start to set. In a few months, the campaign manifestos will start to be written.
Speaker A
And if nothing moves by autumn 2026, we won't have, in 2027, a single presidential platform worthy of the deaths we've been piling up since 2003.
Speaker A
So either we try now, or we accept that this election plays out without having raised the question of the first corpses that each of the coming heatwaves will sow.
Speaker A
And that's why the CRAME law is in the description, why it's freely available, and why it's drafted legally so it can be filed as is.
Speaker A
Because the only way to force the political conversation is to put a precise, defensible object on the table.
Speaker A
And the object, now, is right there. Nobody can say anymore "we don't have time," "we don't know how to do it" or "we're not trained for that." The time, I've put it in; your training, it's right there.
Speaker A
Now, the rest of the job is to not make all this pointless. And as for me, I'm done.
Speaker A
Well, obviously I'm not entirely done with the heatwave subject. I'll obviously try to make, as I promised you, videos that are more "useful" on an individual level.
Speaker A
More scientific videos to try to understand why your bodies do what they do during intense heat, and more practical videos on how to react and how to protect yourself best.
Speaker A
I'm very disorganized, I know it doesn't show, you know, because when I'm on something, I'm only on that.
Speaker A
But because of that, I probably won't manage to do it all in one summer.
Speaker A
In any case, know that the work on this subject continues, and that yours, now, is to support me and to try to spread, if you believe in it, the video you've just watched.
Speaker A
There you go — spread it to your comrades, to the activists you know, and maybe to your elected officials.
Speaker A
There's a real political failure around this subject, and anything we can do to make it visible will already be a huge service rendered to suffering people.
Speaker A
If you find my work useful, you can, as usual, support me on Patreon, the link's in the description, and it's all the more useful to do that now since this video wasn't edited by me.
Speaker A
I hired an editor to help me make it. So that means two things. The first is that the support you already give me, and for which I thank you immensely, let me spend more money on the quality of my videos.
Speaker A
Where was I? I've lost the start of the sentence. And the second is that the more you support me, the more money I have to invest in what I do.
Speaker A
And the more money I have to invest in what I do, the more I can pay my editor.
Speaker A
And the more I can pay my editor well, the more — there you go, I screw up right on the bit that's meant for you. See? It's funny.
Speaker A
And the more I can pay my editor, the more I can ask them to edit more videos.
Speaker A
So that means more videos, and better quality, on this channel. I'm not bullshitting you, you've seen it, right — I didn't go off to the Bahamas.
Speaker A
It's linear, right from the start. The more money I have, the better the videos.
Speaker A
Whether it's the setup, the lighting, the sound treatment. You see, I really do invest what you give me to make quality, and god, what a joy to be able to make quality. Anyway.
Speaker A
Thanks to the brilliant, marvelous and fantastic Double Du, who hates being complimented, for editing this video, thanks to the people who give on Patreon and through YouTube memberships, and thanks to ganciclovir, a great antiviral I've been sticking in
Speaker A
my eye for three days and that's been a real comfort during this time. So as for me, I won't wish you a good summer, you know, because I know it's probably going to be rotten, but I at least wish you to be able to take good care of yourself,
Speaker A
to let others take care of you if you can't do it yourself, and to take care of others in return — and I'll see you next time.
Speaker A
I've never done this gesture and I don't know if it was a good idea.
Topics:heatwaveFranceclimate changepublic healthvulnerable populationspolitical platforms2027 presidential electionair-conditioningclimate-health researchpolicy proposals
