In February 2025, French physician and microbiologist Didier Raoult will begin a two-year ban from practising medicine.
The decision, taken by the national disciplinary chamber of the Ordre des Médecins, is largely a symbolic one – the former head of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire de Marseille (IHU) stepped down as its director in September 2022 and is now retired.
Prof Raoult has said he will lodge an appeal but, for the moment, it brings to an end another chapter in the long controversy surrounding his ongoing promotion of hydroxychloroquine, usually prescribed for malaria, to treat Covid victims.
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Dubious claim
It was during the pandemic that Raoult burst onto screens as the anti-conformist doctor going against the tide, short-circuiting the cohort of scientists scrambling to find an effective treatment to contain the virus.
Hydroxychloroquine was the answer, he claimed.
Except, he is still claiming it – long after scientific consensus has found it has no efficacy against the virus and, in fact, poses serious cardiovascular risks.
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Raoult's career success
Didier Raoult was born in Dakar, Senegal, in March 1952.
He is the only child of André Raoult, a military doctor who founded the Organisme de recherches sur l'alimentation et la nutrition africaines (Orana) and Francine Le Gendre, a Marseille-born nurse.
The family moved to Marseille (Alpes-Maritimes) when Raoult was nine.
“I was a bad pupil, restless, with frightening school reports,” he told Le Monde in a profile in 2010.
He dropped out a year before his baccalaureate, in 1968, and found a job on merchant navy ship Renaissance, spending the next two years at sea. In 1972, he sat his baccalaureate as an independent candidate before starting medicine school.
Having graduated with a postdoctoral studies in epidemiology, he turned down a job at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national public health agency of the US, to work in France.
Here he settled in Marseille and opened a research unit on rickettsia, a bacteria responsible for typhus and tick-bite fever among other diseases, at Aix-Marseille University (AMU).
Pioneering microbiologist
Over the next two decades, Raoult and his research team made huge leaps in microbiology, He helped identify the mimivirus, a ‘mimicking microbe’ twice the size of normal viruses in 1992, and dozens of new bacteria, of which two were named after him: Raoultella planticola and rickettsia raoultii.
He claimed in an interview that 40% of all human bacteria was discovered by his research laboratory.
In the wake of 9/11, Raoult was commissioned by the French government to conduct a study on the state of public health safety should there be a bioterrorist attack.
“The country is one of the most ill-prepared in the event of a massive epidemic infection,” he wrote in the resulting 374-page report.
In 2011, Raoult started running the IHU Méditerranée Infection, a university and hospital centre studying infectious diseases, and created at his own request.
He left in 2022, but not before being awarded the Ordre national du Mérite in 2015, the Legion of Honour in 2011.
All this on top of the Grand Prix Inserm, one of France’s top scientific prizes, which he won in 2010.
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Covid controversy
A celebrity in immunology and microbiology circles, Raoult was often interviewed by mainstream media when epidemics flared up, including the 2009 ‘swine flu’ pandemic.
However, it was Covid that saw his fame spread outside the medical field, and even beyond France.
This is because Raoult claimed in a Youtube video released on February 25, 2020, two months after Covid’s discovery and before worldwide confinements were rolled out, that he had found a remedy after successful medical trials using chloroquine.
“It works effectively on coronavirus, 500mg per day for 10 days. There is spectacular improvement [in health],” he said.
“Of all, it is probably the easiest respiratory infection to treat.”
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Raoult leaned on the studies of Chinese pulmonologist Zhong Nanshan, who himself earned international fame for managing the SARS outbreak between 2002-2004. He published a study in 2020 showing the effectiveness of chloroquine treatment for Covid following a trial on 100 patients.
Raoult jumped on the bandwagon, urging scientists to take interest in Nanshan’s findings, and started his own trials at the IHU.
However, experts were not convinced by his findings and started denouncing botched studies which disregarded basic scientific principles and guidelines.
Trials followed a ‘protocole Raoult’ (Raoult protocol), as it was called, meaning they were open and non-randomised and introduced a strong bias when measuring results.
Endorsed by Donald Trump
The controversy surrounding him ballooned when then-US president Donald Trump also endorsed his findings.
He became a divisive figure at home, feeding on longstanding fissures within French society (see box) and found fans among the gilets jaunes, anti-vaxxers and others generally fed up with the government's handling of the pandemic.
Thousands of people gathered in support groups on Facebook, all praising Raoult. In Marseille, admirers requested that his face be immortalised on the same wall that featured former footballer Zinedine Zidane from 1998 to 2006.
As the pandemic gradually faded from news headlines, questions over the legitimacy of Raoult’s claims remained.
It tempted journalists and scientists to take a closer look at his studies, both during and prior to the Covid outbreak.
A group of 16 medical professors signed an op-ed in May 2023 insisting basic research rules had been breached by several members of the IHU in medical trials, mainly during the Covid period.
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A month later, Le Point newspaper revealed details of its own investigation, claiming that Raoult had probably begun unauthorised experiments as early as 1993, conducting them on vulnerable homeless people and without the mandatory approval of the French clinical trial regulator.
For his part, Didier Raoult remains defiant. A 2020 New York Times profile cited a quote he once gave another journalist when questioned about his tendency to “swim against the current” of scientific thought. Raoult responded: “I’m not an ‘outsider.’ I’m the one who’s farthest out in front.”
What they say about Didier Raoult
“The figure of Didier Raoult is quite interesting. An unconventional look, a provincial, a former ‘rebel student’, he alone embodies the revenge of ‘atypical backgrounds’ on a technocracy perceived as out of touch and contemptuous. His struggle is seen by many of the gilets jaunes expressing themselves on social networks as a mirror image of their own, a sort of revenge for the common sense of ‘those from below’ on an elite that is also widely perceived by the public as ineffective”
Political scientist Jérôme Fourquet and French essayist Chloé Morin in Le Figaro, 2020
“Raoult is the Gérard Depardieu of science. He is loved and considered a genius in his field. But he can also make you scream with stances lacking any nuance and, sometimes, point, which always put him in the spotlight.”
An unnamed researcher in Le Point
“He dreamt of winning a Nobel Prize, but became the leader of conspiracy theorists and anti-vax campaigners. [...] He has never tolerated contradiction. It's impossible to survive around him if you don't agree on everything. This behaviour has isolated him, cut him off from all criticism and shut away inside a sphere of adoration.”
Raoult’s daughter Magali Carcopino-Tusoli, who has not spoken to him for 11 years
