Unapproved Trial for Discredited COVID Cure: Scandal In France

A big red flag is him being listed as an author in 2300 publications only because he adds his name to every paper from his institute, even if he didn't write any of it or do any of the research

2300 papers??? Holy shit, that's two papers a week for 20 years, none stop.

Peer review in 24 h is insane. What amazed me was the venom from believers to even mild criticism. Thanks Dr Hossenfelder for this video.

This is why I am no longer interested in publishing academic papers, or in "keeping up" with the literature. "Peer review" in 24 hours? If a paper can be reviewed in 24 hours it cannot contain any moderately valuable scientific idea: at best it could be a table in a database. I guess different people do things differently, but it usually takes me a morning to reject a paper. How on earth can three referees accept a paper in 24 hours?

I'm sure the comments here are going to be very normal.

A lot of people made a lot of money from this fiasco.

I'm french, and Didier Raoult is a meme in my country, because this guy's ego is stratospherical and he is super arrogant on TV interview

What action was taken towards the peers who reviewed those retracted papers? Especially those "super efficient" ones that approved them under 24 hrs.

My brother is a virologist working in France. He works really long hours, shuns the limelight and steers clear of journalists and the press. He sees it as a waste of energy and time. He says that you can choose to invest time in communication and hype, or you can invest your time on research. My brother chose the latter. His opinion is that Raoult took the first choice and relishes the attention and controver. Basically, that he is all hype and self promotion. Unfortunately, the public is attracted to colorful and noisy, and Raoult is both.

Gérard Depardieu should NOT be practicing medicine.

I know what you are talking about. Unfortunately I discovered that some forms of authority aren't exactly ethical.

I am French, living in France, and I am so ashamed and miserable about all this!

This happened before and will happen again. There is no hope for the uneducated public.

This is the dark side of the Internet. Bullshit can circle the earth before truth can click a mouse.

When they submitted all these papers and had to say what contribution each author made, I assume his contribution was listed as "name recognition for faster review process."

Can't even trust Gandalf nowadays.

"Yes, our drug reduces mortality if you ignore the patients who died." I worked in drug development for 30+ years. That included some analysis of studies to show the investigators were faking the data. It sucks but it happens. (In every case like this that got to my desk, the data was being faked. My job was to formally prove it.)

The pandemic “management” would deserve many, many different episodes shining sunlight on all sides. Many lives were needlessly lost by treating people with severe breathing problems with a cocktail of morphine and midazolam which is widely known (!) to suppress the body’s breathing function and has been commonly used as an end-of-life medication for example for terminal cancer patients. It’s no wonder that people started to look to other points of views but of course that doesn’t automatically mean that those were correct. The proper scientific process was completely killed during the pandemic and it devolved into “I was just following orders.” - and yes I know the historical background of that phrase.

Ego and science don't mix. Ego don't mix with anything good. ..

I don't know who to trust for honest information anymore. Everything is politically or financially slanted. You have to take everything with a bit of skepticism!