Tide is turning for the media-savvy French professor Didier Raoult and his chloroquine, even US President Donald Trump is suddenly barely even mentioning the miracle drug for COVID-19. Maybe this is because the only clinical data supporting the malaria drug chloroquine cure against coronavirus comes from Raoult himself. And only after Raoult denounced controls and other basics of clinical research as unethical. Outside of Raoult’s alternative reality, clinical data from France, Sweden, Brazil and USA already now shows that chloroquine not only does not work against COVID-19, it seems to even kill. Predictably so, since the drug’s side effects are well known.
This is why chloroquine proponents changed their stance and now scream that it is wrong to treat very sick COVID-19 patients with chloroquine. Instead, they insist that the drug must be given very early during infection or even prophylactically, i.e., to healthy and asymptomatic people only. Given the evidence that the coronavirus is apparently lethal for less than 1% of the infected, you can see where this is going. The safest way to successfully heal with witchdoctor magic is to treat those who are not really ill and recover anyway.
But now Raoult seems to have gone completely off the rails. He namely attacked the data integrity expert Elisabeth Bik, on Twitter and in full Trump manner:
Heal the healthy, avoid the sick
The microbiologist Raoult is director of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire en maladies infectieuses de Marseille (IHU Méditerranée Infection) and its URMITE department, which was previously funded by the French research networks CNRS and INSERM. Both withdrew in 2018, after Raoult proved a despotic tyrant who allowed sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying to happen in his institute (read more here). There is also a history of data manipulation, for which Raoult himself was made responsible in 2006. Bik found even more irregularities in his papers, which makes sense: a bullying and totalitarian research environment with a personality cult, where compliance and fear rule, can only produce unreliable or falsified research.
Like these copy-pasted disease-spreading ticks, or these copy-pasted fraud-spreading gel bands, newly discovered at IHU:
P Renesto, P Dehoux, E Gouin, L Touqui, P Cossart, D Raoult Identification and Characterization of a Phospholipase D–Superfamily Gene in Rickettsiae J Infect Dis (2003) doi: 10.1086/379080 Also “lanes two and three show concerning similarities.“
To make the insolence worse, Raoult’s approach was repeatedly criticised by Bik. When Raoult claimed to have cured 80 patients of COVID-19, without a control arm in his study, Bik summed up:
- “At enrollment, 92% of the patients had a “low” score in the National Early Warning Score (NEWS), suggesting they were not very sick.
- The average time between onset of the COVID-19 symptoms and being enrolled in the study was 5 days. This suggests that the patients had already been sick for a while.
- Only 15% of the enrolled patients had a fever. Fever is one of the characteristic symptoms of COVID-19, so people with a positive PCR but no fever are probably only mildly ill, or maybe already recovering.
- Of the 12 patients who had a fever, the mean temperature was 38.6C (101.5 degrees F).
- Only half of the enrolled patients had a lower respiratory tract infection.
- 15% of these patients required oxygen.
- Four patients were asymptomatic.“
Obviously it is easy to cure patients who are not really that sick in the first place. But what about the treatment itself? Problem is, that especially the combination of the immunosuppressive hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycine, as promoted by Raoult, has very serious side effects which can lead to death. It should be noted that while Raoult’s IHU hospital in Marseille boasts a very low COVID-19 mortality rate of 1.7% (while refusing to treat the very ill) it is still higher than the estimate for the rest of France which is 0.53% according to this study from Institut Pasteur.
Because of Raoult, chloroquine became standard COVID-19 therapy in many countries worldwide. Including in France. Yet an observational study on 11 patients from Paris (Molina et al 2020) reported already on 30 March “no evidence of rapid antiviral clearance or clinical benefit”:
“At the time of treatment initiation, 10/11 had fever and received nasal oxygen therapy. Within 5 days, one patient died, two were transferred to the ICU. In one patient, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were discontinued after 4 days because of a prolongation of the QT interval from 405 ms before treatment to 460 and 470 ms under the combination. Mean through blood concentration of hydroxychloroquine was 678 ng/mL (range: 381–891) at days 3–7 after treatment initiation.
Repeated nasopharyngeal swabs in 10 patients (not done in the patient who died) using a qualitative PCR assay (nucleic acid extraction using Nuclisens Easy Mag®, Biomerieux and amplification with RealStar SARS CoV-2®, Altona), were still positive for SARS-CoV2 RNA in 8/10 patients (80%, 95% confidence interval: 49–94) at days 5 to 6 after treatment initiation.“
Sweden, which initially followed Raoult’s teachings and started to treat COVID-19 patients with chloroquine, swiftly aborted the method when patients developed severe side effects. A retrospective study on 84 patients receiving hydroxychloroquine and azithromycine from New York University (Chorin et al medRxiv 2020) also demonstrated how serious those side effects in COVID-19 patients can be:
“We report the change in the QT interval in 84 adult patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection treated with Hydroxychloroquine/Azithromycin combination. QTc prolonged maximally from baseline between days 3 and 4. in 30% of patients QTc increased by greater than 40ms. In 11% of patients QTc increased to >500 ms, representing high risk group for arrhythmia. The development of acute renal failure but not baseline QTc was a strong predictor of extreme QTc prolongation.”
That study, and a mysterious manuscript from Detroit submitted to NEJM, are discussed by Derek Lowe here.
Above the law?
