This is a guest post by Alexander Samuel, a French activist with German roots who was sued by the chloroquine quack Didier Raoult. Alex’s crime was to republish my article in French translation, and in fact, Raoult sued me as well. My own lawsuit was dropped because I refused to learn French and move residence to France. But even then, Raoult and his IHU Méditerranée in Marseille was determined to break Alex and make him pay, both literally and figuratively. They lost.

The main story however is not this nasty vengeful abuser, a parody of a scientist, a mendacious crook with no morals or ethics but with a pathological Napoleon complex. It is about the French political, judicial and academic system which not only accrued Raoult with immense power and political support up to President Macron, but also placed him above all laws and regulations of France. Raoult was also supplied with huge amounts of public research money to sue everyone he wanted, while he and his stooges like the antisemite troll Eric Chabriere were supported by subservient local courts determined to punish their critics. Including Raoult’s own daughter.

I personally believe Alex Samuel was a kind of hostage to get my articles on For Better Science deleted. Raoult, Chabriere and IHU knew they can’t get me to comply either under German or French law. I believe their seemingly unhinged lawsuits against a third party were meant as a kind of blackmail. Make the hostage suffer, make him beg Schneider to delete all articles about Raoult, so that his tormentors will let him go. And indeed, Raoult’s lawyer admitted in court that they sued Alex for no other reason but to get at me.

It was a classic vexatious SLAPP lawsuit, where the main goal is not to win, but to financially ruin and silence the opponent. The farce only stopped because IHU eventually stopped paying for Raoult’s lawsuits. And this rich bully was always too stingy to put up his own money for vexatious lawsuits.

Not only French democracy with its values of liberty and equality looks like a sad joke here. Let us also not forget all those victims in France and worldwide who died during the COVID-19 pandemic because of Raoult’s antivaxxery and his chloroquine and ivermectin quackery, while he suffered exactly zero consequences for all his misdeeds. Despite all those criminal investigations which have been opened against him in 2022-2023 and which obviously led nowhere.

As reminder, Raoult’s “punishment” was his forced retirement with full pension and benefits as IHU director and Aix-Marseille University professor in 2022, he was 70 years old then.

Raoult currently has currently 16 retractions (Retraction Watch Database lists 15). None of those for his dangerous and illegal COVID-19 trials, but for his older microbiological studies which lacked ethics approvals. Even then, it should have been many more retractions: Raoult kept recycling the same irrelevant ethics approval number for hundreds of his clinical studies for many years, because his Aix-Marseille University didn’t mind. Nobody in charge ever minded. This is how France works.

Now, Alex Samuel will tell you about Raoult’s lawsuits against him and others.

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Is this really how France works?

By Alexander Samuel

While Italy banned For Better Science because of dishonest gastroenterologists, another case involving this same website was being held in French courts, more specifically in Marseille, France. It’s about an article published in March 2021, about French hydroxychloroquine genius Didier Raoult.

Didier Raoult, the IHU institute, and Eric Chabrière all decided to sue Leonid Schneider for defamation and insults, which they claim to be present in this article. They also sued me, because I translated it into French and put it on my blog. 

Readers might not know me because I mostly write in French, and some elements I publish are way too local and specific, and sometimes on social media only, like that of the Aix-Marseille University and CNRS researcher, Jean-Marc Sabatier (see tweets here and here). This Editor-in-Chief of three Bentham journals recently published an antivax book (which he defends here) suggesting that COVID-19 vaccines are actually a conspiracy to depopulate the planet by killing as many as possible…

I often work with some sleuths like Lonni Besancon and Fabrice Frank, occasionally co-authoring papers answering funny questions like “Why the article that led to the widespread use of hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 should be retracted”. 

