Raoult and hydroxychloroquine: "Much harm for nothing..."

Emmanuelle Ducros 08:46, May 30, 2023

Where we talk about Didier Raoult again. An article published yesterday Monday in Le Monde, and signed by several medical organizations is making a lot of noise. It urges the public authorities to react to what they call "serious shortcomings" at the IHU Méditerranée and the one who was its patron until last September. Serious accusations.

All the more serious because sixteen of the so-called "learned societies" carry this text. Among them, the Society of Pharmacology, Cardiology, Resuscitation.

They denounce a vast clinical study conducted in Marseille, by Didier Raoult, on more than 30,000 patients at the time of the Covid crisis. The results were published last April, in a version that has not been reviewed by other specialists, what is called a preprint. This study is described in the tribune as "the largest wild therapeutic trial known to date"

Wild therapeutic trial? What does that mean?

According to the signatories, a massive clinical trial has been carried out at the IHU of Marseille, consisting of systematically prescribing an antimalarial that has become famous, hydroxychloroquine and an antiviral, azithromicin. And this, always according to the same protocol, including on asymptomatic patients. According to the signatories, the prescriptions took place without a solid pharmacological basis, and in the absence of any evidence of efficacy.

We have here all the characteristics of a study... but it has never received any authorization from the National Medicines Agency. It was carried out outside any legal or ethical framework, but also outside all the marketing authorizations of the molecules concerned. If we summarize the tribune: tens of thousands of people have been used as guinea pigs, without their knowledge, in clandestine research.

It was a health crisis, doesn't that justify relaxing the rules a little?

The problem is that this study was continued more than a year after the demonstration, by many other studies, of the ineffectiveness, even the dangerousness of the prescriptions massively carried out in Marseille. Hydroxychloroquine, for example, causes, according to other large therapeutic trials, a 13% increase in the risk of being intubated and dying. For Didier Raoult, all other rigged works, only his own, yet denounced for their dubious methodology are correct. He is right against the whole world.

For medical societies, a huge health scandal

It is regrettable that they did not protest earlier, but they are fed up with seeing that there are no criminal consequences, no reaction from university supervisors to breaches that are described as old, recurrent.

The damage done is considerable...

Professor Raoult's show medicine has not only damaged scientific credibility. It has fueled the most delusional conspiracy chapels in covid times – and it still feeds them. It has wasted considerable time and money in the fight against the pandemic, suggesting fanciful treatments and denigrating vaccines. And yet, yet, scientists of doctors, alerted as early as 2020 on the Raoult methods. On the holes and results of his method. They were not listened to. They were harassed, dragged through the mud by the IHU teams, to the indifference of the medical institutions. They are finally reacting.