Under the current symbolic order, the truths of medical science are obfuscated by the media and replaced with performative elements that ultimately separate us from reality.

Examining the importance of media communications, Baudrillard proposes the con-cept of “simulacra”, defined by its capacity to replace reality for its operational signs on the screens. We consider that mediatized Science is part of the “precession of the simulacra”. The catastrophic scenario that justified the most draconian policies was first and above all that of the simulations and mathematical models presented on our screens. In the reduction of meaning to the circulation of significations within a system of signs, as it is the case of mediatized Science, our non-mediatized experiences had to be ignored and be replaced by the duplication of its operative signs. Most of us were constantly consuming signs of the catastrophe, thereby suffering from the pandemic (and the new pandemic rules) without suffering from the disease. And the (very real) suffering caused by the governments’ measures, such as lockdowns or other mobility restrictions, is still confused with the sign “pandemic”. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory –precession of simulacra–that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map”98. We had to rely completely on the map drawn by this mediatized Science in order to move; we had to see nothing but the map to conduct ourselves. “Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact -the models come first [...]”.99The mathematical simulations that predicted a terrify-ing reality of indefinite exponential growth were what we had to look at with total atten-tion and mechanical assent. For the public, everything is framed and manipulated within a “neutral” informational space in an aseptic setting. Local politicians had to follow this “information” and the public opinion thus fabricated. In Baudrillard’s terms, “there is nothing now to protect politicians from the virus of opinion; but nothing protects that opinion from the virus of information”.100The numbers, announced by the authorities in the media, were a more perfect, precise and real reality than the reality experienced in our local communities. They were what Baudrillard called the “hyperreality”.101The growing media coverage –the omnipresence of the infosphere–allows “hyperreality” to prevail. It is a reality more important than anything else, with its truths, its facts; it is intended to cover the entire territory, prevent-ing any other perceptions, perspectives or experiences. Behind each piece of information, an event disappears, and virtuality covers the territory. “It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double”.102In 2020, there was a hyperreality vociferated as “scientific”.103This hyperreality then turned into the daily rumor of the people themselves, becoming common sense and public opinion. “The magnified impression of a catastrophe goes viral. [...It is the] social con-struction of an excess believed to be scientific and prudent”.104 Paradoxically, people sought to alleviate the anxiety and uncertainty generated by the media by consuming more information in the media. In this way,there was a “hyperreal certainty.”105We also witness here a modern obsession for the emancipation from contingency through control, through the annihilation of an “enemy”. The result is not virus control but social control by manipulating the signs of the virus, achieving the most impressive blow of governmentality on a planetary scale. Power depends on virtuality and, among other things, on the capacity –through the model, the map, the simulacrum–to designate the Other, the enemy, the threat. “Power exists only as long as it has this symbolic po-tency”.106The “Observable Reality” of pseudo-scientific journalism, as Lyotard107would call it, is based on the criterion of commensurability, which is inseparable from scientific-technical accumulation, and whose most immediate materialization is its operability. Computer language, translatable into media, is a technical-semantic transformation of the Causality Principle108and Sufficient Reason of Philosophy.109Only the calculable, the measurable, the computable is “real”, and it is precisely so because it can be reduced, totalized and manipulated. We all became potential “asymptomatic” threats; we could all cause the death of someone else. An apparently scientific language but without any possibility of falsifiability. Thus, we ask ourselves with Baudrillard: “what can medicine do with what floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, with the duplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer either true or false?”.110It is no longer true or false because the language game that governs it is not epistemic, but performative, and its veracity criterion lies in its efficiency/inefficiency in representing itself, corroborating itself and projecting itself on our screens. The performative efficiency is what matters from a governmentality perspective: statistics were combined with videos of crying doctors and images of hangars full of coffins. The media communicated the horrors and chanted the arrival of our salvation through technological innovation. In both cases, it did not matter much whether their claims were true or false according to the scientific method. It was not necessary to present before the public –not even to the most demanding academic public–any scientific evidence on the general convenience of the lockdowns; why go to the trouble of “the production of proof” in a seamless order of “indisputable truths”?