This post is a good occasion to trace back my work on the IHU / Raoult case. When the pandemic started, I was an activist, and I had a network of friends among the yellow vest movement in France. I used to work on tear gas where I made friends during the 2019 extradition law protests in Hong Kong. They also told me about Chinese journalists who disappeared when the pandemic began. I was asked to help disseminate the right public health messages, especially about “more positiveness”, because people wanted a cure. I had heard of some chloroquine magic on social networks, and incidentally, Gautret et al. 2020 just got published. At first, I was optimistic, but then the French journalist Florian Gouthière wrote a blog post about this paper, calling it “fragile”. As a molecular biologist, I started dissecting qPCR data in the supplementary table and noticed that the qPCR threshold was apparently different between control and treatment groups. This became obvious looking at the cycle number dynamic. But this was too technical to explain to journalists, editors did not have any interest in my story, instead they invited Perronne and Raoult, all the media was around them. So I explained it to my friends on yellow vest channels first. Indeed, that PCR cycle trick was confirmed by the IHU technicians one year later, 

A big part of my activity was countering disinformation and explaining scientific fraud to the larger public, quoting excellent work – often found on For Better Science – by various great people like Smut Clyde (David Bimler), Alexander Magazinov or Elisabeth Bik. I have to admit, to have made a big mistake in a Twitter thread where I wanted to detail this qPCR issues: being too focussed on explaining, I failed to reference Elisabeth Bik’s original work as my source for the introductory context, showing how often papers signed by Didier Raoult had image duplication concerns. That was a good lesson to remember that there is not much to be gained from fighting scientific misconduct, so it is important to always quote the person who first did the job or spotted a potential fraud. 

Leonid and I won the case now, so everyone can read and share the article which will not be deleted as Didier Raoult asked for. But how we got there and at what costs is an interesting point to understand “how France works”.

Legal procedure

Be aware that I am not a law specialist, this is merely my account of what I learned from experts, thus free to comment and correct any mistakes or misinterpretations.

In France, defamation and insult cases are treated under criminal law, not civil law. Anyone is free to consider a content as defamation and can sue the person who said these words. After filing a complaint, the plaintiff is supposed to pay a deposit to prevent vexatious lawsuits. If it is not done in time, the case is supposed to be dropped. The plaintiff gets their money back if the case proceeds to indictment. Which is almost automatically a consequence of a complaint, valid or not.

In our case, Eric Chabrière did not pay his deposit of €3000 and the judge dropped his complaint. But after 2 months, also Didier Raoult (3000 €) and the IHU (6000 €) did not pay their deposits of €3000 and €6000, respectively. The case should have been dropped there. But it went on regardless, and they paid the deposits later. In such cases, the defender has the right to oppose, during the pre-trial investigation. My indictment started on July 18th, 2022, but I couldn’t oppose it because the judge opened and closed that investigation in the two weeks when my lawyer was on summer vacation. After that, it was too late to be considered. 

A first investigation to identify the authors ended up with questions being asked to Leonid and me. I answered, saying that I just translated Leonid’s article on my own blog. Leonid did not answer. I was indicted, but it was decided not to indict Leonid, maybe because he lives abroad.

Raoult’s complaint and indictment were used by online harassing groups against me and Leonid, and even quoted as proof that we were online harassers. There were articles in conspirationist blogs that attracted lots of engagement through disinformation, and here some IHU related trolls on Twitter:

My lawyer, Mokhtar Abdennouri, did a fantastic job despite these and other impediments. He went through administrative documents and noticed that the person who legally represented the IHU, namely its foundation chair Yolande Obadia, was actually not entitled to do this. On a side note, she later pleaded guilty for “illegal interest” because the IRD institute led by her husband Jean-Paul Moatti paid €300,000 to IHU led by her. Obadia also happens to be one of Didier Raoult’s closest friends (according to Ariane Chemin). My lawyer sent out his conclusions and the next day, the IHU dropped their case against me.

In October 2023, Victor Garcia reported in L’Express about it, and interviewed the institute. Their answer was even stronger: the IHU would not support any legal action regarding Raoult anymore, they considered it a private case. This is very convenient for the institute, after everything that happened during the pandemic, in my opinion. I knew harassment would keep going online against me, and I would have even more legal fees to pay, for my defense against Didier Raoult.