As it happened, Raoult’s most recent (literally) uncontrolled clinical trials were ethically approved by his own submissive IHU. He even treated 14 year old children with chloroquine as part of his 1000 patients trial (Table 1 here, recruitment age was >12 years old), which is actually quite illegal. In his paper Gautret et al TMID 2020 Raoult admitted that his thousands of patients were kept in the dark about the risks, since none of them received a patient information sheet and an informed consent to sign:
“There is no formal consent to sign in our institution by patients“
IHU’s human guinea pigs were unaware of the experimental nature of the therapy, quite the opposite: because Raoult decreed that the hydroxychloroquine+azithromycine method must work, he retrospectively defined it a “standard treatment“. They believed to be undergoing an established, internationally approved therapy for COVID-19. Even more schizophrenically: all studies which Raoult designed in advance, with the explicit purpose to prove his therapy, were declared “retrospective” to deny the need for an ethics approval. This horrendous ethics breach passed peer review at Elsevier with flying colours. In 1 day.
On 20 April 2020, news came of Raoult being in serious legal trouble with the French authorities because of his human experiments with chloroquine:
“The National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM), which did not authorize the second study on hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil *, Sanofi) conducted at the institute hospital-university (IHU) in Marseille by Pr Didier Raoult, awaits that the investigators bring objective elements to demonstrate its observational nature, indicated Dominique Martin in an interview with APMnews.”
That was sure something unexpected for Raoult, after the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has visited his lab just days before and described Raoult as “great scientist”. On 24 April IHU retorted that the study never needed any ethics approval or patient consent, because it was “retrospective”, a hair-raising argument their Italian colleagues routinely used to cover up intentional patient abuse. And anyway, Raoult and his colleagues “deemed it ethically unacceptable to conduct a therapeutic trial“.
Meanwhile, in USA, an NIH Expert Panel, convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (directed by US epidemics expert Anthony Fauci), recommended in its COVID-19 guidelines on 21 April 2020:
“Except in the context of a clinical trial, the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel (the Panel) recommends against the use of the following drugs for the treatment of COVID-19:
– The combination of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin (AIII) because of the potential for toxicities.”
Chloroquine is about to become a major embarrassment for everyone. And Raoult is the central figure in this international Il pleut de la merde.
No wonder that the grand old man, unused to being contradicted or ridiculed, is losing it. The object of Raoult’s public wrath is now Bik whom he describes as “witchhunter”, as well as this study from Veterans Affair hospitals in USA:
Joseph Magagnoli, Siddharth Narendran, Felipe Pereira, Tammy Cummings, James W Hardin, S Scott Sutton, Jayakrishna Ambati Outcomes of hydroxychloroquine usage in United States veterans hospitalized with Covid-19 doi: 10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920
The retrospective controlled clinical study found out that hydroxychloroquine-treated patients had a high risk of death and concluded:
“In this study, we found no evidence that use of hydroxychloroquine, either with or without azithromycin, reduced the risk of mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with Covid-19. An association of increased overall mortality was identified in patients treated with hydroxychloroquine alone.”
The study made all the big news, maybe because it was the first one from the US. Raoult (or maybe his personal assistant in charge of social media) tweeted his views:
“The witchhunter @MicrobiomDigest is not attentive to details when she judges that a study is useful to her paranoiac fights!
Control group was treated with azithromycin.
Nearly dying patients with lymphopenia were treated with hydroxychloroquine.
Fraudulent study. Fake news“
When you spend so much time admiring Trump, you start sounding like your idol. After dealing with Bik, Raoult tweeted his criticism about a study by his French colleagues in Paris and their study Mahevas et al medRxiv 2020.
Unlike his own clinical trials, Mahevas et al was really an observational study of 181 French COVID-19 patients treated after Raoult’s method, but with a control group. The paper, published on 14 April, concludes against the use of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 hypoxic pneumonia patients and mentions:
“Eight patients receiving HCQ (9.5%) experienced electrocardiogram modifications requiring HCQ discontinuation.“
On 24 April Raoult and his IHU issued another press release or a white paper, where they openly accused their Paris colleagues Mahevas et al of “scientific fraud“, already in the headline. Raoult’s J’accuse partners are IHU group leader Philippe Broiqui and clinic head Matthieu Million. If you naively think such institutional fraud accusations happen in the scientific community at least occasionally: not really. IHU seems to have evolved under Raoult’s leadership into a lunatic asylum for the criminally insane.
Prior to that outpour, Raoult endorsed a bizarre telemedicine (sic!) study by a Brazilian insurance (sic!), which was never published anywhere, not even as preprint. It is only available as document on the file sharing platform Dropbox (sic!):
Bik blogged about that Brazilian “study”, where 636 patients, distance-assessed by telemedicine only, themselves decided which drug to take after they self-diagnosed themselves with COVID-19 (sic!). Afterwards, the study’s authors somehow pulled up the numbers of who died and who went to intensive care, and fabricated p-values which did not fit. Bik then provided an update on 20 April:
“It was announced today that the study described below has been suspended because of ethical violations. As pointed out by Natalia Pasternak and Carlos Orsi and Ricardo Parolin Schnekenberg […], the study had already started before the ethical approval had been obtained. This could be figured out by looking at the disclosed study days in the preprint and the trial registration at the Clinical Trials website.“
But for Raoult, that was a proper scientific clinical trial. Not the one done by his US peers in the Veterans Affairs hospitals, that was a “fraudulent” and “fake news”. What about this other Brazilian study, Silva Borba et al medRxiv 2020, published on 16 April?
“The high dose CQ arm presented more QTc>500ms (25%), and a trend toward higher lethality (17%) than the lower dosage. Fatality rate was 13.5% (95%CI=6.9-23.0%), overlapping with the CI of historical data from similar patients not using CQ (95%CI=14.5-19.2%). In 14 patients with paired samples, respiratory secretion at day 4 was negative in only one patient.”
In this double-blinded phase IIb clinical trial, all patients were treated just as Raoult says, with hydroxychloroquine+azithromycine only, without those evil controls Raoult hates? Chloroquine was applied in two different doses, and the doctors had to halt the high dose arm because the patients were dying from heart failure. Raoult doesn’t talk about that study.
