Billet d’enquête - Échange avec le professeur Didier Raoult

/billet-denquete-echange-avec-le-profess

    • Raoult, who has achieved international fame since his proposed treatment for Covid-19 was touted as a miracle cure by President Trump, believes that his colleagues fail to see that their ideas are the products of mere intellectual fashions — that they are hypnotized by methodology into believing that they understand what they do not and that they lack the discipline of mind that would permit them to comprehend their error. “Hubris,” Raoult told me recently, at his institute in Marseille, “is the most common thing in the world.” It is a particularly dangerous malady in doctors like him, whose opinions are freighted with the responsibility of life and death. “Someone who doesn’t know is less stupid than someone who wrongly thinks he does,” he said. “Because it is a terrible thing to be wrong.”

      Raoult, who founded and directs the research hospital known as the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, or IHU, has made a great career assailing orthodoxy, in both word and practice. “There’s nothing I like more than blowing up a theory that’s been so nicely established,” he once said. He has a reputation for bluster but also for a certain creativity. He looks where no one else cares to, with methods no one else is using, and finds things. In just the past 10 years, he has helped identify nearly 500 novel species of human-borne bacteria, about one-fifth of all those named and described. Until recently, he was perhaps best known as the discoverer of the first giant virus, a microbe that, in his opinion, suggests that viruses ought to be considered a fourth and separate domain of living things. The discovery helped win him the Grand Prix Inserm, one of France’s top scientific prizes. It also led him to believe that the tree of life suggested by Darwinian evolution is “entirely false,” he told me, and that Darwin himself “wrote nothing but inanities.” He detests consensus and comity; he believes that science, and life, ought to be a fight.

      “One of Professor Raoult’s abiding characteristics is that he knows that he’s very good,” Kahn told me. “But he considers everyone else to be worthless. And he always has. It’s not a recent development.” At his home, alongside a collection of Roman busts, he is said to keep a marble statue of himself.

      Raoult, who is 68, is a sturdily built but fine-featured man, with high cheekbones and a tight, contemptuous mouth. In recent years, he has hidden these behind a straggly white mustache and goatee and has grown his flaxen hair down to his shoulders. On his right pinkie he now wears a silver skull. In internet memes, he has been depicted as the wizard Gandalf and as a druid; except for his white lab coat, he has the general aspect of a fortuneteller who rides a Harley to work.

      Raoult’s study had measured only viral load. It offered no data on clinical outcomes, and it was not clear if the patients’ actual symptoms had improved or indeed whether the patients lived or died. At the outset, 26 patients were assigned to receive hydroxychloroquine, six more than the 20 who appeared in the final results. The six additional patients had been “lost in follow-up,” the authors wrote, “because of early cessation of treatment.” The reasons given were concerning. One patient stopped taking the drug after developing nausea. Three patients had to be transferred out of the institute to intensive care. One patient died. (Another patient elected to leave the hospital before the end of the treatment cycle.) “So four of the 26 treated patients were actually not recovering at all,” noted Elisabeth Bik, a scientific consultant who wrote a widely circulated blog post on Raoult’s study.

      “I’ve invented 10 or so treatments in my life,” Raoult told me. “Half of them are prescribed all over the world. I’ve never done a double-blind study in my life, never. Never! Never done anything randomized, either.” He noted, with some satisfaction, that the criticism was more intense than he had anticipated. “Honestly, I couldn’t have imagined that it would set off a frenzy like this,” he said, leaning back in his office chair and gesturing at the storm he had created in the world outside. “When you tell the story, it’s extremely straightforward, no? It’s subject, verb, complement: You detect a disease; there’s a drug that’s cheap, whose safety we know all about because there’s two billion people who take it; we prescribe it, and it changes what it changes. It might not be a miracle product, but it’s better than doing nothing, no?”

      WTF

      #grand_homme
      Les mecs hyper intelligents qui prennent tout le monde pour des imbéciles, ouais...

    • On March 16, a Long Island attorney and blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano appeared on Laura Ingraham’s nightly show on Fox News, “The Ingraham Angle.” Ingraham introduced the segment by asking: “What if there’s already a cheap and widely available medication, that’s on the market, to treat the virus? Well, according to a new study, there is such a drug. It’s called chloroquine.” Rigano, who at the time was falsely presenting himself as an adviser to Stanford Medical School, had recently self-published an acclamatory report on the potential of chloroquine, “An Effective Treatment for Coronavirus (Covid-19),” as a Google Doc formatted to resemble a scientific publication. It had begun to circulate in right-wing media and also in Silicon Valley; Elon Musk tweeted a link to it. Raoult saw it and noticed the attention it was receiving online. Another researcher might have found this sort of publication irresponsible and dangerous. Raoult began corresponding with Rigano and his co-author, James Todaro, an ophthalmologist and Bitcoin investor. Raoult authorized them to share his results before they had been published.

