Some facts // Raoult's team examined a small number of patients, and chose which received treatment with the malaria drug and which did not. That breaks with standard practice in clinical trials of randomly assigning patients to treatment or control groups to avoid bias. The scientists also failed to collect full data from some patients, failing to follow the study protocol they had designed. Some patients treated with hydroxychloroquine reportedly died of cardiac arrest, according to newspaper Le Point, raising serious concerns about the risks associated with the treatment. Raoult was officially a member of the first scientific council set up by French President Emmanuel Macron to advise him on the coronavirus epidemic, although he stopped attending meetings after a disagreement over the level of screening and testing. The government last week allowed chloroquine to be used under strict medical supervision in hospitals. France Inter radio reported cases of patients threatening to sue hospitals if they don’t get chloroquine. The resulting surge in demand at French pharmacies has alarmed experts who warn against overhyping unproven medicines, and fear there will be shortages for lupus patients who use chloroquine to avoid inflammations associated with their auto-immune disease. Politically, Macron’s opponents are only too happy to use Raoult and his popularity to undermine the government’s message in the coronavirus crisis “Didier Raoult is too unloved by all those beautiful persons [from the government] not to arouse interest,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leading far left opponent of Macron, on his blog. Far-right leaders have also sided with Raoult, with National Rally leader Marine Le Pen saying that general practitioners should be allowed to prescribe chloroquine “right away,” and questioning the government’s assessment of the situation. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/30/in-france-controversial-doctor-stirs-coronavirus-debate-156889

Continuare... // Raoult treated 24 patients at IHU in early March who had tested positive for COVID-19. On March 16, Raoult announced the results not in a scientific journal but in a YouTube video. Critics argue that not only were there too few subjects in the chloroquine study, but that some of them dropped out during the trial, potentially skewing the results. In addition, Raoult has not released the raw data from the trial, which, remarkably, was not double-blinded. According to Dominique Costagliola, chief epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute, the trial was so slapdash that “it is impossible to interpret the described result as being attributable to the hydroxychloroquine treatment.” Like Trump, Raoult is not just a climate skeptic—in 2013, he declared that climate predictions are “absurd”—but a pandemic skeptic. “Three people in China die from a virus, and that sparks a global alert,” he observed in an IHU video. “This is crazy.” https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/didier-raoult-hydroxychloroquine-plaquenil.html P.S. Macron n-a calificat niciodata epidemia ca o farsa a oponentilor politici cum a facut Trump.