Didier Raoul, the terrifying “end game”

dDid Idier Raoult sign the study too much? Sixteen learned societies and leading scientists, including Academy of Sciences President Allen Fisher, believe the latest, which compares hydroxychloroquine with other treatments in more than 30,000 patients positive for Covid-19, constitutes a therapeutic trial. “wild” – An experiment conducted outside the administrative and ethical rules governing research involving human subjects. in a column published by the worldThey have been surprised by the administrative, departmental and judicial authorities since it was published online in early April.

With their encouragement, the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM) seems to confirm the analysis of the forum signatories on the irregular status of this study, as well as the office of the Minister of Health François Brown. , who sees “A new violation of ethical and deontological rules”. Following the 2021 ANSM, health and research ministers have already taken legal action in early September 2022 on certain practices at the Infectious University Hospital Institute of the Mediterranean (IHU), following a devastating report from their general inspection. The appeal can be extended to this new study.

Without the resolve of a few learned members of the public concerned about the assault on good practice and ethics in clinical research, it is to be feared that Didier Raoult’s repeated insults to the scientific method would have gone unfulfilled. It is time to consider how to avoid such a drift in the future.

We cannot argue with the attempts to control the IHU in recent months, especially under the leadership of the new head of the public aid-hospitals of Marseille and the historical institutional partners of the IHU: the retirement of Didier Raoult, the change of the president at the IHU. Foundation, new director, training on deontological and ethical rules in clinical research…

An unprecedented form of medical populism

But many of Didier Raoul’s lieutenants, to whom he owes his career, are still in office and will sign offensive research. He himself keeps an office in the Square, and has no intention of letting go of an ounce of his influence. Ideally placed to seriously test the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine against a placebo, the microbiologist stubbornly refused to do so, discounting evidence that contradicted his intuition and reduced his anti-systemic rhetoric to absurdity.

At a time when the government announces the creation of twelve new IHUs and four “bioclusters”, all lessons should be taken from the experience of Marseille: if science can use the presentation of itself with the rich personalities of original thinking, this is important. To reflect sound principles of governance and checks and balances in institutions where the temptation of localism and mandarinism is always possible.

Because if it was Covid-19 that exposed Didier Raoult to the general public, the IHU’s dysfunctions were already there. Didn’t the CNRS and Inserm revoke the approval in 2016 and 2019 respectively of the institute that was meant to be the French flagship of infectology? The pandemic underscored this drift, with Didier Raoult choosing to flourish in an unprecedented form of medical populism, addressing patients directly in weekly video sermons without peer judgment. Legal action is needed to remind him that he is not above the law.