New twist around Didier Raoult's latest study on hydroxychloroquine. The National Agency for Drug Safety (ANSM) announced that it "is preparing to seize justice" concerning the "pre-print" co-signed by the former director of the IHU of Marseille, published on April 4, now removed from the MedRxiv preprint platform, according to information from Le Parisien confirmed by Franceinfo.
This "pre-print" - a non-peer-reviewed version of a study, published online and not in a scientific journal - had been described earlier this week as "the largest known 'wild' therapeutic trial" by 16 learned societies of medicine in an article published in Le Monde. It concerns more than 30,000 patients with Covid-19 and treated at the IHU of Marseille between March 2, 2020 and December 31, 2021. This study concludes that administration of hydroxychloroquine reduced mortality in these patients. However, according to several scientists, people with heart risk did not receive the treatment, which skews the results.
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"Care that saved people"
Moreover, according to the ANSM, the regulations would not have been respected during the clinical trials. "After analysis, we confirm that this study can be qualified as a category 1 IHRP (research involving humans). It should thus have benefited from a favorable opinion of a committee for the protection of persons (CPP) and an authorization (from it) to be implemented, "said the ANSM to the Parisian.
On Twitter, Didier Raoult defended himself by ensuring that the tests would have been a simple "care that saved so many people". "The only guinea pigs are those who have been vaccinated, by an illegal trial due to the lack of consent without coercion. The treated and healed were not guinea pigs but lucky ones!" he added. In the aftermath, Professor Raoult also said that "all the authors" of the study, including him, had finally decided to have it removed from the site. He blames "threats of sanctions".
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A judicial investigation had been opened on July 4, 2022 by the Marseille prosecutor's office, after numerous reports issued by the ANSM in October 2021 and May 2022. For his part, Health Minister François Braun assured Wednesday in the Senate that "justice is taking its course" in this case, while he was questioned on "an inertia of the public authorities" by Senator Bernard Jomier (ecologist, related PS).