Doomsday cult
Instead, he lets his loyal bootlickers attack his critics. On 14 April 2020, Raoult’s IHU Marseille openly and publicly threatened a clinician Damien Barraud, who has been very critical of their chloroquine “studies” on Twitter and in newspaper interviews. IHU tweeted a demand for Baraud to be stripped of his medical licence and be sacked by his hospital employer in Metz, and announced lawsuits for libel:
As I reported before, the International Society for Microbial Chemotherapy (ISAC), with which Raoult published his initial chloroquine study Gautret et al IJAA 2020, distanced themselves from it, in a public statement from 4 April 2020. ISAC (and then the publisher Elsevier) insist however that the peer review process “did adhere to the industry’s peer review rules.” Which is strange, since it seems the paper was reviewed and sent back for minor revision on the same day it was submitted. The next day, the authors returned a revised version which was immediately accepted.
Raoult’s follow up clinical trial with 80 patients treated with chloroquine and azithromycine and without any control arm (criticised by Bik above) was published in a different Elsevier journal, and accepted the next day after submission. The first author of the new Gautret et al TMID 2020, Philippe Gautret, is incidentally associate editor of that of that journal.
Regardless of the obviously repeatedly rigged peer review process, that wretched first Gautret et al IJAA 2020 paper serves as the ONLY clinical study on which the pharma giant Novartis bases its newly announced phase 3 clinical trial in USA, on 440 patients. Do check the references here.
Not just this. Somehow Raoult’s Marseille buddy Jean-Paul Moatti managed to smuggle an opinion piece into The Lancet promoting chloroquine. The author declared no conflict of interest, despite being the husband of Raoult’s co-director at IHU, Yolande Obadia.
Now Raoult, the 1-hour-peer review man, suddenly has enough of the traditional publishing he constantly games. He tweeted his YouTube video, saying that he prefers to have his studies assessed by “confined people” at his institute than by some external reviewers he cannot control:
In that same video, Raoult is saying things which make less and less sense:
“Maybe I was capable of responding to this situation because I’m part African and part of my ancestry leave me with the idea that we should treat infectious diseases“
The signs that Raoult might be losing his mind are already there. Problem is, having cemented his totalitarian power at IHU, having stifled all dissent years ago and having surrounded himself by loyal yes-sayers only, there is nobody to tell Raoult that he is making an utter arse of himself, in public and even on video.
In that recent preprint, where Raoult claimed to have cured with chloroquine over 1000 patients mildly or barely suffering from COVID-19 (including children), he counted 5 levels of evidence that his method works. The highest level of evidence is Raoult’s own Gautret et al IJAA 2020 paper, plus two studies from China which don’t even fit. Who cares, it will sure pass peer review in one of Elsevier journals Raoult controls. It is all very surreal.
The manuscript lists these key words: “SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; hydroxychloroquine; azithromycin; ethics; Hippocratic oath“. The last two strongly suggest that there is a kind of religious mass psychosis going on at IHU. These keywords are listed because Raoult firmly believes that it is unethical NOT to treat COVID-19 patients with chloroquine, and every doctor who insists on scientific process and evidence, breaches the Hippocratic oath of not doing harm. Nobody at Marseille laughed or told Raoult to check himself in into an asylum. The entire IHU plays his game like a devout doomsday cult on hallucinogenic drugs.
The “great scientist” believes in his delirium to be actually just like a World War I general, commanding thousands of men to get out the trenches and die for the glory of France.
What next? To be updated, proper randomized controlled clinical trials on chloroquine against COVID-19 are ongoing and might soon deliver results. But Raoult is sure a tough guy who won’t go down without a fight.
This article has been updated several times since it was first published.
Update 2.05.2020
TCM as chloroquine adjuvant?
There seems to be a clear pattern how Raoult evaluates scientific studies. Those which do not fit his general world view, are all flawed or outright fraudulent. Those which seem to support his chloroquine claims are infallible and perfect.
So now Raoult endorses Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as a chloroquine adjuvant. Really, he does:
The reference is to a new preprint from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, China, Yu et al medRxiv 2020. It reports a retrospective analysis of a clinical trial with “568 critically ill patients” with mortalities of 18.8% (9/48) in hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) group and 45.8% (238/520) in no-HCQ group. Astounding, right? Only that the Wuhan authors never mention azythromycine, while Raoult so far insisted HCQ does not help critically ill COVID-19 patients at all.
Now, the preprint by the Tongji cardiologist Wang Daowen and colleagues claims all 568 patients received “baseline treatments [..] of antiviral drugs (Lopinavir and Ritonavir, Entecavir hydrate, or Ribavirin)“. 48 of these allegedly received HCQ. The ethics approval references a clinical trial with Daowen as principal investigator, which however used only one drug: Shuanghuanglian. It is a herbal TCM concoction, the trial had 4 arms with 3 different Shuanghuanglian quantity, plus control arm. A total of 400 patients (as opposed to the preprint’s 568), nobody was treated with HCQ or any other drug mentioned in the preprint.
Unless completely made-up fraud, there is only one way to explain it: For controls, Daowen et al lied about baseline treatment because serious scientists outside of China tend to laugh at TCM. Where the extra 158 patients and the HCQ group came from, is anyone’s guess, unless invented they were borrowed from different trials or hospitals. Raoult says this is good science. Maybe he will replace azythromycine with TCM now?
Update 20.05.2020
Raoult was possibly made to resign his job, he was cited to go to China already this summer. Incidentally, by leaving France and Europe, he would escape any eventual criminal charges for illegal human experimentation.