In court, his lawyer Brice Grazzini asked to postpone the trial to give him more time to prepare, and the judge granted a whole year despite our protests. 

SLAPP lawsuits

Didier Raoult had made a public announcement in a press conference that he obtained €95,400 from IHU to start legal actions against any of his critics. Indeed, there is a legal protection for IHU employees regarding legal fees to defend cases related to their job. Usually, it is used defensively. But IHU’s funding of Raoult’s private lawsuits was not legal. 

First, already back in 2015, an IGAS report stated that the situation of Didier Raoult being IHU director and at the same time member of the administrative board is illegal. Raoult deployed lawyers to argue that it wasn’t a problem:  since he was not being paid for sitting on the administrative board, he can’t be accused of holding two positions at the same time. The salary is obviously not the main reason which makes the situation problematic: as a member of the administrative board, one votes on budget allocation (to himself), appoints the director (himself), etc…

However, the first wave of Raoult’s lawsuits was financed without even asking the administrative board, and decided by his friend Yolande Obadia alone. The situation was corrected afterwards by the rector of the academy of Marseille, who was in charge of checking the regularity of administrative board decisions at the IHU (the rector’s oversight was already recommended in the 2015 report). A vote took place on 23 November 2021 and it was decided to grant Raoult another 80 000 €, the board voted in favour with 13 against 5. This would mean Raoult himself took part in this vote since there are only 18 members in the administrative board, him included. Finally, in the 2022 IGAS report, it is stated that the nomination of administrative board members like Raoult or Georges Leonetti, then dean of Aix Marseille University’s medical school, was not in accordance with the IHU status. 

Armed with such enormous sums in public money to privately sue anyone he pleases, Didier Raoult started multiple actions against :

• Karim Ibazateme, Director of Clinical Transparency and Data Disclosure at Arcus Bio. Ibayateme himself first sued Raoult about the clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine. After receiving this complaint, the Marseille court decided to drop it, with the justification that children were enrolled in the placebo group only. However, the French conference of ethical committees (comité de protection des personnes) communicated about this legal decision, stating that there are contradictions. Other specialists also noted that Didier Raoult had first asked for an authorization, then published an “observational study” after a refusal, as told in a press article by Florian Gouthière. In any case, Didier Raoult sued Ibazateme in return. There’s a longer discussion of this case by Guillaume Limousin in French. 
• Martin Hirsch, director of APHP Paris hospitals. Just after the first COVID-19 wave, French politicians started an inquiry in June 2020. Raoult was of course invited. Initially, a hearing of opposing experts was planned, but the parliament obliged Raoult and interviewed him alone. Raoult dishonestly claimed that he had never recommended hydroxychloroquine, while many politicians expressed their support for Raoult before asking him flattering questions. Raoult claimed that Marseille (16% mortality rate among hospitalized patients) did way better than Paris (43% mortality rate among hospitalized patients) there, which prompted Martin Hirsch to send a letter to the president of the parliament to disagree with those numbers. And this is why Raoult sued him.
• Karine Lacombe, professor for infectious diseases at APHP Paris. This was a lawsuit which Raoult lost, but appealed: a case is related to Hirsch’s, because Lacombe stated that Raoult lied before the commission. Marine Delrue’s article in Liberation explains that Raoult falsely claimed on Twitter that Lacombe was found guilty in court but was acquitted because she believed her wrong numbers in good faith. In reality, Lacombe’s words were based on a sufficient factual basis.
• Jean-Paul Stahl, professor for infectious diseases at the University of Grenoble. Raoult sued Stahl for accusing him of tinkering with his results on hydroxychloroquine and telling nonsense. Raoult lost the case and was sentenced to pay Stahl 1000 €.
• Patrick Bouet, then president of the Order of Physicians, who sued Raoult first. Raoult then sued him back for harassment.
• Dominique Martin and the ANSM (French drug regulation office, of which Martin was Director General) for “endangering the lives of others” and “illegal taking of interests”, related to ANSM’s decisions regarding hydroxcychloroquine and Remdesivir prescriptions.
• François Crémieux, director of Marseille Hospitals (AP-HM), other members of AP-HM, and the magazine Mediapart
• Elisabeth Bik and Boris Barbour (of PubPeer) for alleged harassment and blackmailing as told in this post. These cases were dropped.
• Guillaume Limousin for alleged defamation, because he, as a math teacher, said that Didier Raoult made middle school math mistakes. Didier Raoult lost this case but appealed.

