Raoult, the anti-system professor

Audio 02:44

By: Amaury de Rochegonde Follow

A look back at Professor Didier Raoult, the director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection, and the controversies it arouses in the media. 

Publicity

"  They talked about it  ": the comparison is often made with this drawing by Caran d'Ache from 1898, where we see a peaceful family dinner turning into pugilat after we talked about the Dreyfus affair.

In this period of deconfinement, it is this time Professor Raoult who opposes the French. After a study in the scientific journal The Lancet which claims that treatment with chloroquine is ineffective and perhaps even harmful, a hundred doctors and researchers sent an open letter on Friday May 29 to criticize the methodology used by this leading British medical journal.

The statistical rigor and the exploitation of the data on which the newspaper is based, with its 96,000 cases hospitalized worldwide, are disputed. A counter-offensive that promises to revive the media machine while the WHO has suspended the inclusion of new patients in its clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine and that France has banned the use of this molecule against Covid-19.

Restart the machine? In reality, it would be fairer to say that it never stopped shooting. To the point that chloroquine has become a subject of opinion. This week, after BFMTV, LCI sent its star presenter, David Pujadas, to interview Didier Raoult. Or L'Express which headlined on the cover: “Raoult tir à vue”.

Apart from Marseille folklore, what is striking is to see how much the scientist uses the distrust that the media inspire as power, to establish his credibility. His point is not very well supported on the medical level because it starts from the principle that his interlocutor will not understand. Hence the argument of authority: I am right because I know, unlike you who do not understand anything about science. He also opposes big data, to the cold truth of the figures, an experience of care which allowed him to have only 0.5% of deaths in 4,000 cases treated.

What is Raoult's name? First of all, a time when a great doctor is no longer afraid of finding himself on the bench for the respectability of elites. He says he does not need journalists because of his popularity on the Internet, while using the media. In reality, it is a technique of taking political power specific to anti-system candidates, as shown by the communicator Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet.

The difference is that he is not accountable to the voters and seeks only his own esteem. Besides, Raoult is not a populist. As a good Mandarin, he is even very elitist. He is an ambiguous, contradictory, controversial character in a world which is itself ambiguous, contradictory, controversial. It is, in a way, the antidote to a poorly administered pharmacopoeia.

Newsletter Receive all international news directly in your mailbox

Follow all international news by downloading the RFI application

• France
• Health and Medicine
• Coronavirus
• Media

On the same subject

Mid-day guest

Macron-Raoult meeting: "The president does" and at the same time "with chloroquine"

French press review

In the News: the “mano a mano” Emmanuel Macron-Didier Raoult

Below the info, the chronicle

Coronavirus: Professor Raoult exploited on networks