      On air, Rigano announced that a researcher in the south of France, “one of the most eminent infectious-disease specialists in the whole world,” was about to publish the results of a major clinical study. “Within a matter of six days, the patients taking hydroxychloroquine tested negative for coronavirus, for Covid-19,” Rigano said. (He made no mention of azithromycin.) “We have a strong reason to believe that a preventative dose of hydroxychloroquine is going to prevent the virus from attaching to the body, and just get rid of it completely,” he added. “That’s a game changer,” Ingraham said.

      In the coming days, Ingraham questioned both Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Trump’s pandemic task force, and Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, about the drug. Sean Hannity began promoting it as a cure for Covid-19. “Let’s put it this way,” he said on his radio show. “If I had it — personally, I am speaking only for Sean Hannity — I would be all over this.” Rigano appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and claimed that Raoult’s study had shown hydroxychloroquine to have a “100 percent cure rate against coronavirus.” According to Todaro, Raoult had sent him a copy of his study and allowed him to post it on Twitter that day, two days before the preprint release. “I suspect he gave us permission because he knew it was the fastest way to disseminate the trial results,” Todaro told me. (Rigano did not respond to requests for comment.) Later, Raoult himself appeared on “Dr. Oz,” the talk show hosted by the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, a frequent Fox News guest who has promoted hydroxychloroquine. “I believe that ideas and theories are epidemic,” Raoult once wrote. “When they’re good, they take root.”

      Trump began hyping hydroxychloroquine on March 19, at a White House news conference with his coronavirus task force. “I think it’s going to be very exciting,” Trump said. “I think it could be a game changer and maybe not. And maybe not. But I think it could be, based on what I see, it could be a game changer. Very powerful.” He suggested, inaccurately, that the F.D.A. had approved the drug for use against Covid-19. He made no mention of azithromycin. Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn of the F.D.A. gently corrected him later and said that a large clinical trial would be the appropriate way to evaluate the therapeutic value of the drug.

      Le 20 mars, Marianne avait déjà publié un long article sur l’influence de Fox News dans la hype de la chloroquine :
      https://www.marianne.net/politique/de-marseille-fox-news-comment-les-essais-de-didier-raoult-sur-la-chloroqui

      De l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, les travaux de Raoult ont aussi vivement attiré l’attention. Jusqu’à celle de Gregory Rigano, qui se présente comme « conseiller du programme de recherche translationnelle SPARK de l’Université de médecine de Stanford ». Il n’est cependant pas médecin. Il n’est pas non plus affilié à l’école de médecine de Stanford - l’université tente activement de l’empêcher de revendiquer tout lien avec elle -, et est en réalité... avocat. L’homme est intervenu à plusieurs reprises dans l’émission du très influent Tucker Carlson ("Tucker Carlson Tonight"), et notamment ce jeudi 19 mars : « Le Président doit autoriser l’utilisation de l’hydroxychloroquine contre le coronavirus immédiatement. Ce médicament est sur le marché depuis 50 ans et son utilisation est sûre. Didier Raoult, l’un des meilleurs spécialistes au monde, basé dans le sud de la France, a obtenu des résultats très concluants. »

      Et Carlson de répondre : « J’aimerais croire à cela, et je pense que si ce que vous dites est vrai, c’est une très grande nouvelle et nous devons tester ce médicament. Je vous remercie d’annoncer cela ici et j’espère que nous en entendrons parler rapidement. » Et Tucker Carlson ne s’est pas trompé : Donald Trump annonçait le jour-même approuver le recours à la chloroquine. Il faut dire que Carlson, personnalité très influente dans les milieux conservateurs américains, s’enorgueillit d’avoir déjà fait changer d’avis le président des Etats-Unis. Après des semaines à minimiser les dégâts potentiels entraînés par le coronavirus, un monologue du présentateur avait fini par convaincre Donald Trump de prendre la crise au sérieux.

      Et c’est donc avec tous ces marqueurs de l’extrême-droite complotiste américaine bien visibles que Mélanchon décide, une semaine après l’intervention de Trump, de publier son « Échange avec le professeur Didier Raoult » :
      https://melenchon.fr/2020/03/26/billet-denquete-echange-avec-le-professeur-didier-raoult

  • Chloroquine : comment la droite s’empare de la polémique autour du professeur Raoult
    https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/chloroquine-comment-la-droite-s-empare-de-la-polemique-autour-du-professeur-r

    Alors ça c’est une merveille : en faisant ça (typiquement : FUD), la droite va réussir à exonérer le gouvernement de toute forme de responsabilité politique et juridique.

    Parce que dans six mois ou un an, quand on voudra leur demander des comptes, il suffira aux affreux de la REM de « rappeler » (prétendre) que vous voyez bien, on ne pouvait pas savoir, il y avait les pour et les contre, ceux qui disaient ça, ceux qui disaient le contraire, pas de consensus scientifique, que c’était pas une épidémie grave, et puis regardez nos opposants politiques, pendant qu’on essaie de gérer la crise ils faisaient de l’instrumentalisation délirante sur le dos des malades, etc.