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Do you have the magic potion against coronavirus or is it a comic panoramix ? Didier Raoult is the current doctor in France, the apostle of hydroxychloroquine, a derivative of chlorine, a treatment against malaria . He says it works. His detractors, that the study is a poof. He has his supports, Trump among them, and his detractors.
This Holy Thursday has received the visit of President Emmanuel Macron. At its headquarters, the Mediterranean University Hospital Institute of Marseille. The same place where queues of hundreds of patients are waiting for a diagnosis and a remedy .
The President traveled without a press. The meeting was not on the agenda. According to the BFMTV channel, under the influence of his wife Brigitte. Within a plan of visits to research centers. Today he was in the Kremlin Bicêtre hospital where the Discovery trial is being carried out, which studies four treatments for the pandemic. Instead, authorization has been withdrawn until further evaluation in a clinical trial that included administering to patients a solution derived from the blood of marine worms.
The search for a remedy against the virus that has cost the lives of more than 90,000 people worldwide, according to official statistics, is a global priority (and career). Macron will address the nation on Monday night . It will be the fourth time since the pandemic began. Both sides of the crisis are frowning. In the last 24 hours, 412 people have died in French hospitals, or that brings the total from the beginning of March to 8044, which added to those who died in nursing homes, totals 12,210 deaths . The hope is that for the first time there are fewer patients admitted for resuscitation, 7066 patients.
The French Government is going to extend the confinement for another 15 days . The president will try to recover points in the health field when he is increasingly criticized by the public opposition. Above all, due to the lack of masks. The debate increases on the measures to be taken to get out of confinement. The economic situation should be in the script of the presidential speech. The pandemic has dragged France into a recession never seen before . In the first quarter GDP has fallen 6%, the worst quarter since 1945.
This is the context. A circumstance in which Macron cannot afford enemies of the stature (media, at least) of dr. Raoult. It has its fans. Donald Trump said his medication is a "godsend." In France, a petition for the prescription of Plaquenil, the commercial name of the product, exceeds 456,000 signatures. Among its promoters, Philippe Douste Blazy, former Minister of Health in the 90s.
He is also supported by Christian Estrosi, the right-wing mayor of Nice who went with him to high school. And the president of the Provence-Alpes Côte d'Azur region, Renaud Muselier who is a doctor. From the socialist party to the extreme right, Raoult has friends in every political chapel . You must have a good hand. Its hospital center has received at least 73 million in grants.
On the other side, the Parisian elite. At the time of the former Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn, chloroquine was classified as a poisonous product . And the National Institute of Health and Medical Research stripped the center of its quality label. He defended himself without regard. He accused the official entity of conflict of interest because its director, Yves Lévy, is the husband of Buzyn. Of this she said that she had been married to a son of Simone Veil, flirting with anti-Semitism.
The controversial scientist is a born quarrel and speaks without brake. On January 21, when the Chinese government was about to confine the entire population of Hubei, he posted this comment on YouTube: " Three Chinese die and mount a global alert, the WHO enters the rag and televisions and radios do not stop talking about it. It's crazy. There is no lucidity. " Until mid-February he mocks the epidemic. Soon after, on the same channel, he says that chloroquine will kill covid-19. Without evidence. These will arrive on March 20. The International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents publishes a 15-day trial of 30 coronavirus patients.
None of the treated patients died or ended in resuscitation ... until it was discovered that three patients who ended up in the ICU and one who died, ahem, were excluded from the trial result . Criticism piles up to the point of wondering how a scientific publication was able to pass up such a plethora of errors, dubious statistics, and fat blunders. Some accuse the magazine's director, Jean Marc Rolain, who signs the study and is on the payroll of the center that Raoult runs, of a conflict of interest .
So why does Macron pay him a visit? Two hypotheses to boat soon. One, just in case it works. And two, by public opinion. Because faced with a disease that causes so many deaths, the search for a remedy becomes pressing . Raoult is immensely popular in France. And although with its meanders, it is an eminence in infections.
That is why things have been overlooked that are not forgiven a public figure, such as his skeptical positions on climate change. For this reason, the Minister of Health, Olivier Vérin, who is also a doctor, has approved the treatment of the product in question for seriously ill patients and always in the hospital . And so, President Macron included him in his scientific advice, although the star has been playing truant for 15 days.
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