“Checkmate”, tweeted Didier Raoult on July 13, the day of the official appointment of Professor Pierre-Edouard Fournier as his successor at the IHU. Pierre-Edouard Fournier is a former student of Didier Raoult, under whose supervision he completed his thesis in 1999.
“This appointment is a charade. Didier Raoult will continue to carry out covertly”, believes Cédric Bottero, general secretary of the CGT FERC Sup of the University of Aix-Marseille (AMU) who conducted the CHST hearings (Health, Safety and working conditions). Hearings which have highlighted in particular “situations of moral and sexual harassment since 2017”, supports the trade unionist. An element of dysfunction also denounced in the report of the IGAS-IGESR mission, following which the government seized the Marseille public prosecutor’s office, which opened a judicial investigation.
“This report documents and confirms serious abuses and malfunctions within the IHU in terms of management, conduct of research activities and certain care practices”, add the University Hospitals of Marseille (AP-HM) in a press release. . The management of the AP-HM, the establishment to which the IHU is attached, recalls “its refusal to tacitly renew the agreement which until then bound the two institutions. The revision of this convention will implement the recommendations made by the inspections”, specifies the press release.
free speech
Measurements and reports whose content “does not surprise” Cédric Bottero. For the trade unionist, it is “not just about changing the pinhead but the whole direction. I expect a double movement. First, that the referral to the prosecution goes to the end with enough elements for indictments. Then, that the AMU, the Inserm and the IRD take administrative measures without waiting for the end of the legal proceedings to take precautionary measures and move the leaders away from there”. In particular the faithful of Didier Raoult, Professor Eric Chabrière and Philippe Parola, head of the infectious diseases department of the IHU.
During the CHST carried out in two of the four IHU laboratories, many individual testimonies sketched out the beginning of “a liberation of speech. The appointment of Fournier put a stop to it. The agents are waiting to see if things really move, ”continues Cédric Bottero, while a new CHST hearing is scheduled for Wednesday and a following one next week.