France suffered in its self-esteem during the covid crisis. The response to the pandemic was slow and contradictory. Its excessive bureaucracy, corporatist frictions and the shortcomings of its health system were exposed. Patients had to be urgently transferred to Germany. French pharmaceutical laboratories failed in the attempt to get a vaccine out on time. And a doctor, Didier Raoult, ended up becoming a caricature of the worst health populism, a charlatan in a white coat. His apparently magical remedy against the coronavirus did not work and he was totally discredited.
The scandal starring Raoult, a specialist in infectious diseases and former director of the University Hospital Institute (IHU-Méditerranée Inféction) of Marseille, still raises blisters. Last Sunday, the newspaper Le Monde published a statement signed by representatives of 16 scientific societies in which they denounced the lack of supervision and consequences for what they described as “the largest wild therapeutic trial known.” More than 30,000 patients were guinea pigs. The result of this study was published in April and was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The text of the experts, which has had a wide repercussion, criticized that the IHU, at the request of Raoult, systematically prescribed a cocktail of various medications that included hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin and azithromycin, without having a solid pharmacological basis or evidence on its efficacy. Even more serious, according to the signatories of the article in Le Monde, was that the prescriptions continued to be given for more than a year after it became clear that the drugs did not have a positive effect, but rather the opposite. Given these facts, the complainants called for tougher measures to be adopted in the name of “patient safety” and “the credibility of French medical research.”
At the height of the pandemic, Raoult was acting as something of a guru. The media made a pilgrimage to Marseille to interview him. They waited with expectation for the videos that periodically appeared on the IHU website in which he himself pontificated about the disease and the way to combat it. On one occasion, the President of the Republic himself, Emmanuel Macron, went to Marseille to speak with Raoult. Television broadcast it live. The controversial doctor was also called to testify before Parliament.
One of his theses was that vaccines responded to the profit motive of pharmaceutical companies, not at all interested in the cheap and accessible remedy that he proposed. Today, however, Raoult admits that vaccinated people die less than those who are not. He also acknowledges that hydroxychloroquine is not effective on the 2022 Omicron variant.
Raoult’s rectification is partial and late because it soon became clear that the IHU treatment did not work. The French Medicines Agency (ANSM) found that the use of hydroxychloroquine “exposes patients to potential undesirable effects that can be serious.” According to Le Monde, the administration of hydroxychloroquine for covid patients, banned since May 2020, caused 103 serious side effects in a space of five weeks, with complications that led to eight cardiac arrests, four of them fatal. The Government itself decided to resort to justice, last September, although the Marseille prosecutor’s office is still investigating the case and Raoult has not been prosecuted.
The interested party has reacted to the latest controversy with his usual arrogance and has spoken of “a platform of imbeciles.” Raoult insisted that his treatment was effective and that international studies invalidating hydroxychloroquine have been “rigged.”
The microbiologist, born 71 years ago in Senegal, the son of a military doctor, has been very prolific during his career in scientific publications, although some of his theses have been widely contested due to lack of rigor. In August 2021, he was forced to retire at the helm of the IHU, a macro-project that was his great creation. Decided during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy and inaugurated in 2018, this center of excellence cost 150 million euros, one of the highest investments made in France in the field of medical research.
