Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is about to be stopped by a stroke of a French “genius” with a history of publishing manipulated data. The charismatic Didier Raoult, director of the Research Unit in Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases (URMITE) in Marseille has found a cure: the humble chloroquine, cheap unpatented substance used to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases lupus and rheumatism. The substance so far failed in all antiviral therapies, but this didn’t prevent Raoult from deciding that chloroquine can cure corona virus infections, serious side effects notwithstanding. To prove that, Raoult treated 26 patients at his institution with the derivative hydroxychloroquine, alone and in combination with the antibiotic (meaning antibacterial!) drug azithromycine. The study was not randomised, ethically approved only after it already began, and it was not really controlled: the 16 control patients were treated in different clinics.
After some adjustments (patients removed, data points guessed), a preprint was published simultaneously with a paper in a peer reviewed journal Raoult basically controls. Next, a lawyer with whom Rault partnered with pitched the miracle cure to Fox News, which is the TV channel US president Donald Trump watches all day to get all his information. Trump then tweeted this:
Chaos ensued. People worldwide stormed pharmacies and pet shops for chloroquine, some killed themselves with aquarium cleaner, India banned chloroquine export, while national authorities including French government decided to deploy chloroquine as the medicine to treat COVID19. All based on Trump’s tweets which in turn was based on Fox News promotion of this study by Raoult:
Philippe GAUTRET , Jean Christophe LAGIER 
, Philippe PAROLA , Van Thuan HOANG , Line MEDDED , Morgan MAILHE , Barbara DOUDIER , Johan COURJON , Valerie GIORDANENGO , Vera ESTEVES VIEIRA , Herve TISSOT DUPONT , Stephane HONORE , Philippe COLSON , Eric CHABRIERE , Bernard LA SCOLA , Jean Marc ROLAIN , Philippe BROUQUI , Didier RAOULT Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: preliminary results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial medRxiv (2020) doi: 10.1101/2020.03.16.20037135 and International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (2020) doi: 10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949
It is the opposite of proper clinical research practice. The trial started somewhere in March, likely before an ethics vote was applied for. But already on 11 February 2020 Raoult and colleagues decreed which drug can prevent and cure COVID-19. They wrote about chloroquine in Colson et al 2020, published in the same journal:
“Hence, its possible use both in prophylaxis in people exposed to the novel coronavirus and as a curative treatment will probably be promptly evaluated by our Chinese colleagues.”
Normally, Raoult demands that “Studies of infectious syndromes should no longer be mined without consistently using negative controls to assess the positive predictive value of a positive result.” This he obviously does not apply to himself, especially when the clinical result is already decided in advance. In his own research, Professor Raoult is no fan of randomised controlled clinical trials. A PubPeer user translated his interview:
As Elisabeth Bik discussed, the paper was peer-reviewed in less than 24h, it probably helped that the journal’s Editor-in-Chief is both the paper’s coauthor and Raoult’s IHU subordinate Jean-Marc Rolain. Bik also listed other problems with that paper. Like this:
“In the EU Clinical Trial Register page, the study was described as evaluating PCR data on Day 1, Day 4, Day 7 and Day 14. However, the study show the data for Day 6, which is different than planned. Why did the authors not show the results on Day 7? Did the data on day 7 not look as good?”
In fact, the authors never showed the results of day 14 either. They also refused to share their secondary endpoint data, namely “the clinical effectiveness of treatment on time to apyrexia, normalization of respiratory rate, and average length of hospital stay and mortality”. Basically, it is none of anyone’s business to know if the therapy had any clinical benefit for the patients.
Noteworthy, the control patients were much younger than the treated ones. Which is convenient since COVID19 is generally not dangerous to younger persons. The average age of the control group was 37, that of hydroxychloroquine-treated group 53 years old. Also, as Bik noted:
“The [hydroxychloroquine] treated patients were all in Marseille, while the controls were located in Marseille or other centers.”
Even then, additional tricks were apparently needed. Viral load in control patients was analysed by quantitative RT-PCR and a bit too liberally, as Bik explains:
“Of particular note, control patients 6 and 8-16 appear to have been analyzed differently. Their Day 0 PCR values are not given as CT values (the number of cycles after which a PCR becomes positive, the lower the number, the more virus is present) but as POS/NEG, suggesting a different test was used. […] Several patients in the control group did not even have a PCR result on Day 6, so it is not clear how they were counted in the Day 6 result.”
Some control patients were tested only every second day, afterwards guessed to be positive, some were not tested at all on day 0, as a PubPeer commented noted. And then the authors simply changed the results in control patients between the “in press” and the final paper version, as another PubPeer uses observed:
Another PubPeer user re-ran the analysis, because “an important number of non-treated patients were not tested by PCR (ND)“. Once the ND values were disregarded, there wasn’t any more significant difference between controls and chloroquine-treated patients.
Not only control group had to be adjusted: the treatment group somehow lost 6 patients, as Bik discussed:
“Although the study started with 26 patients in the HQ or HQ+AZ group, data from only 20 treated patients are given, because not all patients completed the 6-day study. The data for these 20 patients looks incredibly nice; especially the patients who were given both medications all recovered very fast.
What happened to the other six treated patients? Why did they drop out of the study? Three of them were transferred to the intensive care unit (presumably because they got sicker) and 1 died. The other two patients were either too nauseous and stopped the medication, or left the hospital […] So 4 of the 26 treated patients were actually not recovering at all.”
It seems, the authors simply removed inconvenient patients from the analysis before publishing their study. They left online their previous evaluation though, which showed a slightly different result, compare here the day 6 time point:
Statistical and ethical problems with that Gautret et al 2020 study were addressed extensively in this preprint by Dahly, Gates & Morris zenodo 2020. The authors also reject Raoult’s claims about previous positive results from China:
“In the background of their paper, Gautret et al referred to “an early clinical trial conducted in COVID-19 Chinese patients, [which] showed that chloroquine had a significant effect, both in terms of clinical outcome and viral clearance, when comparing to control groups”. There were two citations for this claim. The first was a letter7 that doesn’t report any trial data, but instead refers to a conference held in China in February, during which participants (“experts from government and regulatory authorities and organizers of clinical trials”) seemingly agreed that chloroquine was an efficacious treatment for COVID-19. The second cition (also included in the aforementioned letter) refers to a number of clinical trials registered in China, though many of these have now been suspended or closed, while the remaining trials are still recruiting (per their entries on http://www.chictr.org.cn as of March 21, 2020). Hence there are, to our knowledge, no other published reports of clinical trials testing the efficacy of chloroquine for COVID-19 treatment.”
However, now a proper randomised controlled clinical trial was done in China on chloroquine treatment of COVID19. The authors of Chen et al 2020 report:
“One patient in HCQ group developed to severe during the treatment. On day 7, COVID-19 nucleic acid of throat swabs was negative in 13 (86.7%) cases in the HCQ group and 14 (93.3%) cases in the control group (P>0.05). The median duration from hospitalization to virus nucleic acid negative conservation was 4 (1-9) days in HCQ group, which is comparable to that in the control group[2 (1-4) days, (U=83.5, P>0.05)]. The median time for body temperature normalization in HCQ group was 1 (0-2) after hospitalization, which was also comparable to that in the control group 1 (0-3). Radiological progression was shown on CT images in 5 cases (33.3%) of the HCQ group and 7 cases (46.7%) of the control group, and all patients showed improvement in follow-up examination. Four cases (26.7%) of the HCQ group and 3 cases (20%) of the control group had transient diarrhea and abnormal liver function (P>0.05)”
BUT WHAT IF RAOULT IS RIGHT AND IT WORKS?????
I hear you ask that. After all, Raoult is a star of French science: he publishes a scientific paper “nearly every work day”, thanks to 800 employees working under him, as a blog post mentioned, and he is so important that his Marseille collaborators named two bacteria species after the grand director: Raoultella planticola and Rickettsia raoultii.
