About his study published in April in preprint, that is to say not reviewed by peers, Didier Raoult said: “It’s just an observational study”adding that this study, which concludes on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine on the mortality of Covid patients, “can serve and it will serve for history”.
Asked on BFMTV about the fact that he administered this specialty to Covid patients for several months after the ban by the High Council for Public Health, Didier Raoult replied: “I had every right, myself, but also others, to prescribe hydroxychloroquine”. The ban is “a political decision but which does not engage the personal responsibility of doctors”.
The highly controversial infectious disease specialist since the Covid-19 health crisis even claims that “thousands of people who could have been treated were not treated”.
On Sunday, sixteen learned medical societies challenged the authorities in a column in the newspaper Le Monde on “the systematic prescription, to patients with Covid-19 (…) of drugs as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin or azithromycin (…) without solid pharmacological bases, and in the lack of any evidence of efficacy”.
More seriously, according to them, these prescriptions were continued “for more than a year after the formal demonstration of their ineffectiveness”. The authorities must take “the measures adapted to the faults committed”on behalf of the “patient safety” and some “credibility of French medical research”they conclude.
At the end of the Council of Ministers, the government spokesman, Olivier Véran, former Minister of Health, answered questions from journalists on the subject: “What is certain is that hydroxychloroquine has never worked against the coronavirus unfortunately”. “If the conditions for carrying out clinical trials have not been respected (…) it is necessary to seize the authorities. I believe I have done so in my time”.
The vice-president of the Senate Social Affairs Committee, the socialist Bernard Jomier, announced on Twitter on Monday the filing of a written question to the Minister of Higher Education and Research “relating to the manifestly illegal research carried out on 30,000 people by the IHU Méditerranée during the epidemic”.