The French newspaper Entreprendre cited his letter to Robert Lafont, the CEO of this publishing house. The online article was swiftly deleted, but here is a backup. Newspapers were quick to denounce the report as fake news and a prank, Lafort himself played stupid, but I personally am not so sure (although it is likely Raoult was never offered a job in Peking). This was Raoult’s letter, translated:
“Since you have been one of the rare journalists to have exhibited exemplary behaviour during this period, I would like to take this opportunity to reserve for you the first news: my upcoming departure for China (by the end of the summer). I was indeed recruited as Professor by the Peking University (PUHSC), the most renowned medical school in the country, which happens to be very advanced in the field of virology. It became very complicated to undertake research projects in the health sector in France, the sector being plagued by partisan quarrels, sprawling bureaucracy and political correctness. “
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Great article.
Just adding for the record that despite his own exclusion criteria Pr Raoult did enroll 10 y/o children, for which there is a 3 years jail sentence + 45k euros fine.
source : https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Hydroxychloroquine_final_DOI_IJAA.pdf
see page 6 for inclusion criteria : “two primary criteria: i) age >12 years;”
see page 22 for data on patients (two 10 y/o children were included in the study)
PS it doesn’t matter if they were in the “control” group or not, they were part of the study
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It appears the author has an axe to grind here…Me? I’d just like to see a cure found. So why do I say that about the author? Well, Let’s look at Costa Rica, and their death rate. After that, let’s look at Bahrain, and Turkey. What do they have in common? Heavy use of HCQ. Turkey just spoke up on the merits of HCQ yesterday. After that, let’s consider the doctors who have used HCQ for Lupus and RA. One in Italy tweeted yesterday that only 20 patients out of 65,000 users contracted Covid in Italy. Wow! Please try to explain it away…but it sounds like a darn good prophylaxis. And while we’re at it, the author doesn’t seem to understand that chloroquine is not the same as HCQ. Bad results for Chloroquine does not mean anything about HCQ. Think Hydrogen Peroxide vs Water. Only one molecule difference, but vastly different properties.
HCQ is an antiviral. The idea is to kill the virus. You want to use it as early as possible, so it has a better chance of killing fewer bad guys to be successful. Waiting to use it until the patient is deathly ill is an exercise in futility. It doesn’t have an ability to arrest the overreactive immune response that seems to be happening with Covid. Scientists understand this, but the media is hoping readers won’t. After all, this off patent, inexpensive drug, which has been prescribed millions of times with safe outcomes, doesn’t make the medical establishment enough money. If you want a smoking gun, start with who makes money where. At a buck a pill, there’s no financial incentive for anyone to sell HCQ. Pull back the curtain, and you will find there are several doctors in the US who are saying they are successfully using HCQ to prevent hospitalizations and deaths. And it shortens the viral cycle by a lot more than 3 days (Remdesivir). The media and AMA doesn’t seem to want you to hear about it.
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After 4 months of closely following the Covid-19 fight in general and HCq in particular, it appears to me that ZINC is critical to the effective use of HCQ. HCQ may have antiviral properties especially for Covid virus in the body fluids, but once the virus gets into cells where it reproduces, then it seems the ionophore properties of HCQ are the essential component which allows Zinc to enter cells and stop the virus from reproducing there. To the extent that HCQ has some utility in fighting Covid, especially in the early phases, it may be that the patients have enough Zinc reserves for HCQ and Zinc to work together.
Since Covid appears to rapidly deplete Zinc as well as other nutrients like Vitamins C and D3, Dr. Vladimir Zelenco has apparently had success by combining HCQ, zinc and Azithromycin for out-patient use. He and others are now engaged in a retrospecive study of his treated patients and their outcomes compared with other Covid patients in his community who also suffered from Covid infection but were not treated using Dr. Z’s 3 part, 5 day treatment plan which costs $20. He treated older patients who had clear symptoms, and few were subsequently hospitalized and almost none died. I look forward to seeing their paper once it is published.
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Here is a study done in Spain. HCQ does work. And Raoult is completely right. On what basis does remdesivir proof it works ??? Death rate is the same. This med is useless. If I contract the disease and I have to chose between HCQ and Remdesivir, I chose HCQ with my eyes closed. And then I add some Zinc into it. But HCQ is cheap. Remdesivir is an expensive drug from a big company sponsored by Fauci. That’s the difference here.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0057/v1
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“It should be noted that while Raoult’s IHU hospital in Marseille boasts a very low COVID-19 mortality rate of 1.7% (while refusing to treat the very ill) it is still higher than the estimate for the rest of France which is 0.53% according to this study from Institut Pasteur. ”
Not a fan of Raoult at all but it is unfair to compare the mortality rate in his studies to the estimated infection fatality rate (0.53%) as the latter is necessarily much lower. As a reminder IFR = deaths / all infections (including the asymptomatics, undiagnosed etc.)
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T, you mentioned the fatality rate in France is 0.53%? The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea, as on April 22, 2020, reports for France 117 324 total cases, and 20 796 death cases. Expressed these stats (as you indicate) on % basis, gives a mortality rate for France as 17.73%.
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See Salje et al (2020): Estimating the burden of SARS-CoV-2 in France
https://hal-pasteur.archives-ouvertes.fr/pasteur-02548181/document
just published a couple of days ago
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You are attempting to compare the implied infection fatality rate of France to the case fatality rate of a hospital. That would be apples and oranges.
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You mentioned above at ” Given the evidence that the coronavirus is apparently lethal for less than 1% of the infected……”. This cannot be correct!. In many countries, the mortality rate is >10%
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This is lethality and not mortality, so learn first and talk later. Moreover, this depends on the amount of tests performed, so unreliable
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Jhnny99, with respect, by definition lethality is the capacity to cause death, whereas mortality is the number of deaths from a particular cause. In the context of this discussion, I mentioned the mortality rate as the percentage of deaths within the population of people currently infected with COVID-19. Practically, every country in the world monitors a number of active cases and death associated with COVID-19, and these statistics are updated several times daily. These variables represent the cases reported by respective health authorities based on medical records and are independent of the number of tests performed.