Well, Elisabeth Bik found some very bad data fakery in a 15 year old Raoult-co-authored paper:
Florence Fenollar , Stéphane Sire , Nathalie Wilhelm , Didier Raoult Bartonella vinsonii subsp. arupensis as an agent of blood culture-negative endocarditis in a human Journal of Clinical Microbiology (2005)
doi: 10.1128/jcm.43.2.945-947.2005
The gels are most obviously fake, falsified in Photoshop. In at least one instance, a gel band was erased digitally. Here a younger Raoult-coauthored paper from URMITE Marseille, and it is not much better:
Miguel A. De La Cruz , Weidong Zhao , Carine Farenc , Grégory Gimenez , Didier Raoult , Christian Cambillau , Jean-Pierre Gorvel , Stéphane Méress A toxin-antitoxin module of Salmonella promotes virulence in mice PLoS Pathogens (2013) doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1003827
A gel lane was copied three times, while arrows indicate additional image manipulations in that gel figure. The last author Stéphane Méresse seems not to deny that the image was fabricated:
“This image should never have been published and we apologize for this mistake. Below two similar experiences leading to the same conclusion.”
Caught on fake data? Replace it with something else, conclusions not affected. As easy as removing patients from analysis or guessing PCR results. The research culture at URMITE produced also this beauty, again with Raoult as coauthor:
Aurélien Fotso Fotso , Oleg Mediannikov , Didier Raoult , Claude Nappez , Michel Drancourt , Michel Azza Monoclonal Antibodies for the Diagnosis of Borrelia crocidurae American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2016) doi: 10.4269/ajtmh.15-0436
That is truly a beautiful fake. Fractal bacteria, as someone commented on Twitter. Bik found also this, a 19 year old microscopy collage co-authored by Raoult:
S Meconi , C Capo , M Remacle-Bonnet , G Pommier , D Raoult , J L Meg Activation of protein tyrosine kinases by Coxiella burnetii: role in actin cytoskeleton reorganization and bacterial phagocytosis Infection and Immunity (2001) doi: 10.1128/iai.69.4.2520-2526.2001
The arrows indicate that the cells were digitally pasted in. To catch Raoult on having published fabricated data is not really a surprise, as it turned out.
More recently, Raoult’s lab simply slightly darkened an image of a 2D western blot and re-used it again, for a different bacteria. Nobody complained.
M Kowalczewska, A N’Djatchi , C Nappez , S Alwassouf, P Decloquement, N Armstrong, K El Karkouri, S Edouard, D Raoult Identification of rickettsial immunoreactive proteins using a proximity ligation assay Western blotting and the traditional immunoproteomic approach Comparative Immunology Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (2018) doi: 10.1016/j.cimid.2018.06.004
Other PubPeer users joined Bik on the treasure hunt and found another duplicated gel, again slightly darkened:
S Edouard , G Subramanian , B Lefevre , A Dos Santos , P Pouedras , Y Poinsignon , O Mediannikov , D Raoult Co-infection with Arsenophonus nasoniae and Orientia tsutsugamushi in a traveler Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases (2013) doi: 10.1089/vbz.2012.1083
In 2012, Science magazine brought an article about Raoult’s scientific achievements, where hidden among all the celebration were descriptions of his bullying and lack of basic research integrity. Some quotes:
“Yet Raoult is also known for his enmities and his disdain for those who disagree with him. “People don’t like to talk about him because he has a lot of influence. He can make life hard for you,” says one of several French researchers contacted by Science who would only talk about Raoult if they could remain anonymous. “Few of his science colleagues will find the thought of another profile story about him particularly appealing,” geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University—who severed ties with Raoult in 2006 after a 5-year collaboration—wrote in an e-mail to Science“.
and then:
“But some scientists grumble that manuscripts out of Raoult’s lab often contain errors, for instance, as a result of unchecked genetic sequences.
Indeed, problems in a paper about a mouse model for typhus got his lab in hot water in 2006. A reviewer for Infection and Immunity, a journal published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), discovered that four figures in a revised manuscript were identical to figures in the original manuscript, even though they were supposed to describe a different experiment.
In letters to ASM, made available by Raoult, second author Christian Capo and last author Jean-Louis Mège, a group leader, accepted “full responsibility” for the problem, which they said involved only two figures. Capo, in his letter, wrote that he had made an innocent mistake; Mège wrote that Capo had subsequently failed to show the revised manuscript to other authors, who were on vacation, before resubmitting it. But after consulting its ethics panel, ASM banned all five authors, including Raoult, from publishing in its journals for a year. “We are not entirely comfortable with the explanation provided,” ASM officials wrote to Mège. “Misrepresentation of data … is an affront to the ethical conduct of scientific inquiry.”
Capo and Mège accepted the decision, but Raoult wrote ASM that he wasn’t at fault and that the “collective punishment” was “very unfair.” He appealed the ban, also on behalf of two other co-authors, but lost. Furious, he resigned from the editorial board of two other ASM journals, canceled his membership in the American Academy of Microbiology, ASM’s honorific leadership group, and banned his lab from submitting to ASM journals, in which he had published more than 230 studies. His name has been on only two ASM journal papers since, both published in 2010. To clear his name, Raoult sent his ASM correspondence to French colleagues in 2007, along with a letter defending himself. “If I had been in the United States, I would have sued,” he wrote.”
Raoult did not like Science coverage of his genius. He made the journal publish an Erratum, where he even wrongly accused the author of shilling for Danone:
“IT WAS AN HONOR TO HAVE MY PROFILE PUBlished in Science (“Sound and fury in the microbiology lab,” C. Mary, News Focus, 2 March, p. 1033). However, I was surprised that 20% of the article is devoted to the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) story, in which I was a collateral victim of a collective sanction (there has been no collective liability in France since World War II). I did not manage the paper and did not even check the last version. The mistake by C. Capo consists of a single figure inversion (not four, as stated in the Science profile). This paper has since been published (1). In January 2007, I was awarded one of the highest ASM honors—the ICAAC lecture—thus clearing doubts about my scientific integrity.”
Accusing your critics of being Nazis or Nazi collaborateurs is standard practice in French academia, especially when you are called out on data manipulation. But you probably started to get a gist that Raoult is not a nice man and not prepared to be criticised or disagreed with. He has a way to make his subordinates deliver the results he likes:
Now, the extra bit of irony is that Raoult is so full of himself that he published in 2018 an opinion piece to teach France some… research integrity. The occasion was the Catherine Jessus affair which I myself incidentally have caused.
Il pleut de la merde
In 2017, Raoult’s leadership was challenged by a sexual harassment and assault scandal at his URMITE institute, an affair with at least six victims which the director himself described as “a love story gone wrong“. The perpetrator was eventually sacked, but Raoult did not handle the case exemplary, quite the opposite. This article in MarsActu narrates that Raoult tried to hush up the affair for two years while even trying to have the victim sacked:
“For CGT union which made public the sanction at a press conference on Monday, these behaviours are not the result of misconduct of a single person but fall under a system set up around the personality of Director URMITE, Didier Raoult. “I am appalled by the fact that the director of the URMITE could not report acts of harassment to his superiors and his guardianship for two years” . […] “The alleged victims and the person they have named as their attacker were installed in adjacent laboratories within the new premises of the IHU” […] “threats (…) currently uttered by Mr. Raoult against Mrs. A, “ . “We have just been informed that Mr. Raoult intends to fire Mrs. A from URMITE. This is unacceptable “ .
Allegedly Raoult also threatened the other victim, a foreign graduate student, warning her that she will not be allowed to complete her thesis if she blows the whistle. Raoult rejected all accusations against himself and denied responsibility. In reality, the gigantic institute is run as his own private fiefdom, as a 2015 evaluation report criticised (discussed in this blog post). Harassment and abuse of students and employees used to be apparently normal under Raoult iron rule, as a 2017 union report criticised:
“Several students or former students testified to work hours without limits, aggravated work stress, work at night or on weekends. They seem to have an enormous pressure for results. Their presence on publications appears to be based on the needs of those responsible. A visit of the CHSCT helped to highlight the fact that, hitherto, lab coats were not provided to them, so they had to get one on their own and had to wash it outside, despite handling of pathogens in the laboratory. […]
We know of many transfer requests, made by the ITA, but also researchers, INSERM, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University. This seems not to have alerted the leadership on the situation of employees in the unit.
The head of the graduate school had to manage a significant number of students from reallocations of URMITE to other units, during or at the end of their thesis.”