Once such a procedure is started, it takes quite some time to investigate, there is a lot of time and energy used, no matter the outcome. Defendants need to get a lawyer, which is better even though they could try to defend themselves on their own. All these costs are not guaranteed to be reimbursed. In most cases, it is only partly reimbursed, or not at all. This is a flaw in the French justice system : someone unlimited by money can simply start lawsuits and have his targets pay costly fees, drowning them financially and silencing them as the result. It is called a “gag procedure” in France. Whistleblowers are often left with no protection against such justice actions, despite some recent protective laws that are still difficult to apply. I tried to get the whistleblower status, but the official “defender of rights”, the only person able to grant this status, refused to see or hear me. 

Raoult demanded that I pay €20,000 for the prejudice and €10,000 for legal fees, and to condemn me to pay €1000 per day if I do not remove the article from my blog.

One day before the trial, Didier Raoult dropped the case, abandoning his complaint. This makes it legally even more difficult for me to ask for compensation of my legal expenses. The court will decide and publish its verdict on 18 October 2024. I might have lost 5400 €. But this is just money. People who died during the pandemic due to disinformation, scientific fraud and other pandemic profiteering will not return.

Asked why he dropped the case, Didier Raoult’s lawyer explained that he was not after me, he was after Leonid. My lawyer replied with “why would they keep suing Alexander Samuel back in 2022 when Leonid Schneider was not in the case anymore ?”. Olivier Hertel also covered the case, concluding that one cannot describe sentences like this defaming: “Raoult staged an illegal clinical trial with actual patients to prove that chloroquine works”. 

Let us see some facts that have not been discussed in court.

Authorship

On the article on my blog, which uses the “Blogger” platform, there is a mention “written by”, automatically inserted when one publishes a text. Grazzini alleged that I was the “direct author”, or that I would “appropriate” the text written by Leonid. In fact, I asked Leonid if I could translate and publish his article, with his words.

But French courts sometimes make strange decisions. I have met Magali Carcopino, Didier Raoult’s daughter, and she accepted to help me on a guest post on For Better Science. Later, she accused Eric Chabrière, who was already flagged as “free to harass critics of HCQ” by Times Higher Education, of harassing her online with an anonymous account called “Le professionnel”. After showing evidence to the court that the phone number used to create this account was actually Chabrière’s, the judge decided that since Chabrière’s phone number was also to be found on a public pdf on a subdomain of the IHU website, anyone could have used that number to create this account, and it is not evidence that Chabrière himself did it (read also January 2021 Shorts and May 2023 Shorts). Obviously the fact that you receive a confirmation code on your phone to register an account on Twitter was not really taken into account. In the end, it was ordered Magali had to pay Chabrière 2000€ as compensation (and her husband, who was also plaintiff, had to pay €2000, too).

Factual basis

I will not reproduce the whole article accused of being defamatory, readers can check the original article to make up their own mind.

In March 2nd, 2012, Didier Raoult was the focus of Science magazine. We learn that Raoult was banned from publishing in the ASM journals for misrepresentation of data. Elisabeth Bik also found image duplications in Raoult’s papers. Journalists also pointed out that this misconduct was well known in the scientific community, reminding reports and a public tribune. Pierre Ouzoulias, a French senator, even said that new laws against scientific fraud were passed because of Raoult, whom he called a cheater. Is it possible, on such a basis, to talk about “fake data” ?

