Hans Rosling est un chercheur absolument hors catégorie. Le fait qu’il soit non affilié et aussi compétent en fait une personnalité très originale à l’heure où trop souvent, dans l’imaginaire des gens, l’affiliation est plus importante que la compétence réelle.
since 20 October, he has occupied room 319 of Liberia’s Ministry of Health & Social Welfare, a large yellow building not far from the Atlantic Ocean.
When he saw the epidemic curve go up in Sierra Leone and down in Liberia in October, he was skeptical, and he decided to find out firsthand what was happening. He canceled his lectures and contacted the Liberian government. “I’m not a virologist and I’m not a clinician, but I have considerable experience investigating messy epidemics in poor parts of Africa,” he says.
After he arrived in Monrovia, Rosling started by doing simple things, such as proofreading the ministry’s epidemiological reports, which he says nobody had time for. He changed an important detail in the updates: Rather than listing “0 cases” for counties that had not reported any numbers—which could be misleading—he left them blank. Next, he tackled the problem behind the missing data. Some health care workers couldn’t afford to call in their reports, because they were paying the phone charges themselves; Rosling set up a small fund to pay for scratch cards that gave them airtime.
Rosling says he’s tired of the portrayal of Africa as a continent of incompetence, superstition, and rampant corruption. “I am astonished how good people are that I work with here, how dedicated, how serious,” he says. When The New York Times reported that governmental infighting was hampering the Ebola response, Rosling tweeted: “Don McNeil misrepresents Liberia’s EBOLA-response to win the MOST INCORRECT ARTICLE ABOUT EBOLA AWARD.” His self-assurance and impatience with opinions he disagrees with can grate on others. “I find him quite irritating,” says one Western colleague. “Mostly because he turns out to be right about most things.”
His talks still garner “obscene fees,” he says—some $600,000 annually—which he uses to finance the Gapminder Foundation, a nonprofit he set up to bring development statistics to a broad audience. [voilà une excellente justification pour faire payer très cher les conférences ! - pas pour acheter un rolls, mais pour financer une initiative collective]
Rosling is fond of emphasizing that most people’s view of the world is wrong. He often asks how many children get the standard childhood vaccinations—20%, 50%, or 80%? Most people answer 20%, but it’s 80%. “The problem is that the education systems in North America and Europe and the media have not conveyed a fact-based view of the world.”