Employees wrote in 2017 a protest letter denouncing Raoult’s dictatorship. A quote:
“Some of us are frequently belittled, mocked, humiliated, subjected to chauvinist remarks, inappropriate attitudes, violent verbal altercations, even threats from the hierarchy. One research engineer was threatened with professional death…”
The institute reacted by writing a letter to the Minister for Research announcing to punish the whistleblowers (see this blog post), whom Raoult described as “five or six grumpy jealous” and “bitter people“. This is revealing about how URMITE is run:
“A former research engineer URMITE explains that Didier Raoult works “with a table in his head” . “A cross-tabulation with two columns. He regards you more or less, depending on your status, doctor, pharmacist, researcher, engineer .. . And more or less depending on whether you are a man or a woman , he says. We had group meetings on Friday and I have often seen women from crying. “
Raoult demands results from his serfs, unconditionally:
“These tensions in the work are also felt by some doctoral students who describe situations of harassment. “Our research director, close to Didier Raoult, was struggling to handle the pressure that he put on him to get results, says one of them. Suddenly, a pyramid, the pressure fell on us.” He remembers meetings on “work in progress” where students whose work did not convince were humiliated by the research directors, with Raoult at the top.”
In March 2018, in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal which he tried to hush up while threatening the victims, Raoult announced:
“I thank you for having described this place as a brothel. I installed a condom machine “
Later in 2018, Raoult published an opinion piece in Le Point, where he used his authority as medical doctor and expert on sexually transmitted diseases to certify that the alleged victims of sexual harassment should not to be believed, not even by the police. In March 2020, Raoult brought back the sacked sex offender and arranged for him a job at an IHU Mediterranean spin-off. The unions wrote a protest letter, as Marsactu reported on 1 May 2020.
Now consider this. Raoult’s past papers show falsified data, which even resulted in his ban by ASM for one year, to which Raoult responded with threats of lawsuit. He is a patriarchal control freak and a misogynous bully who violently punishes all disagreement and uses threats against whistleblowers and victims to achieve compliance. He is pathologically resistant to criticism and believes to be infallible and omniscient: Raoult denied anthropogenic climate change in 2013 and before that, the microbiologist even denied evolution in his 2011 book “Beyond Darwin“. Raoult’s new study on chloroquine as the cure for COVID19 is obviously flawed, at best.
Should we really trust his claims and put our all lives in his hands?
The article was significantly updated since it first appeared.
Update 7.04.2020
On 4 April, after being alerted by my readers on Twitter and in the comment section, I tweeted about a statement by the International Society for Microbial Chemotherapy (ISAC), which issues the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA). That was now picked up by international media an credited to Retraction Watch. The statement, signed by the society’s president Andreas Voss, was published on 3 April:
“ISAC shares the concerns regarding the above article published recently in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (IJAA). The ISAC Board believes the article does not meet the Society’s expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety.
Despite some suggestions online as to the reliability of the article’s peer review process, the process did adhere to the industry’s peer review rules. Given his role as Editor in Chief of this journal, Jean-Marc Rolain had no involvement in the peer review of the manuscript and has no access to information regarding its peer review. Full responsibility for the manuscript’s peer review process was delegated to an Associate Editor.
Although ISAC recognises it is important to help the scientific community by publishing new data fast, this cannot be at the cost of reducing scientific scrutiny and best practices. Both Editors in Chief of our journals (IJAA and Journal of Global Antimicrobial Resistance) are in full agreement.”
I contacted Voss and asked him if the paper will be retracted. Voss replied:
“ISAC is not the publisher. That is Elsevier and as according to them all rules and industry standards were followed a retraction is not what they consider.“
Voss then added:
“we own the title of JGAR but not of IJAA. Still, IJAA is an “official society journal” and as such we feel the responsibility, which is why we expressed our concerns.“
So it seems Elsevier put their foot down and said no.
Update 10.04.2020
ISAC now replaced and backdated the statement. As I was told by Voss, this happened on orders from Elsevier, who apparently decided ISAC scientists are not qualified to form an opinion about clinical research. The original ISAC statement from 3 April is deleted and replaced with a joint statement of ISAC together with Elsevier. The critical first paragraph is gone, but this is added:
“At present, additional independent peer review is ongoing to ascertain whether concerns about the research content of the paper have merit. Given this process of post-publication assessment is on-going, it would be premature to comment at this time. The study authors have been contacted and asked to address the concerns. Depending on the nature of their response, a correction to the scientific record may be considered in accordance with the policies of Elsevier and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): https://www.elsevier.com/editors/perk/corrections-to-the-record.”
Update 12.04.2020
Now both statements are online: the one from 3 April by ISAC, restored uncensored, and the joint statement from 11 April with Elsevier, as separate release. Thanks ISAC.
Read also the follow-up reporting here and here
Update 18.03.2021
I removed the previous update as it was misleading.
Here is something better, more data fakery by Team Raoult, spotted again by Elisabeth Bik!
Patricia Renesto, Pierre Dehoux, Edith Gouin, Lhousseine Touqui, Pascale Cossart, Didier Raoult Identification and Characterization of a Phospholipase D–Superfamily Gene in Rickettsiae The Journal of Infectious Diseases (2003) doi: 10.1086/379080
P Renesto, J Gouvernet, M Drancourt, V Roux, D Raoult Use of rpoB gene analysis for detection and identification of Bartonella species Journal of Clinical Microbiology (2001) doi: 10.1128/jcm.39.2.430-437.2001
Jérôme Dellacasagrande, Eric Ghigo, Sarah Machergui-El, Hammami, Rudolf Toman, Didier Raoult, Christian Capo, Jean-Louis Mege alpha(v)beta(3) integrin and bacterial lipopolysaccharide are involved in Coxiella burnetii-stimulated production of tumor necrosis factor by human monocytes Infection and Immunity (2000) doi: 10.1128/iai.68.10.5673-5678.2000
Update 30.06.2022
The sexual harasser and racist discussed above has been finally named, by Figaro and other French media in May 2022. It’s Eric Ghigo.
He is on trial now, defended by the IHU lawyer likely paid by tax money as usual.
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Leonid: Be ready for pushback from Trump supporters who seem to overreact to any suggestion that our Dear Leader may have made a mistake.
Although it may turn out that these treatments have merit, people don’t seem to understand the real risk that chasing after solutions that have not been thoroughly vetted may cause harm – both to patients suffering from COVID-19 and to people who depend on these medications for treatment who now face potential shortages in the stampede to acquire these drugs.
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Well said!
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Seems poor Trump haters now have to give up hope and discredit HCQ + AZT therapy in any way possible just because the orange guy spoke about it.
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Having the Orange Caligula tout it while having a financial stake sure doesn’t help this drug’s credibility.
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Great article and website.
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I think that if you ask someone to destroy someone else, it is probably pretty easy to do it with anyone. But that does not help the world. This guy here did not try to find out if the protocol is working. His goal was to kill Didier Raoult! I would be happy to see him talking directly to Raoult. Moreover, I do not see what sexual arrassment as to do with Chloroquine..
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Desperate times call for desperate measures. Given what we are facing today, waiting for results of a randomized double-blinded trial might be as unethical as not treating patients who would otherwise definitely die. New treatment is always risky.
By the way: with hydroxychloroquine the risk is truly minimal, because side effects from this medication are relatively minor and easily discoverable (https://www.rxlist.com/plaquenil-side-effects-drug-center.htm#overview). Many if not all are due to chronic use.
Also, we all should understand that without risk commonly used treatment methods and approaches, such as anesthesia, vaccination, transplantation and many others would never be developed. Surely, when there is plenty of time and nobody is dying all measures to avoid risk should be taken. With COVID-19 we just do not have such a luxury.
Last, but not least: hydroxychloroquine was FDA approved for malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis (https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/daf/index.cfm?event=overview.process&varApplNo=009768),
and was recently approved for “compassionate use” in COVID-19 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKBydiPOcQc).
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Ok sure. But why choose this medication and not any other combination of thousands? Something should have suggested it to you! But, with your defense of this choice you’ve created a sphere where anything can be tried! It’s unethical to not try it, as lives are on the line. You’ve created an atmosphere where quietly whispering magic spells into an ear should be tried, as should any other myth. You either have evidence something may work, or you are blindly guessing. If you are gonna push this as a cure, something to be tried on thousands, perhaps ignoring therapies that might actually work, you better be right.
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This medication is not the only one which is used and tested. At least 10 different anti-viral drugs are used, as far as I know. All of them are used experimentally. For instance, anti-HIV drug is used. It was successful against HIV, now it is used against COVID-19. The same anti-SARS drug, cannot find the name now, etc. etc.
