Didier Raoult


Didier Raoult is a French physician and microbiologist specializing in infectious diseases. In 1984, Raoult created the Rickettsia Unit at Aix-Marseille University. He also teaches infectious diseases in the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University. Since 2008, Raoult has been the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes. He gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease.

Personal life

Raoult was born in 13 March 1952 in Dakar, French West Africa. Raoult's father, who came from Brittany, was serving there as a military doctor; his mother, originally from Marseille, was a nurse. His family returned to France in 1961, and settled in Marseille.
For a time, he was schooled in Nice, then he attended a boarding school in Briançon.
Not being a good student, Raoult repeated a year at high school, dropped out in the second year to join the French merchant marine, on a boat called Renaissance, and spent the next two years at sea.
In 1972, he sat his baccalauréat in literature as a free candidate, and gained entrance into the medical faculty in Marseille. Believing in a family tradition in medicine, Raoult senior refused to pay for the studies in any other subject. Raoult had wanted to become an obstetrician after qualifying, but this choice was denied him because he did not make the grade in his Internship examination. Instead, he specialised in infectious diseases in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Paul Legendre.
In 1982, Raoult married psychiatrist and novelist Natacha Caïn. They have two children together.

Career

Since 2008, Raoult has been the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes,, which employs more than 200 people.
Didier Raoult initiated the construction of a new building to host the Institut hospitalo-universitaire Méditerranée Infection. The IHU Mediterranée Infection, which opened in early 2017, is dedicated to the management and study of infectious diseases and combines diagnostic, care, research and teaching activities in one location.
He was awarded the "Grand prix de l'Inserm" in 2010; Raoult was awarded the "Grand Prix scientifique de la Fondation Louis D." of the Institut de France in 2015; he shared the €450,000 prize with biologist Chris Bowler from the Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; the bacteria genus Raoultella was named in his honor.

Citations

Raoult has more than 2,300 indexed publications. As of 2008, he was "classified among the ten leading French researchers by the journal Nature, for the number of his publications and for his citations number". In 2014, according to ISI Web of Knowledge, he is the most cited microbiologist in Europe, and the seventh worldwide.
According to the Thomson Reuters source "Highly Cited Researchers List", Raoult is among the most influential researchers in his field and his publications are among the 1% most consulted in academic journals. He is one of the 99 most cited microbiologists in the world and one of the 73 most highly cited French scientists. He is a world reference for Q fever and Whipple's disease. As of April 2017, he had over 104,000 citations and an h-index of 148. He is also on the list of the 400 most cited authors in the biomedical world.
Raoult's extremely high publication rate results from his "attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute", a practice that has been called "grossly unethical" by Steven Salzberg. Since 2013 he has been one of the oversea scientists co-afflliated to the King Abdulaziz University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, known to "offer highly cited researchers lucrative adjunct professorships, with minimal requirements for them to be physically present, in return for being listed by them as a secondary affiliation", and so increase its own institutional citation index.
It was reported that of the 1,836 articles published by Raoult between 1995 and 2020, 230 were published in 2 reviews edited by Michel Drancourt who is his right hand man at the IHU and colleague for over 35 years. Members of his staff have editorial functions at almost half of the revues that have published his work. It has been suggested that the way that health institutes obtain funding by linking it to the number of publications made by the institute may be at the root of the large number of publications.

Controversies

American Society for Microbiology publishing ban

In 2006, Raoult and four co-authors were banned for one year from publishing in the journals of the American Society for Microbiology, after a reviewer for Infection and Immunity discovered that four figures from the revised manuscript of a paper about a mouse model for typhus were identical to figures from the originally submitted manuscript, even though they were supposed to represent a different experiment. In response, Raoult "resigned from the editorial board of two other ASM journals, canceled his membership in the American Academy of Microbiology, ASM’s honorific leadership group, and banned his lab from submitting to ASM journals". In response to Science covering the story in 2012, he stated that, "I did not manage the paper and did not even check the last version". The paper was subsequently published in a different journal.

COVID-19

On 17 March 2020, Raoult announced in an online video that a trial involving 24 patients from southeast France supported the claim that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were effective in treating for COVID-19. On 20 March, he published a preliminary report of his study online in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.  The French Health Minister, Olivier Véran, was reported as announcing that "new tests will now go ahead in order to evaluate the results by Professor Raoult, in an attempt to independently replicate the trials and ensure the findings are scientifically robust enough, before any possible decision might be made to roll any treatment out to the wider public". Veran refused to endorse the study conducted by Raoult and the possible health ramifications, on the basis of a single study conducted on 24 people.
The French media also reported that the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi had offered French authorities millions of doses of the drug for use against COVID-19. On 3 April, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, which publishes the journal, issued a statement that the report on the non-blind, non-randomized study "does not meet the Society's expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety.".
Raoult was one of 11 prominent scientists named on 11 March to a committee to advise on scientific matters pertaining to the epidemic in France. He did not attend any of the meetings and resigned from the committee on 24 March saying that he refused to participate. He denounced the "absence of anything scientific sound," and criticised its members for "not having a clue." He defended chloroquine as a benchmark drug for lung diseases, saying that it had suddenly been declared dangerous after having been safely used for 80 years.
Further studies in Marseille, France with a sample of 3,737 COVID-19 patients suggest early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin lead to a significantly better clinical outcome and a faster viral load reduction than other treatments. Other trials, such as the RECOVERY Trial did not find significant improvement.

Selected papers