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To be able to comment you need to be aware of the difference between tested mortality and untested mortality. Most people who have COVID have not been tested.
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Regarding the Mahevas study in Medrxiv.
Could the authors explain why 8 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were counted in the control group?
Moreover, could they inform the public about the clinical outcome of these patients?
Is Raoult incapable of grasping the concept of “setting recruitment criteria and applying them consistently”?
Note that Mahevas et al are a French team of researchers. Raoult expects comity and collegiality from his French colleagues (and threatens them with discipline if they criticise him), but he does not extend the same courtesy.
Implying that Mahevas et al played fast-and-loose when assigning cases to groups (and complaining about lack of clarity in clinical outcomes) is especially rich and reaches Trumpian levels of hypocrisy. US rightwing politicians use this as a deliberate tactic. If your candidate has an obvious flaw – corruption or cowardice or multiple mistresses – you get in first and launch advertisements claiming accusing your opponent of immorality or cowardice or whatever. That way, if the other side tries to point out the flaw in your candidate, voters just roll their eyes.
Raoult is aping not only Trump’s language of “witchhunting” and “fake news”, but also his deployment of tactical hypocrisy.
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Wrong. 100% wrong. I took it. It worked. You would too. Sorry, it works, I am living proof.
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“You would fall for the same scam” is hardly a conclusive argument.
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About Dr Barraud alias fluidloading (which never denied to be Dr Barraud), here is most of his attacks on Pr Raoult, look at this link
http://www.noelshack.com/2020-17-3-1587558555-r-barraud.png
Much more insulting than just “witchhunter”, which is a bit hard, but not insulting at all for me.
So, I understand the answer of the Marseille IHU .
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Eh? You come to my site to complain that Dr Barraud doesn’t bring enough respect for Pr Raoult?
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Thats a big fat lie… only in marseille France were people were treated with chloroquine the rate of deaths was the lowest in France almost 0, people didn’t die in marseille were Dr Raoult treated them, but in rest of France they did and in marseille there is also no more new infections, the same in Greece, they also use the protocol and are fine, this article is just nonsense, it’s harassment and because of those bad articles people were miss informed and didn’t get treated
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excuse me in Greece we do not apply such protocol. Where did you hear that? This is not true. In any case, because of all this bruhaha (maybe this doctor partly to blame?) people were buying plaquenil in tons from the drugstore. Thank God they stopped him!
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Look at the data please. Are you saying that Raoult is a fraud, Zelenko is a fraud, South Dakota is a fraud, the country of Bahrain is a fraud, along with 1000’s of doctors around the world? I understand being dismissive of one data source, but ignoring entire countries is highly unscientific.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u7bETd3q9QVfO6y54jm_7Z5ZHTmoguUAetJHc2gwcj0/edit?usp=sharing
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Zelenko is a fraud, but he seems to have shut up and left the scene when people started asking awkward questions about the current conditions of his clients and whether he was bothering to keep tabs on them.There were also legal issues about his rash decision to release a non-anonymised spreadsheet that identified his clients.
South Dakota? I don’t think there is any such place. Convince me that it exists!
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Its amazing how trite and condescending a human can become. I guess even Clyde is some mothers precious child though.
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Leonid! Noneya is being condescending!
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I cannot agree more. Making huge profit out of this crisis by big pharma and their corrupted allies is the sole motive! Please stop manipulating people it doesn’t work anymore. In Morocco and South Korea the same protocol has proven extremely efficient with lowest mortality rates in the world. The treatment costs nothing and this is what is annoying them all!!!!
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Raoult treats patients who come to IHU-Marseille, therefore statistically more motivated by symptoms than in the Pasteur survey.
Despite this, he had only 12 deaths out of 3039 patients, 0.4% is a succes that no one can deny.
And in the last study, he had 8 deaths out of 1061 patients, 0.75% is a bit more but it included 474 co-morbidities, you can’t tell that it’s only the easy cases.
There are many other errors in your paper, dear Leonid.
Unfortunately a (supposed) lie can’t be fought with another lie, but with the truth.
That’s why you failed.
P.S. : I agree that in Raoul’s treatment, HQ is probably a wrong way and AZ is perhap’s doing all the Job, but Raoult is not only HQ.
Seen from France he was a visionary that refuse this stupid general confinement and that very early asker fot the TTT’s way of the South Korea.
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“Seen from France he was a visionary”??? You mean BFM TV let people think he was a visionary. Seen from France on April, 25, there does not seem to be an HQ miracle. Since you seem French, you understand every word of what is sung by the students in the students’ performance video. Can you deny this man is so hated that students who do not have a carrier yet are not afraid to go public on what it means to work in his institute? What kind of science performs an institute director who is insulted by his subordinates in a show and received a “coup de boule” (headbutt) by a coworker? Don’t tell me how a man behaves and what research he produces are two different things. I have almost 20 years of experience in academia to know that poor leadership produces poor work. With his communication method, Raoult has damaged how science is perceived. When the time comes to discuss research financing, what will the taxpayers remember of that story?
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Pr Raoult is such a visionary that is predictions where false :
21/01/2020 : “Coronavirus in China: should we feel concerned?” “The world has gone crazy, 3 Chinese people die and it make a worldwide alert” ” (https://youtu.be/qoBoryHuZ6E)
17/02/2020 – “Coronavirus: fewer deaths than by scooter accident” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00_vy-f22nE)
25/02/2020 – “Before we can influence mortality statistics in France, things will have to change a lot” in his “Coronavirus: a risk of pandemic?” video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuE5CA6yB-Y)
I could also quote him on his “visions” about the climate but it’s out of his scope of proficiency
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You have many valid points against Raoult methodologies, although the urgency of the situation excuses some of it.
