Professor Didier Raoult, blamed by the order of doctors, opened a symposium on Covid-19 on Wednesday, the holding of which at the IHU Méditerranée Infection aroused the opposition of its founding members.
"We must not try too hard to control knowledge and expression", launched the professor, who must leave the head of the University Hospital Institute (IHU) by the end of the summer.
The Réinfo Covid collective, organizer of the event, relayed multiple false information on vaccines and on Covid-19.
The IHU Méditerranée Infection Foundation is hosting a congress on March 30 and 31 for the sake of freedom of expression, without censoring or condoning it.
— Didier Raoult (@raoult_didier) March 16, 2022
The symposium, entitled "Covid-19: first assessment of scientific knowledge and controversies", is being held for two days in the amphitheater of the IHU.
It brought together on Wednesday morning about fifty people.
“Debate is the source of all knowledge.
There are no cases in which the mechanism of knowledge has not come up against the power in place, which thinks it has the monopoly of saying, "said Professor Raoult, blamed for having communicated "information which does not relied on no confirmed data” by promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19.
A symposium that leaves “no doubt about the objectives”
About twenty personalities, some of whom have stood out for their position against the current of the scientific community on the epidemic, must intervene.
"The way to do research in infectious diseases is to do it with the sick in the middle", asserted Professor Raoult, regretting that Inserm (National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Editor's note) conducts its research away from hospitals and their patients.
This is how he explained that he wanted to “reconstitute” within the IHU “what the Pasteur Institute was 60 years ago”.
Read alsoDidier Raoult: five minutes to understand the dismissal of the director of the Marseille IHU
In a press release dated March 24, the Armed Forces Health Service, Aix-Marseille University, the Research Institute for Development, the French Blood Establishment, the Public Assistance of Marseille Hospitals and Inserm, founding members of the IHU, had asked, in vain, for the "relocation" of this colloquium.
"The title and the nature of the participants and partner associations" left, according to them, "no doubt about the objectives" of the event.
Among the expected speakers are Dr Laurent Toubiana, participant in the conspiratorial documentary "Hold-up", or the CNRS sociologist Laurent Mucchielli, organizer of the conference, who co-authored a study relativizing the impact of the epidemic on the mortality in France.
