2023-05-31 09:02:25
“It’s an attempt at sabotage.” Valérie Verdier, president and managing director of the Institute of Research for Development (IRD), one of the founding structures of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée Infection, said at the mention of the study on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, which was made public on April 4 by Professor Didier Raoult. Like Eric Berton, president of Aix-Marseille Université (AMU), and François Crémieux, director general of the Marseille University Hospitals (AP-HM), both members of the IHU’s board of directors, she saw the online publication, in preprint, of this analysis co-authored by several of the institute’s top executives as a “bad move.” “It sets us back a step, at a time when we’re all trying to restore the IHU’s scientific legitimacy,” said Berton. Crémieux added, “The fact is that everything Didier Raoult says continues to be associated with the institute.”
Nine months following he stepped down as director of the Fondation Méditerranée Infection, the IHU’s parent organization, and the decision by the French National Agency for Drug Safety (ANSM) to ban all clinical research at the institute he was piloting, following an initial inspection in 2022, the retired Raoult is still present. “A bandaid,” said one researcher. More like a thorn, whose presence painfully stings those who had hoped to see him quickly fade away.
On Wednesday, May 24, as he does almost every day, the media-savvy doctor and microbiologist entered the IHU elevator. The access code to the fourth floor, the management floor, had not changed. The only difference for him was that his office was no longer on the right, but on the left as you exit the elevator. “A table in a workroom,” said Pierre-Edouard Fournier, who took over on September 1, 2022, and assured that he has no control over his predecessor’s situation.
Professor emeritus thanks to the Grand Prix awarded by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in 2010, Raoult has access to the IHU whenever he wants. And he doesn’t hold back from doing so, monitoring the work of his two latest Ph.D. students and working for the Japanese group Hitachi on the adaptation of electron microscopes to microbiology. There was no obligation to provide him with an office. But nobody offered an alternative. Especially not the university, which doesn’t want to be accused of extending the professor’s lease on one of its sites. “He is present, but his internal impact has become almost nil,” said Crémieux.
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