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Trump may not be aware that the hydroxychloroquine hype is French in origin. The researcher responsible for the “molécule miracle” is Didier Raoult. The founder and
director and director of Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire, or IHU, in Marseille, the 68-year-old Raoult has compiled a sometimes dazzling, sometimes disturbing career that could have been
scripted been scripted by Marcel Pagnol or Honoré de Balzac. Born in Senegal, Raoult defied his father, who was serving there as a military doctor, and quit high school in his junior year. Signing
up Signing up with the French merchant marine, the young Raoult spent the next two years at sea. Returning to France, he graduated from medical school and nimbly made his way in both
the both the political and professional worlds. Not only did he become an internationally recognized researcher, but he was also a nationally recognized power player. Cultivating
politicians Cultivating politicians as carefully as he did petri dishes, Raoult overcame the opposition of older research institutions and, with the support of then-President Nicolas Sarkozy, created the
IHU the IHU 10 years ago. Despite the doubts, Raoult’s work on infectious disease earned him a place on the French government’s COVID-19 commission.
Not surprisingly, Raoult’s rapid rise raised as many eyebrows as huzzahs. While his fans applaud the 3,000 scientific articles Raoult has co-signed, his critics argue that these
staggering numbers do not add up. Do the math, they remark, and it turns out the Marseillais researcher publishes more papers in a month than most productive
researchers productive researchers publish in a career. Raoult’s method, according to one critic, is to task a young researcher at IHU with an experiment, then co-sign the piece before it is submitted
to submitted to publication. “Raoult is thus able to reach this absolutely insane number of publications every year,” according to one anonymous source quoted by the site Mediapart. More
disturbinglyMore disturbingly, the critic added, “it is simply impossible for Raoult to verify all of these papers.”
Indeed, the question of verification hovers over Raoult’s clinical trial on the effects of hydroxychloroquine on the novel coronavirus. Combining a regimen of Plaquenil—the
commercial Plaquenil —the commercial name of hydroxychloroquine—and an antibiotic, Raoult treated 24 patients at IHU in early March who had tested positive for COVID-19. After six days, the virus had
vacated the bodies of three-quarters of those same patients. On March 16, Raoult announced the results not in a scientific journal but in a YouTube video, in which he declared the jig was up for the virus. Predictably, his self-proclaimed victory then ignited the hysteria that has since swept the world and reached as far as the Oval Office.
In France, pharmacies have been overwhelmed by demands for Plaquenil, leading one pharmacist quoted by Le Monde to exclaim: “Perhaps Raoult is right, but instead of taking
the time to carry out a serious study, he has given us two months of theatrics.” Critics argue that not only were there too few subjects in the chloroquine study, but that
some that some of them dropped out during the trial, potentially skewing the results. In addition, Raoult has not released the raw data from the trial, which, remarkably, was not double-
blinded. According to Dominique Costagliola, chief epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute, the trial was so slapdash that “it is impossible to interpret the described result as being
attributable to the hydroxychloroquine treatment.”
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