Didier Raoult, the French infectious disease scientist who came to prominence for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, has lost two papers for ethics concerns after other scientists flagged issues with hundreds of publications from the institute he formerly led.
Both papers, “Increased Gut Redox and Depletion of Anaerobic and Methanogenic Prokaryotes in Severe Acute Malnutrition,” and “Gut Microbiota Alteration is Characterized by a Proteobacteria and Fusobacteria Bloom in Kwashiorkor and a Bacteroidetes Paucity in Marasmus,” appeared in Scientific Reports in 2016 and 2019, respectively. They have been cited approximately 160 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction notices, published Monday, were nearly identical. They stated:
Editors have retracted this Article.
After publication of this paper concerns about ethical oversight of this study were brought to the attention of the Editors. The Authors were not able to provide documentation of appropriate approval from an ethics committee in either Niger or Senegal, where the participants in this study were based.
Raoult disagreed with both retractions, according to the notices. He did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.
PubPeer users, including sleuth Elisabeth Bik, posted comments in March 2021 calling out issues with the ethics approvals in the studies.
Bik, who has identified ethical concerns with many of Raoult’s papers, and received harassment and legal threats as a result, posted a thread on X (formerly Twitter):
The two retracted papers were also among hundreds from Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille, France, that critics flagged as being conducted under the same ethics approval number, “even though the subjects, samples, and countries of investigation were different.”
The critics indicated that they had contacted Scientific Reports about their concerns, as well as about a dozen others in the journal, in the summer of 2022, and did not receive a response.
In December, the publisher PLOS marked nearly 50 papers by Raoult with expressions of concern while it continued to investigate the ethics approval information. At the time, PLOS said it expected to take at least another year to complete the investigation.
Last year, Raoult retired as director of IHU-MI, which he had overseen since 2011, following an inspection by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products that found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”
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Happy Halloween 🎃
What is the current status of Raoult’s and/or his attorneys’ legal actions against Bik? Did they ever follow through on their legal threats, or did they bravely slither to the mossy underside of a rock someplace?
Yes, It will very interesting to know about this and another legal actions against the brave people who make works like Bik, the ones accused by Francesca Gino, etc.
The situation at IHU is unclear. It seems that IHU is no longer paying D Raoult’s legal fees. This could explain why he’s calmed down. But his networks of conspiracy supporters are still active.
We should also start retracting the papers of bully bosses, sexual harassers, and racists…oh wait, we’ll have to retract a significant part of the literature. It seems we only care about ethics in the narrowest sense possible.
I’d like to point out that right from the start, I contacted some of the French press to point out that Prof. Raoult was lying; all this without being a specialist, without having any knowledge of medicine or biology.
Some newspapers responded by telling me I was a conspiracy theorist; then when they turned against him, they failed to apologize.
How did I know he was lying ?
He claimed that hydroxychloroquine was effective, and his proof was that old people in Africa didn’t die.
Now, I’m a forensic investigator and several months beforehand, I’d had to use the UN database, the world population service, and the problem was that, to put it quickly, roughly speaking, in Africa, there are no old people. People die before they reach old age.
I’m rather surprised that few of you have realized this.
If only for France, on the UN website:
Percentage – Population Percentage by Select Age Groups – Both Sexes.
In 2019, when the Sarvs Cov2 virus appears
France: +60 years / 26.8% +65 years / 20.7% +70 years / 14.8%
USA: / 22.1% / 15.8% / 10.6
Africa: / 5.4% / 3.4% / 2%
https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/Standard/Population/
For old people to die in Africa, there would have to be some of them !