Also, newly manufactured vaccine is tested. Etc.
THIS medication is selected for attack in the media, and it is attacked because Trump is promoting it. There is no other reason.
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The evidence that people use is the data collected by Chinese during last several month. There is no wild guessing there – just published results. And yes, experience is limited, but nothing is used at random. Again, data is limited, some are true, some are not. Presently we don’t know which is which, but still the use of any medication is based on existing evidence, not on blind guess.
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Other science supports HCQ.. are you suggesting HCQ is simply a random choice of treatment here? It’s been shown to increase intracellular PH, decreasing RNA virus ability to replicate. Also, glycosylation of the AT2 receptor which has been shown to be COVID binding site. It’s also a zinc ionophore, allowing greats Zn uptake into the cells where it can also work to inhibit RNA polymerase …
not such a random grasp
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Professor Raoult is a world-renowned specialist of infectious diseases, and this article is surely written with the goal of discrediting him. Yes, Big Pharma hates him and likely paid for this article. Chloroquine is a cheap drug that is effective in most Coronavirus patients, when administered early and properly. Professor Raoult is hated by Big Pharma because he challenges the usefulness of some vaccines. This pseudo-scientific, politically-motivated article is nothing but slander. It wants us to die while Big Pharma comes up with an expensive vaccine in a year, so they can get richer, and even implant us with a microchip in the mean time. No alternative solution offered, just criticizing a world-renowned specialist throughout. How much did Big Pharma pay you?
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Augie, pull your head out of your arse you deranged antivaxxer.
Professor Raoult receives millions from Big Pharma, it is all over his institute’s website. His key sponsor is Sanofi, which just happens to sell chloroquine, including for the Discovery clinical trials starting now.
How much Raoult receives into his own pocket, as a very likely Sanofi consultant, advisor or invited speaker, is to be figured out.
As for who paid for this article: I will tell you the truth. I am on the payroll of the Elders of Zion.
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Usually, naming someone “antivaxxer” raises a red flag.
You claim to be an “independent science journalist”. Please show us your independence by writing a paper about William Thompson’s revenaltions about the MMR/autism study published in pediatrics, about Verstraeten’s cohort study showing an increased risk of autism after the HepB shot given in the first month of life (unadj. risk of 7.6, jumping to 11 after adjustments), the result has been confirmed in a published case-control (J Toxicol Environ Health A. 2010;73(24):1665-77. Hepatitis B vaccination of male neonates and autism diagnosis, NHIS 1997-2002.), please investigate also the link between the hepatitis B vaccine and Multiple Sclerosis, as some studies seem to be fake with inconsistent datas between those provided in some texts and the associated tables.
“for better science” as you said.
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I leave your idiotic comment online so others see who supports Raoult: antivaxxers, alt-right and climate change denialists. Do not try commenting here again.
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Augie, the study that claimed that Hydroxychloroquine administered early was effective in patients was suspended due to ethical violations.
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dreamer, National Multiple Sclerosis Society: “In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) determined that there is no association between hepatitis B vaccination and the onset of MS. A 2017 systematic review of vaccine safety in MS concluded that the hepatitis B vaccine does not increase a person’s risk of developing MS.”
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Putting aside the design pitfalls, major concerns arise on missing data, as well as on the unethical conduct history of the authors. Besides, results seem inconsistent with those found by this study DOI: 10.3785/j.issn.1008-9292.2020.03.03, in which, by the way, treatments were randomized and had a larger sample size. Despite all these, they may be right, and we cannot simply dismiss their findings. Bref, more research on the field is needed as soon as possible.
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Yes we can simply dismiss their findings as they have lost all credibility.
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I just wonder what has been Mr. Schneider biggest scientific accomplishment. It seems to me that Mr Schneider rather be a gossip/critic than a research scientist. The easy way out. What better way to destroy the credibility of an individual than to attack him/her personally. A typical leftist approach. Had not Mr Trump mentioned the possibility of success in defeating Corona Virus, many, many of us might not have heard of France’s most productive microbiologist work.
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Many of us might not have heard ? That is absurd .
The medical community was aware . The Chinese & Indians experimented with HCQ before you read about it in a tweet . In my country , 2 Italian tourists were cured with Chloroquine + oseltamivir, long before your President tweeted about it. They also used broad spectrum Anti-virals. One italian tourist also died of cardiac arrest .
And that’s the point ! Which drug to use will have to be decided by the Doctors on the ground based on a case by case basis . And not by medically illiterate ideologues on Fox news or twitter
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“What better way to destroy the credibility of an individual than to attack him/her personally. A typical leftist approach.”
Not sure about that. It is a tactic straight out of Trump’s playbook.
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Nice to see you figured out how to make an account, Didier
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Sanofi is absolutely not buddies with Raoult. Please stop de slander Leonid.
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donc en résumé on soigne suivant son instinct ? Il y a moins de morts en Islande et en nll Zélande qu’à l’ihu de Marseille, sans potion magique, alors que celui ci ne compte les morts trop rapides….
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Hi Leonid. Thanks for your work to show us the truth about Pr Raoult. I’m very interested by your analyse about the falsified data in “Raoult” papers. I don’t know how it works in your country but, in France, the real authors of the papers are the first and the second authors. The others have just participated to the paper (technicians, reviewers or grants seekers). In France, the grants seekers are the professors, like Didier Raoult and this professor have really no time to analyse all the papers. So, i think it’s really not an argument.
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In science, every author is responsible. Primarily the corresponding author, and then it goes after who made or supervised which figure.
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I have a pragmatic vision of science, not an idealized vision. It is how it works now in French lab, not how it should works 🙂
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Mr Schneider,
I reply to you here because I don’t see any reply option to the previous post.
Without entering the main discussion about the effectiveness of the drug or the behaviour of the Prof, I simply observe that you behave exactly like him.
You dismiss the intervention of someone who does not agree with you by insulting them.
You’re write rageously <Augie, pull your head out of your arse you deranged antivaxxer> instead of discussing as a serious, , objective journalist. For me already a reason not to believe in your statements and looking for another more serious source of information.
Thanks
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I am sorry, do you also wish to discuss the dangers of vaccination? There are indeed alternative, “more serious” sources and forums for you to engage with.
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Dear Baguette,
I also have to disagree with your view about the real authors and the other authors (are they then unreal authors?). As LS pointed out, all authors are, or should be, responsible. I do not believe this is something that should be adapted to the local habits (if these were indeed as widespread as you seem to believe).
I have also worked in France and what you describe does not apply to the French research institutes I know. There are a number of places where people actually abides to the international rules and only co-sign an article when they satisfy the authorship criteria. At least in all institutes I joined, this was the case and the director was not automatically an author of all publications produced by the institute, that would not make any sense. In fact, I just checked and, in my case, the director was never the most prolific author of the institute. I believe it is not fair that some researchers do not respect the rules for their own benefit while others do.
It’s true that Prof. Raoult is not the only one playing that dangerous game (neither in France nor internationally) but he has certainly been very successful in doing it. See for instance this publication about influential researchers in 2013 (https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.12171, in particular Table 1). Prof. Raoult was the second most prolific author in biomedical science with 1,252 publications between 1996 and 2011, corresponding to 1.5 publications every week. As highlighted by Olivier Berruyer in his blog post (linked by LS), his scientific output is now even more important (from 2012 on, he managed to publish more than 3 publications per week).
It seems implausible that he can qualify as an author for that many publications, yet he is competing with other researchers who play it by the book. In my opinion, he can not have it both ways, having the extra publication to boost his profile (or ego?) without sharing any responsibility with respect to the content. So I believe this is an argument that is valid in today’s discussion.
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Schinia > I can tell you that in some fields /labs directors do add their name to papers. I did observed different behavior between Mathematics Labs and Computer science labs. I also have a friend (in this fields) who published a paper whose one of the author is not responsible for any work, but not doing so would be an awful political move and would definitively have impacted his career negatively.
On the other side, one of my friend who got his phd in “number theory” doesn’t have its phd supervisor name on its publications, despite he did received some helps from him (which is natural when you have a good supervisor).
In France we do have this nothing of “first author”.
I have head from some friends from Chemistry and Health that this two field are just a terrible jungle and that a lot of things happening behind the scene is unfair and unethical. Falsified data and co-author who didn’t wrote a line is not that uncommon.
