Didier Raoult: The Donald Trump of science

He Was a Science Star. Then He Promoted a Questionable Cure for Covid-19.

...“You know, people sometimes say, ‘If the patient gets better, that’s because of the drug, and if they get worse, it’s because of the virus,’” [Jean-Michel]Molina told me. “And of course that’s not true. And that’s why you need to do a well-conducted, randomized, placebo-controlled study if you want to show anything.” 

It is possible that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are an effective treatment for Covid-19. But Raoult’s study showed, at best, that 20 people who would almost certainly have survived without any treatment at all also survived for six days while taking the drugs Raoult prescribed.

“If you haven’t done this stuff, you can look at a report of people responding to such a treatment and figure that the answer is here — right here, and anyone who doesn’t see it must have some ulterior motives,” Derek Lowe, a longtime pharmaceutical researcher, wrote for Science Translational Medicine last month. “But that’s not how it works.” 

He went on: “Alzheimer’s drugs, obesity drugs, cardiovascular drugs, osteoporosis drugs: Over and over, there have been what looked like positive results that evaporated on closer inspection. After you’ve experienced this a few times, you take the lesson to heart that the only way to be sure about these things is to run sufficiently powered controlled trials. No shortcuts, no gut feelings — just data.”

...Other scientists disagreed with this [Raoult's]characterization of the results. “The cure rate is almost identical to what’s been described about the natural course of the disease,” the virologist Christine Rouzioux told French radio. Lacombe called Raoult’s conclusions “magical thinking,” adding: “I very honestly think he hasn’t shown anything at all.” 

It was soon discovered, too, that the second and third studies had been conducted without approval from a state ethics board. In an initial version of the third paper, Raoult wrote that he had conducted a “retrospective study on a cohort of patients receiving standard treatment following a research protocol previously registered.” 

He provided a reference to the protocol that had been approved for the first trial. But that protocol included hydroxychloroquine alone and not azithromycin; Raoult never received approval to systematically test a combination of the drugs...

Tom Gauld