He returned the keys to the IHU in September 2022, but did not disarm. Didier Raoult is back in the spotlight after the publication this Sunday in the newspaper The world from a platform accusing him of having conducted, by testing his protocol on more than 30,000 people, “the largest ‘wild’ therapeutic trial known to date”. 20 minutes takes stock of this new controversy concerning Didier Raoult (and comes back to the previous ones).
Why this platform?
This forum, co-signed in particular by the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the French-speaking Society of Infectious Pathology and Professor Alain Fisher, President of the Academy of Sciences, reacts to the publication in early April by Didier Raoult and his teams ofa study ” preprint “, that is to say without peer review, relating to 30,423 patients sick with Covid-19 and cared for at the Marseille IHU in March 2020 and December 2021.
The signatories consider that “the ethical and scientific standards” of therapeutic research there “have been largely violated”. They thus denounce “the systematic prescription to patients with Covid-19, whatever their age and symptoms, of drugs as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin or azithromycin, on preprinted prescriptions”. Prescriptions “carried out without any marketing authorization” and “continued, which is more serious, during more than a year after the formal demonstration of their inefficiency “, they write, calling on the authorities to react. According to the authors of this text, this study, conducted “outside any ethical or legal framework”, would constitute “probably the largest ‘wild’ therapeutic trial known to date”.
What does the study published at the beginning of April say?
In his autobiography also published at the beginning of April, Didier Raoult announces the publication and the results of this study of data collected “under the control of a bailiff” (P. 212) in order to “thwart the various strategies put in place to devalue [leur] work “. It reports a mortality rate in its patients of 1.77% and concludes that “hydroxychloroquine, alone or combined (with other molecules in its protocol), was associated with significant protection against death”.
To support this research, which was in many respects to sound the revenge of its protocol, the mortality recorded in its departments was compared to INSEE data. In his book, he gives a popularized version of the conclusion: “the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin combination is associated with mortality at least five times lower than that of other therapies, including azithromycin alone. Ivermectin / azithromycin also gives results, but much less significant than hydroxychloroquine”, argues Didier Raoult in chapter 11, The Covid or the self-fulfilling prophecy.
What are the reactions?
guest of BFM-TV this Tuesday morning, Didier Raoult denied having carried out “a therapeutic trial”, preferring to speak of “an observational study” which “will be used for history”, according to his usual modesty. Although the prescription of hydroxychloroquine had been banned by the High Council for Public Health on May 27, 2020, the Marseille professor considered that this ban was “a political decision but which does not engage [ait] not the personal responsibility of doctors” and that he therefore had “perfectly the right, but also the others, to prescribe hydroxychloroquine”.
On the political side, Olivier Véran, Minister of Health during the health crisis and current government spokesperson, repeated “that hydroxychloroquine has never worked against the coronavirus”, wishing that the authorities be seized “if the conditions of carrying out clinical trials have not been complied with”. Environmental senator Bernard Jomier, a general practitioner by training, for its part announced on Tuesday that it had seized the prosecutor of the Republic of Marseilles.
A new “Raoult case”?
If Dominique Laurens, the public prosecutor of Marseille, were to open a judicial investigation, it would be the second “Raoult file” on the offices of the magistrates of the public health center. In September 2022, after the submission of reports from the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (Ansm) and the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (Igas) on the management of the IHU, an initial investigation was opened. But more than the conditions for carrying out the study, the results of which have just been presented, this investigation focuses on another therapeutic trial relating to tuberculosis and deemed “wild”. The section detailed by the Igas report, for its part, reports pressure on the staff and doctors of the IHU not aligned with Raoult’s position, pointing to various practices “that may fall under criminal qualifications”.
More anecdotally, Didier Raoult has already been in court, after filing a complaint for defamation against his colleague Karine Lacombe who had argued that “legal actions [contre Didier Raoult] for lying before the parliamentary commission are ongoing”. A charge from which she was released in November 2022 in good faith, and not for the veracity of her words.
And Didier Raoult in his judicial response does not stop there. In April 2022, he had during a press conference organized at the IHU in the company of two of his lawyers announced the filing of several complaints, aimed in particular at Mediapart, which had revealed the Ansm report, but also François Crémieux, the director general of the AP-HM for a publication in the newspaper of the institution and people “internal to the AP-HM” suspected of having fraudulently accessed his medical file and that of his wife .