2023-05-31 11:38:00
The Marseille prosecutor’s office confirmed the ongoing search on Wednesday. It is part of an investigation into the illegal prescription of hydroxychloroquine.
By Benoît Leroy for Le Point (with AFP)
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L’IHU Marseille in the sights of justice. This Wednesday, May 31, the Mediterranean Infection University Hospital Institute (IHU) in Marseille is targeted by a search, according to information from Provence confirmed by BFMTV and The Parisian. This act of legal procedure is part of an investigation opened in the summer of 2022 concerning “serious breaches of the regulation of research involving the human person”.
With BFM Marseille Provence, the IHU confirmed the existence of this search, assuring in passing that “everything is going well”. With Agence France-Presse, the secretary general of the IHU, Camille Grosso, specified that this search took place “in the continuity of the reports” by the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM), in October 2021 and May 2022. The premises were invaded around 8:30 a.m. by the gendarmes of the Marseille research section, in charge of the investigations. The Marseille public prosecutor’s office also confirmed, with the Parisianthe holding of this search.
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Following these reports from the ANSM that the Marseille public prosecutor’s office had opened a judicial investigation on July 4, 2022, for “forgery in writing”, “use of forgery in writing” and “interventional research involving a human person not justified by its usual management without obtaining the opinion of the committee for the protection of persons and the authorization of the ANSM”. At the end of May, the Marseille prosecutor’s office had indicated that there had been, at this stage of the judicial investigation, no indictment yet.
“Justice takes its course”, according to Braun
This search was conducted under the direction of the investigating judges in charge of the procedure, assisted by investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Damage to the Environment and Public Health (OCLAESP)”, indicates the prosecution of Marseille in a press release published Wednesday afternoon. And the Marseille prosecutor clarified: “This judicial information does not include the facts relating to the therapeutic management of tuberculosis and Covid-19, mentioned by the IGAS-IGESR inspection mission as likely to constitute unauthorized clinical research facts”.
Asked about “an inertia of the public authorities” by Bernard Jomier (ecologist, related PS), François Braun replied that “justice is taking its course”, in reference to this search. “Immediately” after a report (Igas / Igesr) pinning down “practices both managerial and monitoring inappropriate, even deviant clinical studies”, the government seized the Marseille prosecutor’s office in September, then demanded a “recovery plan” from the new management and the directors, he also pleaded.
The judicial inquiry was opened after the publication, in 2022, of a report signed by the General Inspectorate of Education, Sport and Research and the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs. The report then highlighted “serious dysfunctions of the IHU concerning the quality of its research and care activities”.
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On Sunday, around fifteen learned societies published a vitriolic forum, in the columns of the Monde, concerning a “wild” clinical trial on hydroxychloroquine, during the Covid-19 pandemic. For his part, Professor Didier Raoult had castigated, the next day, “a forum of fools”, ensuring that he had never done a “therapeutic” trial, but an “observational study”.
More seriously, according to these learned societies, these prescriptions were continued “for more than a year after the formal demonstration of their ineffectiveness”. The authorities must take “measures adapted to the faults committed”, in particular in the name of the “credibility of French medical research”, they concluded.
The Minister of Health deplored “a new inadmissible episode in this affair” with a study co-signed by Didier Raoult relating to more than 30,000 patients treated at the IHU for two years. This study – not yet published in a scientific journal or peer-reviewed, but simply posted online in April – concludes that the administration of hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin) to Covid patients reduced their mortality.
“Faced with this publication proposal which is akin to provocation”, with patients “treated at the IHU outside any framework of clinical experimentation and use of drugs since used without marketing authorization “, “we will be required to take, with Sylvie Retailleau (Higher Education and Research), all the necessary measures towards all the signatories”, he concluded.
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