On October 28th, 2021, a press article talking about tuberculosis trials stated that illegal trials caused severe complications and that these prescriptions kept going at the IHU. These trials started back in 2017 and even caused renal complications and hematuria on a 17 year old Chechen patient. But let’s also have a look at the covid pandemic. Even though the name of Didier Raoult is never quoted in a communication by the French drug regulation agency (ANSM), titled “Illegal clinical research protocols, unjustified off-label prescriptions”, the drift of some (unnamed) physicians is described. A 2022 ANSM report warned that the agency received false documents to justify the clinical trials. An investigation started for “forged documents”, “use of forged documents” and “interventional research involving a human person not justified by their usual care”.

The discussion around the observational study on hydroxychloroquine that previously asked for an ethical agreement it did not get is also good to mention here. But I think the most striking document is the 2022 IGAS evaluation of the IHU: about the COVID-19 prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin/zinc and ivermectin, or about some studies at the IHU, “these facts are of a nature that may be considered criminal offenses”. Can we speak of “illegal clinical trials” in such a case ?

This same report explains that data from Nice was used as a control on the Gautret et al 2020. study: 34 patients had a PCR result, but only 6 were used. The table legend states that PCR results with a Ct equal or higher than 35 are negative. But results with Ct values like 38 or 40 were transcribed as positive on the IHU data. Confronted with this information during a TV show, the vice president of the IHU, Louis Schweitzer, said “yes, undoubtedly” when asked if this is fraudulent. Inconsistencies were also found and described in a peer reviewed paper between the first publication of these results in 2020 and an update in 2021. Is it ok to say “falsified clinical trials” when this happens?

There are some “old reports” about the IHU that surfaced during the pandemic. But the most emblematic did not. A 2017 report mentions “forged data”, “sexual and moral harassment” due to the “vertical management”. 8 persons received this report at this time, among them Frédérique Vidal, minister of research (and gel band duplication), Yvon Berland, president of Aix Marseille University, and Jean-Olivier Arnaud, director of AP-HM. Nothing happened.

An anonymous letter also complained about harassment,  and a health, safety and working conditions committee (CHSCT) visit confirmed the case of sexual harassment, which later led to condemn Eric Ghigo (read here and here). These elements were all confirmed in the 2022 IGAS report. Didier Raoult was informed in 2015 but did not do anything despite French laws obliging him to act (article 40). He even joked about this in 2018, saying “My institute was described as a brothel, so I had a condom dispenser installed“. On a French investigative TV show, Raoult’s comments on the victim were also quoted: “Shyness was not her most remarkable character trait”, “professionally, she had the reputation to spend the day at the coffee machine”, “scientifically, she is not a star”, and when asked if the victims could have lied, his answer is “i think it is the case for Ms. X”. What about talking about bullying and condoning sexual harassment in regard of these facts: can one call this defamation?

The original article was mainly about Christian Lehmann’s revelations. They are detailed in the original post, but let’s recall the facts. First, on 23 March 2020, a French law was passed to reserve hydroxychloroquine for hospitalized patients and avoid mass prescriptions. At IHU, patients were then hospitalized for one day (“hospitalisation de jour”), and over 40% of all daily hospitalizations in France were done in Marseille Hospitals in the year 2020 (1% of all daily hospitalizations were done there the year before).

According to Ariane Chemin, this was done with the complicity of the French president Emmanuel Macron and Olivier Véran, health minister at that time, who reassured Didier Raoult that there would be no oversight. Anne Jouan interviewed anonymous sources at the ANSM in her book, she also reported that the president and the health minister interfered to stop investigations that could have been done early in 2020 at the IHU. These hospitalizations were very expensive (over 1200 € as reported by Lehmann). Sadly, it is only in June 2023 that IHU got searched by authorities for an investigation about the “biggest illegal clinical trial in History” according to French scientific and medical societies who co-signed a tribune (read also September 2022 Shorts). In my opinion, the definition of a “gigantic criminal scam” is very close to “biggest illegal clinical trial in History”. 

Let’s focus on Didier Raoult’s hydroxychloroquine papers, since another one got published recently in a predatory journal. These studies consistently claim that hydroxychloroquine works, based on results from IHU patients. Interestingly, the fact that patients with mild symptoms were counted as hospitalized makes it easy to claim having better outcomes than the rest of the world. Many biases have been described in every study released on this topic by Raoult and his co authors. In this last one, an interesting comment by Thomas Kesteman on PubPeer which suggests that the results were actually non-significant.