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I worked there and I can testify:
As already mentioned, the work environment at the URMIT (the institute of Prof. Raoult) is absolutely toxic. Or at least it was when I worked there, but I don’t have any reason to think that it has changed.
All research groups were working in competition against each other, hating each other, cheating. I cannot tell you how common the cheating in the institute was, but it surely was common in the lab where I did my master thesis. An example: “If they ask you where the error bars are, just tell them they are so small we can’t see them”.
I myself had little to do with Prof. Raoult since my master thesis supervisor (officially responding to Prof. Raoult) was hiding his research from him.
My supervisor told me several times:
“Prof. Raoult will probably never ask you what you’re doing here. But in the off chance that he does, tell him that you’re studying the phagolysosome of Coxiella burnetii.”
This was an obvious lie. I was working on something completely different, but he did not want Prof. Raoult to know. So, I had to remember this lie during my entire Master thesis. In any other institute this would be shocking, but these kind of practices were common at the URMIT.
I did attend some of the “WIP” (work in progress) meetings although this was meant for PhD students. I can assure you that all PhD students showing their results in front of him were terrified. I remember especially one time he completely destroyed one student 1 minute into her talk because she had quoted a paper that was too old. This seems completely arbitrary, but if there was another reason for him screaming at her, no one in the room understood it. This day, the whole institute was talking about this event and about how crazy our director was.
This aside, the URMIT is clearly a machine, created to publish as much as possible to increase the H-index and expertscape ranking of Prof. Raoult.
Everyone digging a little bit can see that all groups are publish in their friend’s journals, bypassing peer-reviews. This is common knowledge for everyone working in this institute, or even everyone doing science in Marseille.
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Oh God
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Shame on the writer of this article! A top scientist with more than 2000 papers, more than 150,000 citations, and several awards, yet you can’t find anything positive to say about him!
Again, big shame on you!
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We have a manipulated article by a researcher with a highly questionable track record showig effect of chloroquine + a Chinese study showing that it is not better than placebo + a cult around Trump screaming in desperation that it works, because they will fill the churces for Easter and want their stock shares to rise.
It’s a no-brainer.
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“Few of his science colleagues will fi nd the thought of another profile story about him particularly appealing,” geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University—who severed ties with Raoult in 2006 after a 5-year collaboration
Claverie and Raoult co-authored the 2003 paper announcing the discovery of Mimivirus. Since then, Claverie discovered Megavirus and Pandoravirus, and there seems to be an unwritten law that no giant-sized viri can be discovered without his involvement somewhere, while Raoult has been promoting himself as the world expert on giant-sized viri.
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Great article.
Outside of the personalities involved in this particular study there are previous studies into chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine. Is it a Zinc ionophore – those claims do have scientific efficacy.
There will not be enough beds, oxygen or respirators to treat everyone who falls seriously ill with covid 19. Clinicians will be deciding who lives or dies, normal standards of care simply can’t be maintained.
In that reality then I think it’s ethical that every patient should be able to request the hydroxychloroquine/zpac combo or any other drug that could possibly improve their condition in a clinical setting.
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You mean cell culture studies?
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“In that reality then I think it’s ethical that every patient should be able to request the hydroxychloroquine/zpac combo or any other drug that could possibly improve their condition in a clinical setting.”
Wow. just wow. That is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.
Unless you mean they should have the right to request it, because you believe in freedom of speech, but equally doctors should have the right to refuse it because it’s a stupid request. then, well, it’s still stupid because you’re saying that people should be wasting doctors’ time because they read a Trump tweet or some other nonsense.
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Dr. Dena Grayson
✔
@DrDenaGrayson
🛑Hydroxychloroquine (plaquenil) can prolong the QT interval (heart rhythm) and can cause a FATAL arrhythmia. Azithromycin can also prolong the QT interval, so use of these 2 drugs together should ONLY be done under the supervision of a doctor.
I have a question: Dr. Dena, would she prescribe topical steroids to her patients, knowing that topical steroids cause more adverse reactions than any other existing medications. Here is the partial list:
Common side effects reported with topical steroids include:
Easy bruising and tearing of the skin.
Enlarged blood vessels (telangiectasia)
Folliculitis (inflammation of the hair follicles) and miliaria (sweat rash): ointments.
Increased hair thickness and length in the area of application (hypertrichosis)
Skin thinning.
Besides:
My own mother carried this https://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/news-and-analysis/diuretic-reduces-skin-atrophy-associated-with-corticosteroid-creams/20068200.article?firstPass=false wound from her age of 32 until her death at the age of 81. I am diabetic because of the same side effects caused by topical steroids.
Where:
The side effects caused by hydroxychloroquine are minimal. She and other pandits for their only known reason are playing the crooked psychological tricks with the public by a simple psychological game of feer. By taking only one part out of the context of the description of adverse reaction cased by hydroxychloroquine.
The truth of the meter is:
Mechanism of action described by UPS reads as: Hydroxychloroquine increases lysosomal pH in antigen-presenting cells. In inflammatory conditions, it blocks toll-like receptors on plasmacytoid dendritic cells (PDCs). Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR 9), which recognizes DNA-containing immune complexes, leads to the production of interferon and causes the dendritic cells to mature and present antigen to T cells. Hydroxychloroquine, by decreasing TLR signaling, reduces the activation of dendritic cells and the inflammatory process. In 2003, a novel mechanism was described wherein hydroxychloroquine inhibits stimulation of the toll-like receptor (TLR) 9 family receptors.
The short terms side effects of hydroxychloroquine in comparison with other dangerous drugs are minimal, Again from the UPS:
The most common adverse effects are mild nausea and occasional stomach cramps with mild diarrhea. The most serious adverse effects affect the eye, with dose-related retinopathy as a concern even after hydroxychloroquine use is discontinued.
The only problem would be if the medication is used for other treatments rather than malaria and viral diseases such as rheumatic arthritis, lupus and so on, that is because of prolonged usage and they are again as described by same sours:
For the prolonged treatment of lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, adverse effects include the acute symptoms, plus altered eye pigmentation, acne, anemia, bleaching of hair, blisters in mouth and eyes, blood disorders, convulsions, vision difficulties, diminished reflexes, emotional changes, the excessive coloring of the skin, hearing loss, hives, itching, liver problems or liver failure, loss of hair, muscle paralysis, weakness or atrophy, nightmares, psoriasis, reading difficulties, tinnitus, skin inflammation and scaling, skin rash, vertigo, weight loss, and occasionally urinary incontinence. Hydroxychloroquine can worsen existing cases of both psoriasis and porphyria.
Many in the field of medical professions today are asking themself why this profession is not trustworthy anymore.
Don’t ask me, my own experience taught me а lesson, not to trust them. Yes if I am in the acute stage caused by the COVID 19, my physician would proscribe me hydroxychloroquine even if I need to fight to get it.
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It should be USP instead of UPS.
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It is worth also to point out that in the group of 14 patients treated with only Plaquenil (HDC), 2 were asynptomatic, resulted positive the Day 0, and then on always negative. As possible false positive cases or at least anomalous cases, it would have been better not to include in the result analysis.
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when Louis Pasteur tried the rabies treatment on the little shepherd, he too was following a very random protocol …
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Claiming to be Pasteur does not suffice. You also need to be right…
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just cant beleive all the the false information and desinformation in this article…you should be ashame!
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I am not comfortable with 2 points of your article.
1. The phrase “a lawyer with whom Rault partnered with…” is not true. In the Wired article, it is just written “Todaro and Rigano together started talking to Raoult about the small study he was then preparing,…” then nothing else. Guit by association argument.
2. The sexual harassment story and other arguments against the person of Raoult: argumentum ad hominem. “A makes a claim a, B asserts that A holds a property that is unwelcome, and hence B concludes that argument a is wrong”.
Very disappointing from a guy who claims “for better science”. You could have just criticized Raoult’s study, and yes it is true that his trial does not prove anything yet about the “miracle” cure, and everybody should be cautious about it.
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Maybe it was no clear what the last section of my article meant to convey.
Raoult was guilty of covering up the sexual abuse by his subordinate group leader for 2 years. His only actions were to threaten and blackmail the victims, even to attempt sacking them. He even made fun of the victims (announcing a condom vending machine) after the sexual predator was sacked and Raoult’s cover-up activities were exposed by the unions and journalists. It fits to the overall pattern of Raoult being a bullying sadistic misogynous tyrant who created over many years an oppressive atmosphere of fear and deference at his institute of 800 employees. Every single case of such lab leadership worldwide resulted in massive research fraud, simply because group leaders, students and postdocs are afraid to contradict or to displease the boss.