However you don’t address the flawed Veterans study that Raoult criticizes, which is way worse than his studies on all points. You also write that Hydroxycloroquine doesnt work, there’s not a hint of evidence of that. You therefore have nothing scientifical in your approach as well.
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I really don’t get this argument that “urgency of the situation excuses some of it”. I’d say that urgency implies reinforced attention, because a mistake could have enormous consequences when thousands of lives are on the line. OK we somehow face the unknown, but it’s not like we have no approach to deal with urgent situations, no knowledge gained from past pandemics and nobody except Raoult working on it. Politicians asking for an immediate solution to get people back to work asap in addition to damaged health systems in many countries, including the richest, already play a strongly negative role. If somebody has a hint that something might be working based on observation, then it should be presented that way. Scientists generally understand that and it is acceptable in urgent situations. But danger starts when you trick people. Nobody nowadays can ignore the role of media. Being approximate, not to say dishonest, and still go public in a situation like the present one is not like a quarrel in scientific journals that no one reads.
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Untrue. This page is lying. Go read the paper that claims HCQ leads to higher death rate. Raoult is right. They gave all patients that were in the most critical state HCQ and then they conclude that HCQ increases deaths. Despicable manipulation. I stopped reading this page immediately because this is clearly a propaganda page.
Here is proof of a study one in Spain given HCQ early on. HCQ works. Period.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0057/v1
HCQ works like Tamiflu for the flu. You need to use Tamiflu withing 48 hours of your influenza infection or else it is useless. The same is true for HCQ. The side effects of HCQ are ridiculous. This medicin is approved for people with lupus and reuma. These patients take HCQ on a daily basis. Millions of people have been taking this drug for malaria in the past decades. If this drug would be really that toxic, it would never have been approved for those people.
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Wow… from the moment you confuse cloroquine with hydroxycloroquine, everything you have written becomes invalid. just for starters. Costa Rica is using it using Wuhan methodology, you can check it out…what’s wrong with you, writing piles of shit? Ok, you don’t like the guy..you don’t like Trump…but it’s working, doctors have started using it and this pile of excrement you have written here will be forgoten and so will you!
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Tell us more of this “Wuhan methodology”.
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Wow ! You seem to be a great analyst. 12 deaths over 3000 people treated. 0,4% death rate. A full hospital of fake and lying medical staff ! That’s magic !
So continue your “better science” while they save people.
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“He even treated 14 year old children with chloroquine as part of his 1000 patients trial (Table 1 here, recruitment age was >12 years old), which is actually quite illegal.”
It cannot be “quite illegal”. Either it’s illegal or it’s legal. Please either reference the law that was broken and explain how (which would be really valuable info), or delete that line.
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It’s illegal : cf https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006072665&idArticle=LEGIARTI000025457542
which is clearly the case here as it is an experimental treatment for this disease. Enrolling them if enough to violate the law even if they are part of the control group, since in a normal study groups are randomized and nor the doctors nor the patients know who is in which group. And in case you don’t know how patients are tested have a look at this ( https://health.ucdavis.edu/coronavirus/coronavirus-testing.html ), and tell me if you’d like to have your kids tested like this when it is NOT necessary they’d be part of the study. Once again minors cannot be included in a study unless they cannot be replaced by adults. This law has been made for this, to protect people and moreover children.
PS this French law the French transciption on EU law https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32014R0536
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If you download the original Renesto et al. blot and examine it with Fotoforensics or just Photoshop, it is easy to see that all of the bands/lanes are pasted in. It is a complete collage. This guy has been trolling science for years.
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Dear Owlbert, please share your visual analysis!
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Put the PNG version through level sweep analysis, and it shows blocky halos around pasted-in elements, including text, bands and lanes. I can’t insert graphics here.
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Upload to imgur.com and add link, as Zebedee always does!
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Independent Science Journalist and Cartoonist. The author is a cartoonist. Why don’t you talk to doctors that are really using HCQ in the hospital and ask them if it works? Its clearly to early to use data and studies. We as doctors need to think about how things work and why they work. We need to prevent the Cytokine storm. Treating after the storm is too late. The day you get the disease and the day you get treated really matters. If you treat shingles after 48 hours Valcyclovir is not effective. If you treat Infulenza with Tamiflu after 48 hours Tamiflu is not effective. If you put oil in your motor after you drive really matters. Its all the same. Timing is everything. Well almost everything. My point is the timing of treatment is really big deal. Pubmed as data on the Chinese invitro study of chloroquine.
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Your article is obviously not written in an objective manner. You undermine your credibility with your extreme polemic personal attacks. Have you read Dr. Magagnoli et al’s study on outcomes of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients in the VA and checked whether Dr. Raoult’s criticisms of it are valid? I have and conclude Dr. Raoult’s rightly points out its serious flaws.
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Oooh, that’s rich. I think it’s better to focus on the serious flaws of Rauolt’s ‘studies.’ And if we want to talk about undermining credibility with extreme polemic personal attacks, we should look at what Raoult is doing and has done for years against detractors.
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The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine with zinc, etc. treatments used early at the onset of covid-19 by the mainstream media and medical elites like yourself is a poster child example of the battle between integrity vs ideological rigidity. The blame for thousands, if not millions, of covid-19 deaths will soon become abundantly clear being laid upon these two groups of ideoligists referenced above. That is if the truth is allowed to prevail.
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Very serious,very,very serious .Stay “independent Cartoonist ” . Will be better for all of us dear Mr.Nobody.
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At the moment we don’t have any treatment that is efficient for covid-19. This is not a surprise, based on experience from SARS-Cov, MERS-Cov and seasonal influenza virus.
History has learned us that vaccine is the only efficient treatment.
Please forget politics, stupid conspiratory theories and ideology and take care while waiting for a vaccine to be developed.
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I totally agree with Morty!
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Bravo Didier !!! Kepp going, men !