I still don’t understand, with all this evidence, how it was possible for Didier Raoult to imagine he could win a legal case against me. Yet I fear he might start a legal action against me again, and drop it again at the last minute. This is how you can intimidate and silence critics in France.

The Lega case

Didier Raoult did not show up in court to attack me. But two days earlier, he had time to go on the French conspirationist media called “France Soir”. This once famous French journal was bought by Xavier Azalbert, who made a conspirationist blog out of it. This same Azalbert was among a group harassing a medicine professor in Lyon, Jean-Christophe Lega.

Lega published a paper earlier this year, estimating how many people died from hydroxychloroquine prescriptions in hospitals during the first wave in 6 countries with available data (between 3 000 and 30 000 deaths). Raoult attacked Lega’s paper went on a criticized French TV show, which had been criticised for pushing far right ideology and conspirationist theories (even adrenochrome nonsense). A harassment campaign was started against Lega, with legal threats against the journal’s editor and demonstrations in front of Lega’s hospital while Azalbert’s France Soir compared Lega to Nazis. The harassment went on with attacks against Mathieu Molimard who defended this paper publicly: he received many angry letters and various threats and hate messages, and complained that he had almost no institutional support.

The pressure even went international on Lega’s study, with letters of concern being sent in from various countries. It is interesting to note that in Brazil, a large criminal investigation took place, involving president Jair Bolsonaro, in which Didier Raoult is mentioned. A private health sector company “Prevent Senior” led large clandestine clinical trials, based on Didier Raoult’s protocol. Hydroxychloroquine was also used by far-right networks who made millions with its illegal sales. All these actors would face hard consequences and many physicians around the world have strong incentive to block any paper estimating how many deaths hydroxychloroquine could have caused.

Lega’s paper eventually got retracted but the notice raised many questions : it seems like it was removed under pressure and without a due process of publishing letters of concern and answers.

This rings a bell to people who had followed Raoult’s first publication, Gautret et al 2020. In fact, he sent out legal threats against the publisher Elsevier to prevent the retraction of his study, which Elsevier planned based on Fritz Rosendaal’s report. Evidence for this was leaked in an “Enquête Exclusive” investigative show episode. No French authority cared when an open letter signed by hundreds of scientists expressed concerns about such legal threats.

Let’s listen to Didier Raoult?

It is still possible Didier Raoult got some elements right. He can’t always be wrong. I think there are actually some elements that are quite smart in his words, especially when he criticizes Lega’s study which would attribute only 17 000 deaths to hydroxychloroquine on average, largely underestimating Raoult’s “success”. Raoult also says that John Ioannidis is the world number one because he publishes so much, his H index is over 200, we can trust him. 

Let’s then listen to Ioannidis and trust him like Raoult does:

“There is probably a cohort effect, and there is an effect of what we did mostly wrong during the first wave. We have a paper coming out in Nature Communications which is an international meta-analysis of hydroxychloroquine trials. We show a significant increase in mortality, probably we killed a hundred thousand people with hydroxychloroquine, as a treatment, globally.”.

This paper is the one professor Lega used to estimate mortality outcomes due to hydroxychloroquine treatment among hospitalized patients during the first wave. It is grossly 11% excess mortality (OR 1.11, 95% CI: 1.02, 1.20; I² = 0%; 26 trials; 10,012 patients). 

Raoult also said in a IHU-hosted preprint that thanks to his 2020 paper which he threatened Elsevier to not retract, half of the world took hydroxychloroquine :

“It should be noted that this paper is now by far the most cited paper in the literature on the treatment of COVID-19, exceeding 1600 citations in Google Scholar. As a result of this paper, half of the world’s population now benefits from a recommendation of hydroxychloroquine with or without azithromycin, this currently concerns more than 4.5 billion people”

I can understand that Didier Raoult disagrees with professor Lega. He wants to be credited for hydroxychloroquine treatment around the world. He also says we should trust Ioannidis. Ioannidis told us hydroxychloroquine caused 11% excess mortality. So if we take the estimated COVID-19 deaths as of today, around 7 million people, this means 770 000 deaths. That is a way higher score than only 17 000.

