Two 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 serve, and it will serve, 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 does not engage the personal responsibility of doctors”.
Didier Raoult: “There has never been a therapeutic trial” pic.twitter.com/2mcj2mTiNf
The highly controversial infectious disease specialist since the Covid-19 health crisis even claims that “thousands of people who could have been treated have not been treated”.
On Sunday, sixteen learned medical societies challenged the authorities in a column in the newspaper Le Monde on “the systematic prescription, for patients with Covid-19 (…) of drugs as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin or azithromycin […] without solid pharmacological bases, and in the absence of any evidence of efficacy”.
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 appropriate 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 […] it must be brought to the attention of the authorities. I believe I have done so in my time, ”he added.
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 convening 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,” the ministry said.
