On Sunday, several scientists attacked the ex-boss of the Marseille IHU. On Tuesday, Didier Raoult felt that his study “can be used for history”.
By BL with AFP
© CHRISTOPHE SIMON / AFP
Published on
Subscriber-only audio playback
Dtwo days after a vitriolic platform, he responds. “There has never been a therapeutic trial,” defended Professor Didier Raoult, former boss of the Marseille IHU, on BFMTV on Tuesday May 30. And this, following the publication of a tribune of doctors accusing him of having conducted “the largest known” wild “therapeutic trial” on hydroxychloroquine.
About his study published in April in preprint, that is to say not reviewed by peers, Didier Raoult said: “It’s just an observational study”, adding that this study, which concludes with the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine on the mortality of Covid patients, “can be used, and it will be used, for History”. Asked on BFMTV about the fact that he administered this specialty to Covid patients for several months after the ban by the High Council for Public Health, Didier Raoult replied: “I had every right, me, but also the others, to prescribe hydroxychloroquine. The ban is “a political decision but which does not engage the personal responsibility of doctors”.
The highly controversial infectious disease specialist since the Covid-19 health crisis even claims that “thousands of people who could have been treated were not treated”.
READ ALSOThree years later, the (provisional) assessment of the Covid-19 epidemic in France
On Sunday, sixteen learned medical societies challenged the authorities in a newspaper column The world on “the systematic prescription, to patients with Covid-19 (…) of drugs as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin or azithromycin […] without solid pharmacological bases, and in the absence of any proof of efficacy”.
“Hydroxychloroquine never worked”
More serious, according to them, these prescriptions were continued “for more than a year after the formal demonstration of their ineffectiveness”. The authorities must take “measures adapted to the faults committed”, in the name of “patient safety” and “the credibility of French medical research”, they conclude.
At the end of the Council of Ministers, the government spokesman, Olivier Véran, former Minister of Health, answered questions from journalists on the subject: “What is certain is that hydroxychloroquine never worked against the coronavirus, alas. “If the conditions for carrying out clinical trials have not been respected […] you have to take it to the authorities. I believe I have done so in my time, ”he added.
READ ALSOChristine Clerc – Covid: the epic of Captain Véran
The vice-president of the Senate’s Social Affairs Committee, the socialist Bernard Jomier, announced on Twitter on Monday the filing of a written question to the Minister of Higher Education and Research “relating to the manifestly illegal research carried out out of 30,000 people by the IHU Méditerranée during the epidemic”.
Questioned by Agence France-Presse, the office of the Minister of Health, François Braun, recalled that the latter as well as the Minister of Research and Higher Education, Sylvie Retailleau, had seized the public prosecutor of Marseille “on the unacceptable practices of the IHU”.
Since the convocation of the founding establishments of the IHU by the ministers in October, assures the ministry, “the inappropriate and dangerous prescriptions have ceased”. “In view of the seriousness of these new elements, the two ministries will therefore be required to re-hear the founding establishments and the management of the IHU-MI quickly”, indicated the ministry.