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Is this article the work of a scientist or a failed Buzzfeed journalist?
Shame on the author that clearly is still fighting his high school insecurities and is begging for relevancy.
I shall use this hit piece as an example of the bias of the ideologically rigid scientific community. If you even consider yourself a scientist.
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There appears to a campaign to discredit the use of Hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of covid-19. Is it because HCQ is inexpensive and the patents have expired? Is because other drugs considered to treat covid-19, antivirals or a vaccine would be more profitable?
Hope those who stand to profit are paying you well for credibility and your soul.
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https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2766117
Not conclusive by any means as a retrospective cohort study, but still it doesn’t look good for the proposed treatment.
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I stopped reading from the very beginning. Dr. Raoult is right in his Twitter. I read the paper. HCQ was given to patients that were in a hopeless situation. What kind of study treats all dying patients with HCQ and concludes that HCQ leads to more deaths ?
Here is a Spanish study that shows early HCQ does work. This page is pure propaganda.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0057/v1
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Your preprint is also propaganda. As explained in the online comments, the authors cherry-picked the HCQ group from otherwise healthy patients, while the non-HCQ’s were at death’s door (e.g. many were in frank DIC). The authors are also incapable of doing simple statistical analysis. After listing these deficiencies, they were advised by the most competent online reviewer to pull this paper, since it “will only generate a stack of letters to the editor, and it will be ignored in any review.” But I’m sure it will appear in the sort of garbage journal where nobody cares.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0057/v2
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as for the truth I have no idea. I DO KNOW THAT THE VETERANS STUDY TOLD US NOTHING. The giving of hydroxchloriquine to the sickest people only before they die is not a study. We know it does not work in the later stages. We want to know if hydroxchloriquine, zinc and z pac work in the early stages. We seam to trial everything but what has been shown to have some effect.
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Dr. Raoult is a very well established scientist. He is one of those scientist who publish very frequently and because of that there a few cases (out of thousands) in which some questionable work was done but, overall, he is generally well respected. I do not think he is known for clinical development, however. So he is not highly versed in the standard methods of gaining official approval for a medication.
A clinical series is nevertheless scientific evidence. And many great medical discoveries have been made by uncontrolled case studies. These days we worship at the shrine of the randomized controlled trial. I guess I do myself. I have been a PI and Co-PI in a number of studies. That is generally the way it’s done now but a series of cases, even a small one, can have great information. Also, as has become painfully obvious lately with recent discussions about the large percentage of “successful” randomized controlled trials that ultimately are shown to be incorrect, our standard methods are not perfect. Statistical significance is not everything. One needs to evaluate many other things such as the effect size. There are also sorts of ways that randomized trials can be done incorrectly, even by excellent people trying to do their best. There are even challenges to the whole basis on which such studies are found, the frequentist school of statistics. There are a number of statisticians who argue for the reworking of our methods to basis them on Baysian statistics. In my opinion, either approach, or even a mixture, can be used as long as people know what they are doing and design the studies with care.
Use of medications off label is justified in many cases. I prescribe a number of medications off label in my practice. Until more definite information is found, hydroxychloroquine is a medication worth considering for early stages of Covid 19 patients in selected patients as determined by the patients’ doctors.
Dr. Raoult is far from a witch doctor. He is an accomplished scientist and his views deserve respectful consideration, not ridicule, though, of course, not slavish acceptance either. I think we will have some more definitive answers soon but for now hydroxycholoroquine can be a reasonable choice for some patients.
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Feels like a paid for by big pharma trolling site.
No wonder Google places it at the top of the list on Dr rAOULT.
A new low for real science.
A new high for fake science
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Oh yes, very perspicacious of you. Especially the big piggy bank top left asking for donations. A dead give away!
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Anyone can put a donation thing on a site.
The Lancet study stinks and it should be retracted… How can someone calling himself an ‘independent journalist’ agree to such a shady data set and associated data analysis? Nothing in that paper is available or repeatable. Accusing other people of cherry picking,… the irony is overwhelming.
This is not independent journalism (I won’t go into the scribllings you call cartoons), this is pathetic, self-congretulatory sensationalism by some self-proclaimed “Editor-In-Chief of the Scienctific World”. For better science lmao… you’re just a troll with a strong opinion and a website.
The real question is: How the hell did this nonsense end up first on google?
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“Self-proclaimed” what? Where did you find that quote? In your head?
As for your last question: I made two phone calls: one to Soros, one to Gates.
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Hei Leonid,
I have to say that I am really puzzled by your article. I am myself a scientist and like most of the scientists that have a minimum of ethic, I am horrified by nearly everything what Didier Raoult does and asserts.
When I read your article, I feel of course supported in my opinion, and I am not double checking everything you say (a small confirmation bias here…). Until the end… Didier Raoult resigning? Whaouuuu… that one I had to double check.
Being French, I could look in both French and international news. This hasn’t been really covered internationally, but in France it is pretty much accepted that this was a fake.
Raoult’s team denied it quickly, and investigations concluded that it was a fake email address. The “Entreprendre” magazine did not only remove the article but also accepted that their source was fake.
So of course maybe it is a cover up and in the end it will be found to be true, but this seems unlikely: If Raoult had sent a letter to Lafond so he could be the first one to publish it, why deny the publication?
Back to your article Leonid. You obviously had access to the original news, so you should also have access to the follow up. You published the update 1 week ago, and haven’t added any follow up. So as it stands it looks pretty much like a fake news.
That disappoints me a lot. You are obviously subjective in your way of writing. This is fine, but you should still check what you are writing about, otherwise you are doing exactly what Raoult does: disseminating fake news. When I think about all the things in your article that I did not fact-checked, can I believe them? I am not sure anymore.
I know it is harsh, but one mistake like that and you lose all my trust.