Hence it is important to know in which scientific work environment the chloroquine results were obtained.
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In fact, Didier Raoult is a consulting scientist with Torado’s Open-data repository on hydroxychloroquine (and azithromycin) initiative, as shown by this website that was created to advertize it: https://www.covidtrial.io/. Of course, it might be that Torado proclaimed Raoult to be on his consultancy team without asking him, as he seems prone to involve people in his “research” without letting them know about it. But, I haven’t seen Raoult protesting over this and I doubt he doesn’t know about it, because Torado is the reason why Trump became so enthusiastic about this potential treatment and Raoult has been making reference to this: https://www.marianne.net/politique/de-marseille-fox-news-comment-les-essais-de-didier-raoult-sur-la-chloroquine-ont-convaincu.
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Thanks Leonid for this useful piece of work – as always!
I have also published a statement yesterday about that fraud affair (and its extra-scientific consequences). It’s a Youtube video, I’m sorry it’s all in French (basically, I am simply exposing the paper’s fraud to the general public, using simple terms and accessible concepts):
Best,
Hervé
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Hello!
I just discovered your blog article through a Twitter friend (@Damkyan_Omega) and I find it really well written and hinsightful, especially as it lays out clearly all this going wrong with Raoult’s study and his overall research practices.
For this reason, I was wondering if you would allow me to translate it in French and re-publish it on my blog (https://www.ariane-beldi.ch), of course, with reference to this article, your blog and your CV (as I want to give back to Ceasar what’s Caesar’s). Many French-speaking people in Europe don’t have a sufficient command of English to be able to read your article and I believe it would be very useful to give people a better picture of what is going on at the scientific level in this affair.
I don’t believe this article could convince Raoult’s unconditional partisans ready to beatifying him, but it might reach the bystanders watching the online shouting match going on between Raoult’s crowds and those criticizing him, some of them actually going overboard too. I also have some friends and contacts who are journalists within national Swiss media (especially the Swiss Television) who are really trying to make sense of this, but feel kind of embarrassed, because they don’t have the right tools to understand what is going on, at least, as far as science is concerned.
Of course, I will relay this English version as well and recommend your blog, which is really a great place to turn to for a better understanding of science at work.
What do you think?
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Of course, go ahead!
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Thank you! I’m on it!
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Oh, and by the way, do you allow me to use your illustrations (pictures and graphics)? They are kind of central to your demonstration. But I still want to ask for your authorization.
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In this case, none of graphics are mine: they are actually links to original sources.
I only hold copyright on my cartoons.
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I’m worried about your stance about Raoult being anti-evolutionnist… His book “Dépasser Darwin” (Beyond Darwin) never “denies evolution” as you said but rather is a vulgarisation essay. He mainly talks about horizontal transfer which may differ from the non-specialist knowledge but is not in any case a refutation of evolution. At best a refutation of darwinian theory which is the current scientific consensus? (cf. Synthetic theory of evolution)
I apologize for my English, I did my best 😦
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This from Science 2012 article:
Indeed, Raoult only denies the “established” evolution theory, because as with everything he knows it better than everyone else. Let’s teach Raoultian Evolution instead in French schools?
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And if it was you?
And if you had covi19 Leonid or someone you love? What would you do? I bet I you’d beg for your HCQ, like everyone, and secretly thank Raoult for pushing this thing forward. I also bet you will claim you would not.
Overall, I am a bit confused about the usefulness of this ‘thing’ you probably call a blog entry. HCQ trials are going ahead, massive, so we will know in about 10 days. If Raoult was wrong, you can destroy him then. If Raoult is right what is the point really? Are you afraid he gets a Nobel, because the failed scientist in you hates the guts of successful ones? Well, if it works, he will indeed get a Nobel, a well deserved one, for pushing against the self-righteous that believe you are leading. I will applaud.
If he is wrong, I do not see much harm done, but history will judge, and you can be part of the trials, where you will get a chance to quench your appetite for blood and other bodily substances.
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First of all: this comment was posted from same Spanish IP address as all of “Athanaore porphryrogenete” comments.
Now, about this: “history will judge, and you can be part of the trials, where you will get a chance to quench your appetite for blood and other bodily substances.”
Get your facts right. It was because of Raoult’s approval that a group leader was free to harass his female subordinates with demands like “it’s 4 PM, who wants to suck my cock?”
Otherwise I am slowly bored by dumb Spaniards worshipping an ageing academic fraudster. Remember Carlos Lopez-Otin?
And to answer you question: I would sure not take chloroquine against COVID19, it would namely DECREASE my chances to survive. Now you go back to lapping up Raoult’s bodily substances.
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Prejudice and intimidation, all in one mail…
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Hydroxychloroquine can help to save lives. An European study is going to clarify that.
https://twitter.com/GSK_ES/status/1269645289893376004?s=20
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Helen, maybe you should learn to read. Interesting study though, pity for you it’s not at all what you imagined.
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I totally agree with Rd Lasius. Read Leonid. Cultivate yourself a bit. Raoult is arguing, quite interestingly, That Darwin’s vision was partly motivated by religion and that the tree of life clearly religion-inspired. In his work on bacteria, Raoult has successfully shown many times that the tree of life was a very poor model for reality that is much more bush-like. In fact, since Kimura, we know that Darwin initial guesses do not account very well for reality, especially the survival of the fittest paradigm. It is very clearly survival of the luckiest, which is not quite the same. This is what Raoult says, in his flamboyant way, a bit exaggerated, but much more scientifically accurate that this poorly written blog implies.
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I haven’t read Raoult’s book on evolution, but if your rendering is correct, then, we can say that he has completely misunderstood Darwin and seems to ignore that since Darwin, evolutionary biology has, well, “evolved” a lot. And we all know that Darwin wasn’t right about everything. His theory has since then been corrected and enriched. But it is true that it was very poorly translated in French throughout the 19th and the first half ot the 20th century (because French scholars couldn’t stand that a British scientist could compete and question their great scientist Lamarck; so they literally boycotted him for decades) and nor until the late 70’s that it began to be properly understood and taught within the French academia. Still now, many French people confuse Lamarckism with Darwinism and the present-day concepts of evolution.
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Hello Ariane, I admire your eagerness to comment on a book you have not read … What Raoult is attacking is the cult-like status of Darwin, and the fact that Darwinism is too often hailed as religion. He is right. Darwinism IS a theory, which is why it is superior to Creationism that is NOT a theory but a belief system. Raoult, as Popperian, claims his right to falsify Darwinism, as you would for any theory. You should go one day to one of his lectures.
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Pingback: COVID19 and Chloroquine - what does the science say? - Managed Care Matters
Pingback: Are hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin an effective treatment for COVID-19? – Science-Based Medicine
Je crois plutôt que les jaloux et les incompetents sont de sortie.. Il a 2600 publications ds des revues à comité de lecture. Dire qu’elles sont trafiquées est tt simplement de la pure malhonnêteté
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Personne n’a dit que les données des 2600 études sont trafiquées. Par contre, il a été démontré qu’il a commis un certain nombre de fraudes et de manipulations. Par ailleurs, je ne sais pas pour vous, mais même en postulant une puissance de travail hors-paire, il est peu probable qu’il ait réussi à travailler sur 1-3 études par semaines! C’est simplement impossible. Il a donc très probablement exigé de signé comme co-auteur toutes les études qui sortaient de son instituts, probablement sans même les lire, parce qu’entre ses propres recherches et la gestion de son institut (qui compte 800 employés), je doute qu’il ait le temps de tout lire, aussi puissant soit-il.
Accuser de jalouise et d’incompétence ceux qui vous démontrent par A+B que cette étude est complètement bidon et qu’il n’en est pas à son premier coup d’essai, mais sans en tenir compte, c’est un peu l’hôpital qui se fout de la charité.
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Et écrire que l’article de ce blog prétendrait que TOUTES les études de Raoult sont traffiquées.. est une plus grande malhonnêteté encore.. A moins que ce ne soit une compréhension difficile. On se concentre !
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Great article! Thanks for the work.
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Hi Leonid,
Stick with cartoons carreer, leave science behind.
