Do not trust this man with your medicine!


Didier Raoult, quack

We all knew, way back in 2020, that the paper that launched the myth of hydroxychloroquine was total crap. In 2020!

The report was not a randomized clinical trial—one in which many people are followed to see how their health fares, not simply whether a virus is detectable. And Oz’s “100 percent” interpretation involves conspicuous omissions. According to the study itself, three other patients who received hydroxychloroquine were too sick to be tested for the virus by day six (they were intubated in the ICU). Another had a bad reaction to the drug and stopped taking it. Another was not tested because, by day six, he had died.

It was all about selective deletion of negative data to get a positive effect. Now, here in 2024, people are still saying exactly the same thing…well, not exactly, because they’ve also uncovered further problems in the study. Science says what everyone said all along!

The paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA), led by Philippe Gautret of the Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), claimed that treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug, reduced virus levels in samples from COVID-19 patients, and that the drug was even more effective if used alongside the antibiotic azithromycin. Then–IHU Director Didier Raoult, the paper’s senior author, enthused about the promise of the drug on social media and TV, leading to a wave of hype, including from then–U.S. President Donald Trump.

But scientists immediately raised concerns about the paper, noting the sample size of only 36 patients and the unusually short peer-review time: The paper was submitted on 16 March 2020 and published 4 days later. On 24 March, scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik noted on her blog that six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. Larger, more rigorous trials carried out later in 2020 showed hydroxychloroquine did not benefit COVID-19 patients.

Critics of Raoult’s paper have pointed out more damning problems since. In an August 2023 letter published in Therapies, Bik and colleagues noted the cutoff for classifying a polymerase chain reaction test as positive was different in the treatment and control groups. The letter also raised questions about whether the study had received proper ethical approval, and noted an editorial conflict of interest: IJAA’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jean-Marc Rolain, was also one of the authors. (A statement saying he had not been involved in peer review was later added to the paper.) The letter called for the paper to be retracted.

A bad study with weak statistics and manipulated data that led to millions of people doping themselves with a medication that was worse than useless against COVID — and people are still taking it — but it was the simplistic, magic pill that they wanted. The doctors might have rejected it, but Joe Rogan and Dr Oz endorsed it.

There is good news. The paper has finally been retracted, well after it has already done harm.

The corresponding author, Didier Raoult, dissents. He disagrees with all the scientists all around the world who looked at his sloppy work four years ago and said that this should have been rejected from the get-go. This is not surprising: he looks like a terrible hack.

According to the notice, the three authors who raised concerns about the paper “no longer wish to see their names associated with the article.” Gautret and several other authors told the investigators they disagreed with the retraction, and the investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern.

28 garbage papers? I don’t know how many papers this guy has published, the only notable metric is his significant contributions to bad science.

Comments

  1. KG says

    I was shocked when I discovered that a respected French academic colleague was completely pro-Raoult. I’d never detected any other batty ideas from her, so my guess is that it was about him being French.

  2. seversky says

    From Wikipedia

    Yet, Raoult’s extremely uncommon and high publication rate results from his “attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute”,[46] a practice that has been called “grossly unethical” by Steven Salzberg.[47] Since 2013 he has been one of the overseas scientists co-affiliated with the King Abdulaziz University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,[48][49] known to “offer highly cited researchers lucrative adjunct professorships, with minimal requirements for them to be physically present, in return for being listed by them as a secondary affiliation”, and so increase its own institutional citation index.[50]

    Of the 1,836 articles published by Raoult between 1995 and 2020 (amounting to over 120 a year, or approximately one article every three days), 230 were published in two journals edited by Michel Drancourt, who was his right-hand man at the IHU and a close collaborator for over 35 years. Staff members have editorial positions at almost half the journals that have published Raoult’s work. The funding of French health institutes according to their number of publications has been suggested to be at the root of his large number of publications.[51]

    This looks like the paper publishing version of the Gish Gallop – the Raoult Rush?

  3. magistramarla says

    Ask anyone with an autoimmune disease – hydroxycloroquine is given to us to tamp down the rampant inflammation which we face everyday. It is a firstline drug for us. Later, we are often started on methotrexate or something else as our disease progresses. It was discovered during WWII that soldiers with Lupus improved when they were taking HCQ for Malaria and it has been prescribed “off-lable” for autoimmune disease patients ever since.
    I have systemic Sjogren’s disease and I’ve been taking HCQ since 2008 for inflammation. During the pandemic, it was impossible to get, so I simply suffered without it until I was able to talk my unaware PCP into sending me to a rheumatologist.
    The only thing that he will prescribe for Sjogren’s is HCQ, since he doesn’t believe that Sjogren’s is really systemic. It “takes the edge off” of my pain and swelling, but that’s all it’s good for. If the orange fool and his minions again make HCQ hard to get for those of us who have a good medical reason for taking it, it will make my life that much more painful.

  4. dlpthomas says

    Publishing as many papers as this guy did, estimated to be one every 3 days between 1995 and 1920, is a gigantic red flag. Sadly he is not the researcher who attaches “his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute”

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