“Only an observational study”. This is how Professor Didier Raoult, a guest of Bruce Toussaint’s Live on BFMTV, describes what was denounced by medical research organizations in a forum as a “‘wild’ therapeutic trial” on hydroxychloroquine carried out between 2020 and 2021 at the IHU Méditerranée Infection from Marseille. Didier Raoult, who was its director at the time, co-signed the resulting prepublished study in April.
“Observational study”
“Stop nonsense, there has never been a therapeutic trial there. We report all the patients and all the treatments they have had,” defended the professor from Marseillaise.
“There are people who have had the treatment that we thought was the most effective, which was hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (…)”, he said again, detailing different combinations of treatments that would have been received.
“It’s just an observational study.”
Didier Raoult defended the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, as well as the validity of the results obtained through this contested study. “The underlying problem is that these data are already available, they are exhaustive. And the result by death cannot be deceived,” he assured, although his methodology has been questioned by the signatories of the forum published in The world.
No marketing authorization
These professionals from the medical world believe in particular that the “systematic prescriptions” of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin at the IHU in Marseille “were made outside of any marketing authorization, but also outside of any ethical or legal framework, relying largely on monitoring repeated examination of patients with PCR and evaluation methods, without medical justification”.
In May 2020, the Higher Council of Public Health had recommended not administering this treatment against Covid-19, a warning renewed by the Medicines Agency in October 2020. The opinions of these two organizations had led to the prohibition of the use of this drug to treat the coronavirus, which continued in severely affected patients until May 2020. However, the study at the IHU of Marseille with this treatment continued until December 2021.
Asked about the fact that he prescribed this drug informing patients that there was no marketing authorization, Didier Raoult denied that this was a problem. “All of this is not science, they are political settlement decisions with the pharmaceutical industry,” he reiterated.
Source: BFM TV
