Didier Raoult, who popularized hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for covid-19, is being investigated for unauthorized research on homeless people
https://www.lepoint.fr/sante/didier-raoult-30-years-of-unregulated-experiments-on-human-22-06-2023-2525726_40.phpOpen linkView original on lemmy.world331
Comments18
Jesus fucking Christ, just when you thought he couldn't sink any lower... The damage this idiot did to the scientific community and science communication is unimaginable.
Just in case anyone is still taking hydroxychloroquine preemptively (and uselessly) to prevent covid, please stop. I’ve been taking it as intended for lupus for years but it’s permanently damaged my eyesight. Blindness is a rare but real side effect if you take it for a long time.
This guy is a shame for us all, French academics… sorry World, please know we’re not all frauds….
Don't fall for it. All the research he conducted was done under supervision of a bailiff, wich in France is a guarantee that all was done respecting the law. He enforced this uncommon way of doing because he knew the government had issues with him taking other directions than that of vaccination. The reason he is now constantly under attack is because many associations who went on trial against european governments and europe itself are using his works to prove their point. Should the government manage to discredit the man all those trials would fall to nothing.
His "trials" with homeless people were done in a totally unscientific manner. They deserve to be discredited.
I am a scientist myself, and I know what the HCERES says about his institute, and also that his institute no longer had support of the CNRS, which is telling considering that the CNRS only very rarely make such moves, as well as editors no longer accepting his papers leading him to create his own self serving journals. My issues with him are his lack of scientific rigor and lack of scientific ethics. Unfortunately, he's staining the community as a whole, even though he lost support of several scientific institutions long before the Covid.
Absolute nut job
This is straight out of Extreme Measures (1996).
He sure looks like a hack, man...
Did anyone read the privacy settings? I thought Europe had rules against spying and making it impossible to opt out.
Obviously this guy is a quack but this headline is sensationalized. He took blood samples from people, it's not like he was transplanting organs
It explains further down the key issues, with this admission from one of Raoult's team: "this study had no protocol, no inclusion criteria and no initial research question."
I mean, it's not removing organs maybe, but I'm not sure that it's legal for random unlicensed people to draw blood. I mean, there have been cases in the past where people improperly reusing needles to cut costs when doing legitimate medical work have caused serious problems via spreading disease.
https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7517-6-24
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20471316/
And IIRC, if you screw up and put air into the vein, you can cause a stroke, really mess someone up.
https://www.healthline.com/health/air-embolism#causes
I fail to see what is sensationalized. He is being investigated for studying the blood of homeless people without proper permission of an ethics board or the authorities, which as the article discusses is against the law.
He is also suspected to have faked a number of his recent scientific publications. Which is naughty.
... was he authorized to do that?
How is that sensationalized? Considering I had to deal with IRB human research stuff just to get the okay to send a survey out to coworkers, blood samples is definitely "conducting research"
Thanks for clearing that up! I had no idea who this guy was.