Regards,
Sven
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Hi Sven, I discussed on Twitter why it is not really likely for a publishing CEO with 40 years of experience to fall for an amateur prank. IHU says many things, including accusing everyone they don’t agree with of research fraud and witchhunts.
Here is my offer: you go back to reading reliable sources like Retraction Watch, and if by September Raoult has resigned, you give my humble fakenews page another chance?
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Ha ok, I do not have twitter… not really a social media guy… 🙂
Without reading your twitter discussion, I would agree that with experience you are less likely to fall into traps. However, it is also true that the imminence and craziness of this information was likely to lead to a strong burst of adrenaline in any news writer. If you add to this a source that seems plausible (not for me to judge), a mistake can be quickly done. Many of the very reputed newspapers have already done some mistakes in the past and will still do in the future.
Yes, the IHU says a lot of fake/bad/stupid things… I agree. But that does not mean that everything they say is wrong. So even though it is tempting to put any statement they say in the trash bin, that would be a very poor critical work.
I think you are getting me wrong with your offer. Raoult resigning before september or not would not change my point of view. What annoys me is that you write it like it would be a fact, which as it stands today is not the case. Somebody reading your article and not the comments has no way to know that this is a strongly discussed assertion.
Leaving your webpage? Why? Because I disagree with something? That is not what my critical mind tells me. It is important to read/listen to every point of view, but when possible it is also important to say it when something seems off.
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In my view, the only fake news was the offer from China, and that was what IHU denied most vigorously . Chinese don’t pick up our garbage. Hence the removal of the article and the denials.
Otherwise, the fact remains such letter was published. I am Ok with being the only one still citing it.
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It seems that I cannot reply directly to your last message so I will reply here.
So you do even agree that the offer from china is fake! So why is it still uncorrected in the article? You clearly write “Raoult was made to resign his job, he will go to China already this summer.” Why would you write that (and write about the consequences) if you believe it is fake?
Citing the letter isn’t the problem at all. Citing it while omitting an important part of the story/context is very problematic.
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Now here I actually agree with you! Haven’t thought of that aspect (China), will correct. Thanks.
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Nice! I like it much more like that. Thanks for correcting.
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ALL THIS ARTICLE TURNED OUT TO BE FALSE AND HIT JOB – ALL COUNTRIES NOW ARE USING IT AND THE WHO HAS NO OTHER OPTION THAN RE-START TRIALS TO SEE IF THE CAN SAFE THEIR INTEREST IN THE PROFIT WITH VACCINES – THIS IS A DISGRACE IF NOT CORRECTED? BUT HELL IT WILL NOT? – BECAUSE THE AUTHOR IS NOT A RESEARCHER IS A REPEATER
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how dare you, insult an eminence like Rault, you are a truly bad actor, hope you are getting paid if not you lost your brain
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Hi Leonid,
Thanks for the article!
What is the source for saying that URMITE lost its CNRS and INSERM funding in 2018? I tried to google a bit but can’t find this information anywhere.
Regards
Charles
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Good point. I think the details should be here: https://www.les-crises.fr/le-professeur-didier-raoult-rebelle-anti-systeme-ou-megalomane-sans-ethique/
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I had a look at this article yesterday actually 🙂
I can’t find any mention of INSERM or CNRS withdrawing funding from the IHU or URMITE. The end of section VIII actually suggests that the IHU gets direct funding from the state via the ANR until the end of 2020.
There is a mention that INSERM and CNRS ordered an inquiry into the IHU (following accusations of harassment and mismanagement) but there is no mention of any action taken against the IHU following this inquiry, or following the falsification of results in IHU scientific papers.
Regards
Charles
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Here you go:
https://marsactu.fr/didier-raoult-inaugure-son-ihu-mediterranee-infection-sur-un-mode-defensif/
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Hey, thanks for the follow up and sorry about the late reply I’ve been distracted by work.
I really want this to be true but it seems near impossible to get a reputable source of information to confirm this.
I found another page with a little bit more information than the marsactu article: http://sante-secu-social.npa2009.org/?Mediapart-Chloroquine-pourquoi-le-passe-de-Didier-Raoult-joue-contre-lui
The website itself is not very reliable but the article is a good summary of all the stuff I have read here and there about this:
– Withdrawal of the label (unclear whether this means funding stops) for the units replacing URMITE (MEPHI and VITROME)
– Decision taken after a report from HCERES, pointing to “quantity over quality”, publications in dummy journals created only for that purpose, lack of expertise in epidemiology, etc…
I think that what we really need to find is this damning HCERES report (which should be public). The NPA article says the inquiry for the report started in January 2017 and the sanctions were taken in January 2018. This suggests the report was published at some point in 2017.
However the evaluation reports for MEPHI and VITROME on the HCERES website show nothing out of the ordinary (the tone is neutral for vitrome and rather positive for mephi). These reports are dated from May and June 2017 respectively, so the dates match what we expect. However the content does not 😦
– https://www.hceres.fr/en/rechercher-une-publication/mephi-microbes-evolution-phylogenie-et-infections
– https://www.hceres.fr/fr/rechercher-une-publication/vitrome-vecteurs-infections-tropicales-et-mediterraneenne
The website of the University of Marseille still shows INSERM and CNRS as supervising entities for MEPHI:
https://pharmacie.univ-amu.fr/mephi
But makes no such mention for VITROME:
https://pharmacie.univ-amu.fr/vitrome
Any idea how to find that missing HCERES report?
Charles
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Update: You might want to update this article. It’s embarrassing. Dr.’s Zelenko and Raoult just released their studies showing death rates of 0.7% and 0.5%. And The Henry Ford hospital had a reduction of 50%. https://twitter.com/Jonathanbstan/status/1279882753878654977?s=20
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Oh thank you. I will delete this article and ask other scientists to retract their clinical trial data also.
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