- Professor Didier Raoult was heard at length by the deputies in the National Assembly, where he spoke about Gilead, a Californian pharmaceutical laboratory.
- He notably claimed to have identified the doctor "who had received the most money from Gilead in six years".
- He advised the deputies to go and check “conflicts of interest” with the scientific council on the sites dedicated to transparency in the health field. But the operation is not so simple.
The declaration did not go unnoticed during the hearing of Professor Didier Raoult on June 24 at the National Assembly. Before the deputies, the doctor accused the detractors of chloroquine of receiving money from Gilead Sciences, a Californian pharmaceutical laboratory producing remdesivir, another drug tested against Covid-19.
The director of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée said he had identified the person who had made threats against him - facts for which an investigation is underway at the Nantes prosecutor's office. According to Didier Raoult, he is the health professional who "has received the most money from Gilead in six years".
A little earlier in the hearing, Didier Raoult had said, about the relations between certain members of the scientific council and the pharmaceutical laboratories: “All of this is transparent. Look on the Internet, it's easy as cabbage. And the professor to quote the sites "Transparency Health" and "Euros For Docs".
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We followed the advice of Didier Raoult, but the procedure is not exactly "easy as cabbage". A database listing, on declarations by companies, the “links of interest” between pharmaceutical laboratories and health professionals was officially launched in June 2014 to improve “confidence” between users and the world of medical research. after the Mediator scandal. But Transparency Health is difficult to read and difficult to use.
Concretely, unless you start a manual search of all the doctors having links of interest with Gilead Sciences and compare the amounts involved, it is not possible, at this stage, to affirm that a doctor has received more money from Gilead. Because each declaration should be added up in each of the three categories (benefits, agreements, remuneration) for each health professional concerned. For Gilead, there are, for example, nearly 115,000 entries.
In addition, if the Transparency Health database can be downloaded from the data.gouv.fr website, the file is so large that it cannot be manipulated by traditional software.
In a 2016 report, the Court of Auditors also regretted that it is "almost impossible, except to re-enter all the data, to have a global vision of the content of the site" Transparency Health. According to the same report, Gilead Sciences was one of the most generous companies with health workers in 2014, having paid more than 2.8 million euros in benefits. But the laboratory was far behind Novartis Pharma and its 10.4 million euros in declared benefits.
Another complex tool
The Euros For Docs collective, mentioned by Professor Raoult, wants to "simplify access" to the Transparency Health database to explore lobbying in the health industries. This database has already been used by the media. A collective of journalists in the region, Data + Local, used it for its #TransparenceCHU surveys, published in January.
Thus, for Gilead Sciences, the laboratory has declared 63.3 million euros in interest links since 2014. But this tool also has its limits: it is not possible to classify the total amount spent by a company for each practitioner. The platform gives, however, the possibility of consulting the total amount of the links of interests between a doctor and a company. But, again, to be able to say that a health professional is the one who received the most money, one would have to compare him with all the other practitioners, one by one.
Finally, let's come back to the identification of the author of the threats. An investigation for "acts of intimidation, but not death threats" is underway, conducted by the Nantes prosecution. We remind you, the presumption of innocence prevails and Didier Raoult is not justified in designating, even without naming him, the author of the threats before he is found guilty.
The public prosecutor of Nantes had indicated to AFP, at the end of March, that his services had been charged with the preliminary investigation because the telephone call targeting the director of the Mediterranean IHU had been made from Nantes. The telephone used could be that of a doctor from the Nantes University Hospital, according to Le Canard enchaîné . Asked about the progress of the investigation, the prosecution, which has announced no indictment at this stage, informed us that it was not "planned to communicate on this case".
Contacted by 20 Minutes , the Nantes University Hospital said it did not want to "comment on a case under investigation for facts dating back several months". The establishment still wishes to assert that it did not favor one treatment over another. He specifies, in a response sent by e-mail, that he included "78 patients in more than a dozen therapeutic trials during the Covid-19 crisis, by giving priority in March to the Discovery study coordinated by Inserm ”. This clinical trial tested four treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and remesivir. But the World Health Organization decided on June 17 to stop the trial for hydroxychloroquine.
The Nantes University Hospital adds that it took part in the Hycovid study, promoted by the Angers University Hospital, to test a treatment with hydroxychloroquine. And also indicates that the other therapeutic trials set up at the CHU are coordinated "either by health establishments or by pharmaceutical laboratories such as Roche, Novartis, Karyofarm, Gilead and Sanofi". This work with the health industry is "very structured," he says.
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