In this short paper we analyse some paradoxical aspects of France’s Foucauldian heritage: (1) while several French scholars claim the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what Foucault called biopolitics, popular reaction instead suggests a biopolitical failure on the part of the government; (2) One of these failures concerns the government’s inability to produce reliable biostatistical data, especially regarding health inequalities in relation to COVID-19. We interrogate whether Foucaldianism contributed, in the past as well today, towards a certain myopia in France regarding biostatistics and its relation to social inequalities in health. One might ask whether this very data could provide an appropriate response to the Foucauldian question: What kind of governance of life is the pandemic revealing to us?

在这篇短文中，我们分析了法国福柯传统的一些矛盾方面：(1) 虽然一些法国学者声称 COVID-19 大流行是福柯所谓的生命政治的完美例子，但民众的反应却表明政府的生命政治失败; (2) 其中一项失败涉及政府无法提供可靠的生物统计数据，特别是与 COVID-19 相关的健康不平等数据。我们质疑福卡尔主义在过去和今天是否导致了法国在生物统计学及其与健康方面的社会不平等关系方面的某种短视。人们可能会问，这些数据是否可以对福柯的问题提供适当的回答：这场流行病向我们揭示了什么样的生活治理？