The big day is here.
This evening, Professor Didier Raoult will have to say goodbye to the AP-HM, the public assistance of hospitals in Marseille.
Aged 69, the microbiologist, promoter of a controversial treatment of Covid-19 patients via a dual therapy combining hydroxychloroquine (whose effectiveness has been denied by studies) and azithromycin, which has as many fans as despisers, is reached by the age limit which earned him retirement.
Read alsoDidier Raoult: five minutes to understand the sidelining of the director of the IHU in Marseille
The new management of the AP-HM did not wish to extend him as a university professor-hospital practitioner (PU-PH) within Aix-Marseille University and the university hospitals of Marseille. He is therefore no longer the head of the department. According to France Bleu Provence, the new director also refused Raoult to remain a temporary employee two half-days a week. “He asked for two half-days of vacation per week. One could not expect a great job from it. We will say that he succeeded in his succession because he is surrounded by a brilliant team with whom we are already working ”, explained Jean-Luc Jouve, president of the medical commission of the AP-HM. He denies that the institution wanted to silence the rebel professor: “We are in a democracy. He will always be able to continue to express himself ”.
"We are not carrying out a putsch on this function"
Although retired, Didier Raoult remains director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection, the private scientific cooperation foundation he founded.
The board of directors, which alone has the power to dismiss him, meets in the fall.
The AP-HM has only one of the 18 directors.
A preparatory meeting for this council is scheduled for mid-September.
"We must calm down"
Professor @raoult_didier reacts to his exclusion from the Marseille IHU in #TPMP!
pic.twitter.com/BNkD6HlEmm
- TPMP (@TPMP) August 30, 2021
Guest of “Touche pas à mon poste” Monday evening, Professor Didier Raoult reacted to this horizon. "The IHU was created by law, twenty people express themselves on the board of directors, we do not carry out a putsch on this function," he told Cyril Hanouna. Referring to "an extraordinary tendency to hubris, to the unreason that this epidemic has exacerbated", he concluded that "people who told me they were going to dictate their law to me, I have seen it in 30 years ".