Insults, death threats, degrading comments ... Three chief doctors, speaking in the media on Covid-19 and hydroxychloroquine, including the French infectious disease specialist Karine Lacombe, signed a column in The Lancet magazine to denounce cyberstalking whose health experts are victims.
“Beyond the lack of representation of women, it seems particularly worrying to us that harassment (is) a reality in the scientific community, as the journal Science underlined in 2017 in an editorial,” they point out.
The flammable debate over hydroxychloroquine
In the column published this week in The Lancet, the Swiss pharmacologist Caroline Samer, the infectious disease specialist Alexandra Calmy, also Swiss, and Karine Lacombe claim to have been "victims to varying degrees of threats of all kinds, including defamatory statements, harassment and attacks misogynistic ”.
Facts "always in connection with interventions in the media when we tried to explain rationally the state of knowledge on the efficacy and safety of hydroxychloroquine in the treatment and prevention of Covid-19", state -they.
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And to evoke more serious facts (death threats, cyberstalking) in Brazil, in France and in Switzerland against specialists “after the publication of studies not demonstrating the clinical effectiveness of chloroquine and of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 ”.
"All threats against researchers and doctors must be clearly and unanimously rejected and denounced by the scientific community and the institutions for which researchers work", they believe.
Weak presence of experts on TV sets
While the low presence of experts on the platforms has been denounced since the start of the health crisis, they are calling for “better preparation” for public interventions in training courses and “guarantees of support”, recalling that female doctors are more often denigrated than their male colleagues.
With comments attacking their physique or threatening in tone.
Promoted by French professor Didier Raoult and used, depending on the country, as a treatment for malaria or autoimmune diseases, hydroxychloroquine is the drug that has generated the most ink since the start of the pandemic.
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According to studies, hydroxychloroquine is not effective against Covid-19.
This observation was especially fueled by the large British clinical trial Recovery.
He showed in early June that hydroxychloroquine did not reduce mortality, without convincing the fierce and many supporters of the drug.