Message you send with discrediting research effort during crisis like these could mean that you work for rich insurance funds who would rather have nothing used – and try to get rid of the old people…
If you are not – you should at least be aware of what damage you can provoke – just by having free time.
Get in the hospital – and be useful.
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Actually I am on the payroll of Sanofi. The makers of chloroquine who pump millions into Raoult’s research.
Sanofi pays me in toilet paper now, the highest COVID19 currency.
https://forbetterscience.com/2019/08/29/sanofi-rd-head-john-reed-knows-how-to-science/
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OK, so with Trump apparently supporting Raoult, an army of volunteers have decided that scanning and running al the 3.000 papers of Raoult through an image duplication software was the most urgent thing to do. Here is what they came out with. This is what gets Leonid so excited.
What drove me nuts these last years have been all the cases of bands flipped 180 degrees – often out of the plane, something forbidden when ice skating – in photoshop and pasted. You don’t flip things like that by chance. This is genuinely disingenuous. By contrast, c/ping the wrong figure is something that happens a LOT, to all of us. Sometimes you catch it sometimes you don’t. If it is a secondary supporting figure, you never catch it. If it is a secondary paper you often don’t pay attention. Correcting the abstract is depressing enough….
Now, I would argue that with four exceptions, everything reported inpub-peerr is minor, and within the boundaries of acceptable mistakes in a very big lab. Even considering the three worst ones (band duplications and re-used background), If one was to randomly take 3.000 publications, I am sure many many more things would come up. But it’s all about destroying Raout right? Because of Trump right?
https://pubpeer.com/publications/E71C8E0323F9C4335AFEAC9E28BD76
OK, they packed in a bit more in the images. – bad practice for sure, scientific crime? I don’t think so
https://pubpeer.com/publications/E71C8E0323F9C4335AFEAC9E28BD76
duplicated picture, used to be shown as an exemple. Give me ONE conclusion of the paper SUPPORTED OR NOT by this figure. May the one who never messed up the images throw the first pixel. If you have no reason to fraud, the most likely explanation is a mistake. And yes, kit happens – A LOT
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4608D42F05A64C8CC261791FBF0E8B
cut and paste bands with different labels. Bad style yes
https://pubpeer.com/publications/17FFAA6A308B1C585F5B858270E602
possible case of the same gel at different exposure levels with different labels. Bad style, yes
https://pubpeer.com/publications/4608D42F05A64C8CC261791FBF0E8B#7
cut and paste bands with different labels. Bad style yes
https://pubpeer.com/publications/D2FBE34F49E965A8BE6730E531E9F1#1
clear resume of the background -> bad style. AT the same time it is the validation of a monoclonal antibody. Ohhh. What an offense to science. Just a poor engineering paper
https://pubpeer.com/publications/94C83AFDA24223756DB6B7067EB483#3
duplication of Figure …. S15 . Oh my god. S15! Who has ever looked at S15. You put S15 for yourself, just to make sure you remember what you actually did
https://pubpeer.com/publications/8A980938D1FAEA13F9CBF1884C2002#1
Oh my god, the citations are not where they should be. Retract Retract
https://pubpeer.com/publications/54C2CD0E0EC09BFFDD962977373AE6#0
slight imprecision on the strains
https://pubpeer.com/publications/58C978FB447B6D3D849F2CAD757F13#0
slight imprecision on the strains
https://pubpeer.com/publications/1790C23F38ECA4972F1F703EA6875F#0
slight imprecision on the strains
https://pubpeer.com/publications/3480B9DE6C9330B0747034C330BA6A
big fight between Raoult and Claverie on calling the viral system a CRISPR – good science
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“By contrast, c/ping the wrong figure is something that happens a LOT, to all of us.” I am sorry, but this is called sloppiness.
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Hi Tom
Clinicians in Italy, Spain and France at this very moment are having to choose who to treat based on assumed outcome. Individuals requiring critical care will not receive it. Those individuals are entitled to that treatment and these states have an obligation to protect and care for its citizens. Unfortunately this pandemic has put clinicians in a war time situation and outcome based assessments are needed because of a lack of resources.
With the reality of having to deny individuals critical care and instead managing, if the patients are lucky, their final days and hours it would seem to me to be quite ethical for a doctor to consider a request from a patient for treatment with a combination of hydroxychloroquine and zpac.
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Just released covid-19 80 patients Professeur raoult
Click to access COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf
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here is the follow-up article…80 patients this time: https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf
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So let me see if I understand this correctly:
Only 15 % of the patients had a fever?
4 were asymptomatic carriers but still hospitalized?
There was no informed consent for the treatment?
There was no randomized control group despite the mostly mild symptoms?
It’s extremely unclear why most of these patients were hospitalized in the first place. Difficulty to breathe?
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Just realeased covid-19 new 80 patients results Professeur Raoult
Click to access COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf
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Hydroxychloroquinine (HCQ) is also used in rheumatism therapy to immobilize neutrophiel granulocytes (PMN), since HCQ binds to PMN micro-tubules, further to that priming of the PMN is reduced. As a result, pro-inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1, IL-6 are released to a lesser extent if the PMN overreacts to stimuli such as LPS, viruses (in NK cells) and complement components. It apparently also works in the CNS, where it reduces the release of IL-1 and resolves psychiatric symptoms (off-label use in: Bartonella henselae Bloodstream Infection in a Boy With Pediatric Acute-Onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6423671/ ). The same applies to the spindle poison colchicine, which also reduces inflammation by reduction of release of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Colchicine is concentrated in PMN and nerve cells, not in serum. We have successfully used this – off label (analog to Mediterranean familiar fever) – to lower fever due to systemic IL-6 overproduction in a post- infectious syndrome of C jejuni, after prednisolone 100mg, novalgin (3000mg), paracetamol 5000mg), ibuprofen (2000mg) were ineffective in lowering fever. It could be, that excessive recruitment and over-priming of PMN followed by excessive release of pro-inflammatory cytokine, that body’s own defense could damage organs , which could be prevented by , HCQ or colchicine. However, this does not mean that HCQ interferes with the metabolism of Covid-19 replication. Azithromycin (AZT) accumulates in the PMN, especially the alveolar macorphage. These are eukaryotes, where it inhibits the ribosomal protein synthesis of prokaryotes (bacteria) that have been phagocytized. AZT could thus prevent bacterial superinfection as part of a Covid 19 virus infection. AZT is a macrolide, and an inhibitory intervention in Covid 19 virus replication would be extremely surprising. The combination of AZT and HCQ has also been successfully used to treat neuropsychiatric symptoms of a child, infected with B henselae, supra, unfortunately, the doctors had not carried out an analysis of the pro-inflammatory cytokines in that case.
It would be helpful if there would surface some evidence about AZT and HCQ that affect the virus metabolism. So far, from clinical aspects, I would suggest, that the combination of HQC and AZT would simply ameliorate the inflammatory symptoms of Corona-19-virus infection, such as bacterial pneumonia, but not counter act the virus infection as such. Not at all I can see a preventive measurement of the combination of HQC and AZT in counteracting the Corona-19-virus infection
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«Now consider this. Raoult’s past papers show falsified data, which even resulted in his ban by ASM for one year, to which Raoult responded with threats of lawsuit. He is a patriarchal control freak and a misogynous bully who violently punishes all disagreement and uses threats against whistleblowers and victims to achieve compliance. He is pathologically resistant to criticism and believes to be infallible and omniscient: Raoult denied anthropogenic climate change in 2013 and before that, the microbiologist even denied evolution in his 2011 book “Beyond Darwin“. Raoult’s new study on chloroquine as the cure for COVID19 is obviously flawed, at best.»
This is political ans social ideological bullshit..
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So what you tell us is that all those searchers are fake and liars?? Florence Fenollar , Stéphane Sire , Nathalie Wilhelm, Miguel A. De La Cruz , Weidong Zhao , Carine Farenc , Grégory Gimenez , Didier Raoult , Christian Cambillau , Jean-Pierre Gorvel , Stéphane Méress, Aurélien Fotso Fotso , Oleg Mediannikov , Claude Nappez , Michel Drancourt , Michel Azza, S Meconi , C Capo , M Remacle-Bonnet , G Pommier , J L Meg, M Kowalczewska, A N’Djatchi , C Nappez , S Alwassouf, P Decloquement, N Armstrong, K El Karkouri, and S Edouard.
