Suddenly, The Imperial March, Darth Vader’s signature sound in Star Wars, sounds. Didier Raoult, not wearing the helmet of the Sith lord, but a surgical mask, descends the flight of steps of the conference room of the Maison du Barreau (Paris 1st), surrounded by twelve lawyers. That evening, there was no question of a trial. At least not entirely. The sulphurous Marseille professor is simply the guest of honor at the first Berryer Conference of the year 2024, which took place on Thursday February 8. The bicentennial institution, showcase of the Paris bar, is a multi-year eloquence competition which combines fierce oratorical jousts and more or less schoolboy humor. The process is simple: two speakers respond to an absurd question – “How’s Raoult working?” and “Is the doctor imaginary?” – before seeing their presentation massacred by the twelve secretaries, young stars of the bar. Honor can then defend the speakers, then a former secretary concludes the conference by hugging the twelve lawyers.
Guests from all walks of life were invited, from Salvador Dali to Serge Gainsbourg, including JoeyStarr, Jean Lassalle and even François Hollande. If the choice of guest – decided at the discretion of the fourth secretary – is often debated, this invitation was particularly warmly received. On the conference’s social networks, many regulars expressed their disagreement. “I am shocked. There can be no invitation without tenderness like Berryer,” denounces one. “Shameful,” says another. “We’re still talking about potential deaths, there’s nothing funny about it anymore [NDLR, une récente étude montre que l’hydroxychloroquine a provoqué 16 990 morts lors de la pandémie de Covid-19]”, says a lawyer who prefers to remain anonymous. The fact remains that some 400 places were snapped up in just a few minutes, a record.
The introductory speech sets the tone: “We have been criticized for having a guest targeted by numerous legal proceedings, but at the conference, the proceedings excite us!” jokes one of the secretaries. Didier Raoult displays a smile, although tense. While it is clear that this is not the place where the scientific debate will be settled, a few incisive remarks recall the controversies. “You are to eloquence what Raoult is to medicine, a fraud!”, hisses one of the secretaries after the first speaker’s presentation. Another goes so far as to make the comparison with Josef Mengele, Nazi doctor at the Auschwitz camp. “Oh !” outraged and bursts of laughter in the room echo the extreme polarization generated by the Marseille professor… Whose gaze turns black at this moment. Moments later, his counterattack, although measured, is devoid of humor. “The last time I was called stupid, it was my former client Michel Fourniret [NDLR, célèbre tueur en série français]”, replies the targeted lawyer. This will not go any further.
Outside, some spectators regret that the guest of honor has abandoned the games in favor of “endless tunnels” of lectures cut short by mocking applause. Others point out that, for someone who has a reputation for not taking the slightest criticism, “He did well.” You had to wander the corridors after the conference to hear another side of the professor. “Your colleague acted smart on stage, but if I catch him outside, he will feel it passing!”, he assures a secretary, showing him his hand. Isn’t it bold to threaten a lawyer in front of another lawyer? The young criminal lawyers don’t mind: they’ve seen others. Didier Raoult will simply leave this note in the guestbook: “Thank you for this eventful invitation. Be careful not to let your guests be called Nazis.”
Skids on conquered land
Enough to recall the recent loss of composure of the professor live on television. “If we don’t read, we end up becoming idiots,” he told the journalist Eugénie Bastié on January 12, in Pascal Praud’s show on Cnews, after she admitted not having looked through her latest work – the eighth since 2020! – which he came to promote. “You can respond instead of bombarding people with your contempt!”, she was indignant. And twelve days later, in Cyril Hanouna’s show, on C8, another Bolloré channel where he also has his napkin ring: “You compare people who are not comparable, I am the most cited microbiologist in the world […] I don’t usually talk to people like you, I don’t talk in bars.” he said to columnist Géraldine Maillet who asked him why he had always refused to debate with “fellow doctors” and felt that he had “failed on covid” and that it was “too hard for (him) to accept”. February 11, interviewed by the Youtube channel Les Incorrectibles on the epidemiological models of the British Neil Fergusson – who campaigned for confinement – Didier Raoult goes further: “He, in the late Middle Ages, we would have burned him, that would probably have been a pretty good idea”.
