Top virologist, or huckster?
"While his fans applaud the 3,000 scientific articles Raoult has co-signed, his critics argue that these staggering numbers do not add up. Do the math, they remark, and it turns out the Marseillais researcher publishes more papers in a month than most productive researchers publish in a career. Raoult’s method, according to one critic, is to task a young researcher at IHU with an experiment, then co-sign the piece before it is submitted to publication. “Raoult is thus able to reach this absolutely insane number of publications every year,” according to one anonymous source quoted by the site Mediapart. More disturbingly, the critic added, “it is simply impossible for Raoult to verify all of these papers.”"
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the question of verification hovers over Raoult’s clinical trial on the effects of hydroxychloroquine on the novel coronavirus. Combining a regimen of Plaquenil—the commercial name of hydroxychloroquine—and an antibiotic, Raoult treated 24 patients at IHU in early March who had tested positive for COVID-19. After six days, the virus had vacated the bodies of three-quarters of those same patients. On March 16, Raoult announced the results not in a scientific journal but in a YouTube video, in which he declared the jig was up for the virus. Predictably, his self-proclaimed victory then ignited the hysteria that has since swept the world and reached as far as the Oval Office.
In France, pharmacies have been overwhelmed by demands for Plaquenil, leading one pharmacist quoted by Le Monde to exclaim: “Perhaps Raoult is right, but instead of taking the time to carry out a serious study, he has given us two months of theatrics.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/didier-raoult-hydroxychloroquine-plaquenil.html
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