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Interesting article that is so biased and full of attack. You should be a shame of yourself., particularly in these times. We should have listened to the Chinese first, then to the Pr Raoult that basically run a study to verify these results and now backed up with another study on 80 patients and no confirmed by the Australian. This treatment is the only thing we have and if we had practiced it 2 months we would not have been where we are now. In time of urgency you have to take shortcut and trust your experts. Let me guess you must be biased politically to write such crap. These experts dedicated their life to this science. Shame on you!!!
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Your Pr Raoult is so used to lying that he even lied about Chinese preliminary data, which doesn’t exist. While you eat your aquarium cleaner, I updated my article with this:
Statistical and ethical problems with that Gautret et al 2020 study were addressed extensively in this preprint by Dahly, Gates & Morris zenodo 2020. The authors also reject Raoult’s claims about previous positive results from China:
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Pingback: Post-publication reviews on COVID-19 papers – Science Integrity Digest
He just wants to promote his new book, issues yesterday, about pandemics (how convenient)…. with a big “covid 19” on the cover
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Hi Leonid,
As a non scientist, I have a couple of questions about modifying images in scientific publications.
Here is an article identified on Pubpeers as having doctored images (not a Raoult publication) : https://pubpeer.com/publications/7B8DDC913375F15C078F677F20594F
The author replied that the images had been modified “for the sake of clarity” and publishes the complete images.
Is it common for scientists to modify images “for the sake of clarity” ? Is a modified image in itself enough to invalidate a publication’s conclusions ?
Many thanks and regards.
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This was Anne Peyroche replying. Knowing her criminal energy, I would not trust the image she posted as raw data. https://forbetterscience.com/2020/02/19/cea-declares-anne-peyroches-data-fakery-scientifically-correct/
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Hey Paul, that’s a good point. However, one would then expect the image/figure caption to say as much, i.e. “in the interests of clarity, we have done … such and such”. Generally, raw, unadulterated data is prized. So the answer would be no.
In any case, the target audience of scientific papers is scientific peers, not the public at large, so clarity is not often prioritised. A certain mimimum level is required, but only in the sense that the arguments should be logical. In practice however, scientific papers are devoid of narrative, are often just listings of facts, and avoid saying one thing in more than one way, which is often a hallmark of clear exposition (an exception would be summaries and abstracts, but these are meant to also be self-standing, that is why they repeat material).
A more plausible reason for manipulation would not be for increasing clarity, but for reducing verbosity, or cutting down outsized images that wouldn’t fit on the publisher’s page. Actually this is common in mathematical graphs, where axes and scales are often manipulated so that the figure will fit in its allocated space. Again however, the caption to the graph would really have to be explicit about what was done.
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Sorry I should have also commented on your final question: “Is a modified image in itself enough to invalidate a publication’s conclusions ?”
As it stands, I would say, “not often, no” to this question. I would say, it may diminish the respect and integrity attached to the authors, but may be not even in a substantial way, as long as, and this should be stressed, no intention to delude can be perceived.
However, deadlines, and the resulting rush often make it unclear as to what extent an image manipulation is an overt objective, rather than the effect of the pressure of having to submit within a prescribed time frame. As per my previous point, however, it may be better to include a caption saying “in the interests of timeliness, we have manipulated this figure, etc.”
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Truly interesting content! I also feel very skeptical about chloroquine to treat Covid19. But some of your statements deeply question your own integrity and objectivity on this topic. Stating that French government decided to deploy chloroquine as the medicine to treat COVID19 (…) based on Trump’s tweets is really a big joke. And strongly minors the credibility of this publication.
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Sorry about that. Of course French government issued this guideline based on peer reviewed research of Pr Raoult and following Macron’s coordination with US President. My apologies. I will delete my site now.
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Euh, no: French Government has not decided to deploy chloroquine as THE medecine to treat Covid19 : they just open the possibility to use it.
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You obviously underestimate the mendacity of your average right wing politician.
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As much as it pains you to give Dr. Raoult any credit, here are the results of a second study (80 patients) that shows tremendous results. https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-IHU-2-1.pdf
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Cohort data was also cherry picked.
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Pingback: Thoughts on the Gautret et al. paper about Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin treatment of COVID-19 infections – Science Integrity Digest
A new batch of datas has been send to the french experts by Raoult pertaining to more than 700 patients contamined and treated with the 2 molecules. Only 1 death for the moment.
to follow….
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And how many of those patients were actually seriously ill? That preprint you’ve been spamming here gives the impression that you have been wasting precious hospital resources on hospitalizing patients with no or minimal symptoms and then subjected them to experimental treatment without informed consent.
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«And how many of those patients were actually seriously ill?»
This is actually Raoult point. He give treatment as soon as you have symptoms or as you are test positive, so his method lower viral charge and lower chance to get more severed ill as he give medicin at the very early stage.
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“This is actually Raoult point. He give treatment as soon as you have symptoms or as you are test positive, so his method lower viral charge and lower chance to get more severed ill as he give medicin at the very early stage.”
That’s how he hopes it works as prophylaxis but he doesn’t actually know this since he refused to do a proper randomized controlled study. Which he had and still has an excellent opportunity to do.
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Recent news:
«Das Malariamittel ist unsere grösste Hoffnung»
Novartis-Chef Vas Narasimhan über den Kampf gegen das Virus und den Stopp des Jobabbau-Programmes.
“Pre-clinical studies in animals as well as the first data from clinical studies show that hydroxychloroquine kills the coronavirus,” Narasimhan told the newspaper. “We’re working with Swiss hospitals on possible treatment protocols for the clinical use of the drug, but it’s too early to say anything definitively.”
https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/sonntagszeitung/das-malariamittel-ist-unsere-groesste-hoffnung/story/23326259
2. FDA issues emergency authorization of anti-malaria drug for coronavirus care
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/29/fda-emergency-authorization-anti-malaria-drug-155095
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My grandfather was a NYC policeman during 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Things were dire and working with doctors the police would take away sick family members to a field hospital. This was done to help spare the rest of family and to help isolate the disease. My mother was 3 years old at the time with a baby sister. To avoid bringing the disease home, the doctor advised my grandfather to always wash up and change clothes outside the home. In addition he was told to chew tobacco all day long. In the evening wash out the tobacco and gargle with scotch whiskey. The family stayed well through out the epidemic.
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My father was a child in 1919, in the German colony of South-West-Africa,, living in Luederitz-Bay (now state of Namibia). he reported, that people with Spanish flue were concentrated by the British authorities on shark-island, in front of the Luederitz bay. At that time, there was no help at all, more worse, due to WW1, people, in particular of the loser-side (Germany-Austria-Hungarian Nations on Balkan-Ukrainia) were heavily starved and in addition incapacitated by tuberculosis, which paved the way for the viral invasion. Thats why there was the incredible high death rate due to Spanish flue in central Europe / continental Europe, compared to the Entente, whose population had free supply of food. now days, fortunately, Europe did not have that 4-year-long-lasting war, obviously free access to food supply, and no spread of tuberculosis, at least in central Europe. The outcome of COVID-19 should be different from 1919-Spanish-flue in Europe. On other continents with different nutritional and infectious co-background , it could be different.
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100% of the 701 patients have been tested + covid 19 before getting the treatment of course.
You will see the study very soon.
I do not know what you are talking about regarding spamming….
If the patient is seriously ill ( like intubeted) the treatment wont work ( usually viral charge is low at that stage).
That is why Raoult recommands giving the treatment at the begining to reduce the viral charge so infection dont get time to develop.
So i agree with a part of what you said treatement is not really working with patient seriously ill.
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The preprint was clear about the patients having tested positive for Covid-19 but that does not generally result in hospitalization. Most patients are just isolated at home and it is a pretty huge difference in severity between a mild fever to the need of intubation. Further, I see no justifications for not doing a proper randomized controlled trial with the patients who had mild symptoms. It seems to me that Raoult is so enamored with the idea of hydroxychloroquinine working that he is wasting precious time and resources that should have been used to test whether it actually works in a randomized trial.
Randomly assigned 30 treated + 30 controls from the low risk group in the preprint might not be the largest amount but if the efficiency actually is good enough to be a “game changer” it should have been clear enough to see there. The way it was done instead leaves me with absolutely no idea to whether hydroxychloroquinine really is working or not.
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viral load not charge 🙂
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In french, we say: Charge Virale.
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