The one who became world famous on February 25, 2020, when he published his famous video “Covid-19: endgame”, always knows how to make people talk about him. The sequence where he thanked rapper Booba who had relayed a video claiming that Covid-19 vaccines would cause cancer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease further illustrates this. What does it matter if this release has angered the scientific community to the point of prompting the writing of the column “Let’s put an end to the unpunished propagation of false medical information!”, published in L’Express and signed by the main learned societies of France. What does it matter, too, if he was pushed into retirement by the University Hospitals of Marseille on August 31, 2021 and officially fired from the IHU of Marseille since September 1, 2022: he still has an office there, from which he recently responded to an interview with Karl Zéro. Asked by L’Express, the vice-president of the IHUm Louis Schweitzer, who had promised his permanent departure, did not answer our questions. Neither did Didier Raoult.
His retirement is at least as controversial on a media level as on a scientific level. In recent months, numerous specialist journals have decided to look into his work. “If you enter their name into the Retraction Database website – watchdog of scientific ethics – you will notice that nine of his studies have been retracted [NDLR : retirées de la revue dans laquelle elles avaient été publiées, la sanction la plus sévère du monde académique infligée uniquement en cas de faute exceptionnellement grave]”, lists Lonni Besançon, researcher in data visualization at Linköping University (Sweden). Six retractions come from the American Society for Microbiology, one of the most prestigious journals in the field which had already banned him from publication for a year, in 2006, after fraud was detected. Retraction Watch also reported 66 expressions of concern, wording indicating that a study is under investigation.
For now, Didier Raoult is still far away from the top of the site ranking, where the first three accumulate between 124 and 194 retractions. “But if the 456 items in which colleagues and I identified possible ethical breaches ended up being retracted, he will hands down take the lead in the ranking of the worst scientists on the planet,” adds the researcher. On the PubPeer collaborative platform, which allows researchers to identify possible problems in articles already published in scientific journals, 458 studies by Didier Raoult are commented on. “Most messages raise questions, although their seriousness varies,” notes Boris Barbour, representative of PubPeer and CNRS researcher in fundamental neuroscience at the Institute of Biology of the École Normale Supérieure.
Ethics and integrity brought to the forefront
Is Didier Raoult’s story destined to end with a descent into scientific hell and a few media sparks? “We could believe for a time, with the creation of the French Office for Scientific Integrity or the Network of Scientific Integrity Referents, in 2017, that France had taken stock of the problem. But the health crisis has demonstrates the opposite. Which pushed, for example, the Academy of Sciences to set up a working group on integrity”, notes Michel Dubois, sociologist of science and research director at the CNRS.
“Didier Raoult also contributed – by suing them or insulting them – to highlight researchers who work on good scientific practices, like Elisabeth Bik who has since received the famous John Maddox prize which rewards scientists who have demonstrated great courage and integrity in defending science and scientific reasoning in the face of fierce opposition and hostility, adds Lonni Besançon. In the same way that Booba probably served disinformation online by motivating the deputies to approve, Wednesday February 14, the creation of a new offense of “provocation to abandonment of care”, in the bill to combat sectarian abuses.
Which does not prevent these researchers from deploring the slow reactions of the authorities. “The misuse of the bibliometric system by creating scientific journals in order to publish poor quality studies en masse and obtain Sigaps points – calculated by the Ministry of Health to calculate, they allow to obtain funding and career advancement – is proof of the impunity of the powerful and the inaction of the authorities and institutions. And today, these problems remain unresolved,” denounces Boris Barbour, who recalls that the subject goes beyond Didier Raoult and the IHUm. “We know that articles and citations can be significantly manipulated, as revealed by the affair of the Clarivate database which, in its latest ranking of the most cited researchers in the world, was forced to remove a scientist out of eight because she could not publicly defend their inclusion,” he points out. The start, perhaps, of broader investigations and a sweeping sweep to prevent such failures from happening again?
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