Sadly, it looks like the French justice system is not really advancing fast on the IHU case. Are the courts flooded with gag procedures?

Politic may play a role. On 21 September 2024, the new French Prime Minister Michel Barnier announced his new cabinet. Patrick Hetzel will be the new minister of research. Interestingly, he was among Didier Raoult’s first supporters, sending out a public letter to president President Macron, asking him to allow and support hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc as a treatment for COVID-19. He even shared online a petition launched by former health minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, with Christian Perronne (master of the chloroquine-based Lyme Disease protocol) and Martine Wonner (a known French conspiracy theorist).

Douste-Blazy now regrets his petition, but Hetzel doesn’t seem to have uttered any criticism yet. Rather, he went on to criticize the French vaccination campaign from July 2021 because the vaccines were still in phase 3 clinical trial at that time.

Illegal clinical trials?

One day before my court hearing, when Didier Raoult dropped his case he had started 3 years ago against me, his good friend and successor Pierre-Edouard Fournier (read about him in July 2022 Shorts) made a funny move. He used to head the ad-hoc ethical committee according to the 2022 IGAS report. He was also editor in a Raoult-friendly journal. It is the same ethical committee’s agreement which is stated in 249 publications as described in Fabrice Frank’s paper I had the honor to co-author, entitled “Raising concerns on questionable ethics approvals – a case study of 456 trials from the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection”.

But suddenly, Fournier became a whistleblower with the Marseille hospitals (AP-HM), reporting to French health authorities the latest research deemed illegal by Didier Raoult. I think this is the best French magic actually. 

I wonder if there will be any kind of accountability at some point in this whole story. Politician Christian Estrosi, who put on a show to support hydroxychloroquine while boasting that Didier Raoult was his friend, earned a promotion as Officer of the Honour Legion in early 2021. Hervé Cael, who created a website called “in chloroquine we trust” and supported Didier Raoult, was nominated as president of the order of physicians of the Provence Alpes Côte-d’Azur region (where Marseille is) in February 2022. Renaud Muselier, president of the region, is also a member of the administrative board that voted for Didier Raoult’s lawsuit funds. He stated that Didier Raoult saved his mother during the pandemic. He also happens to have been a very close friend of Raoult, a friendship that started while they were both medicine students.

Eric Berton, president of Aix-Marseille University (AMU), also said it was not his fault when accused of inactivity. Actually, he wasn’t really that inactive: he seems to have forwarded whistleblower emails to Eric Chabrière, who used them online to expose the whistleblowers to harassment and threats. Another fun fact about the coordinator of the AMU ethics committee is that Audrey Zeitoun-Calvo seems to use the Declaration of Helsinki as a means to issue legal threats to defend scientists who published fake science. 

So many people could have done something to stop the trials at the IHU, to stop all the nonsense from spreading. Jacques Robert wrote the “betrayal of tutorship”. In my opinion, this is a very true statement. 

What scares me is that maverick doctors, antivax groups and other conspiracy theorists made a lot of money through donations and are now using this crowdfunding to start legal procedures against various physicians. Jerôme Marty and Jerôme Barrière had to face this kind of action. 

We haven’t heard much about any the investigations started about the IHU (accusations of using forged documents to justify illegal trials 2 years ago, mentioned earlier in this article for instance). The only trials that took place so far are procedures that made actual whistleblowers lose time, money and energy.

Karine Lacombe, Dominique Costagliola, Elisabeth Bik, Guillaume Limousin, Damien Barraud, Lonni Besancon, Nathan Peiffer-Smadja, Thibault Fiolet, Fabrice Frank were all left to be harassed online. Some were even harassed legally. 

I am proud to be in their company. And I still hope France will work differently at some point. 

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