Misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines continues to wreak havoc. While we observe a very high proportion of non-vaccinated among the most severe cases of infection, Professor Didier Raoult came this week to provide grist for the antivax mill, accusing vaccines of having “ increased epidemic “. A statement that is not based on any scientific demonstration.
These are totally fallacious arguments that led Didier Raoult this week to multiply the untruths, both on the YouTube channel of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire de Marseille and in a radio program for the general public, with millions views and shares on social networks. ” How to explain that it is in the countries where we have vaccinated the most that there are the most cases »? Asks Professor Raoult. Purely rhetorical question leading to the conclusion that the vaccine “ increased the epidemic “. The questioning is so biased that it suffices to reverse the terms to correct the reasoning: it is more often in the countries where the populations were the most threatened, the most affected, that the vaccination campaigns were the more intense, not the other way around.
Unfounded allegations
Didier Raoult relies on another argument to incriminate vaccination. According to him, a significant proportion of those vaccinated who tested positive would do so within a very short period of time after the injection. An observation without scientific significance, because no statistical data currently allow us to quantify this phenomenon on a large scale. Didier Raoult therefore starts from a false observation. From the moment when the vaccinated population has become a large majority, as in France, when the recall campaign was launched, given the extreme contagiousness of the Omicron variant, it is not surprising that we observes many positive cases in people who have just received a dose. But there is nothing to establish a causal link.
The untested hypothesis of antibody-facilitated infection
Professor Raoult nevertheless refers to the hypothesis of facilitating antibodies, a complication phenomenon that has been observed, for example, in the case of dengue fever. Researchers have focused on this problem known by the acronym ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement). But the conclusions of their work are not in line with Professor Raoult’s statements. Far from being neglected, this track has been studied, as related the article by Stéphane Korsia-Meffre, published on November 3, 2020 on the Vidal medical site, updated on January 10, 2022 : “ After one year of administration of vaccines against Covid-19, on more than four billion people worldwide, no event of aggravated illness associated with vaccination has been observed among infected people despite vaccination. On the contrary, during pertherapeutic infections (“breakthrough infections”, despite the vaccine), the mass of data point to a reduction in the severity of symptoms in vaccinated persons. »
In other words, what can happen in the case of dengue, for example, is not necessarily transposable to Covid-19. No publication has been able to establish the fact that by vaccinating one would increase the infection, instead of avoiding or attenuating it. It is even the opposite that has been proven, as can be read on Derek Lowe’s blog for Science magazine, where several studies are analyzed. The work undertaken has shown that if this mode of infection by facilitating antibodies could have occurred in vitro-in the laboratory, it is quite the opposite in vivo, nothing of the sort has yet been detected, either in animal, nor in man. And all the experience accumulated with vaccination campaigns carried out around the world clearly shows that vaccines make it possible to considerably reduce the most serious cases. At the beginning of January in France, out of a million non-vaccinated people, an average of 26 people were recorded each day in intensive care, an average falling to 1.5 among the vaccinated. Supporting graphics, the Decoders of the World show, in the edition of January 4, 2022, that ” the majority of intensive care patients are unvaccinated ”, In an article which warns against the sometimes erroneous interpretation of the figures of the DREES (Directorate of research, studies, evaluation and statistics).
Make the buzz at all costs
Difficult to understand what justifies such a position on the part of someone who could be considered a great French scientist, a great practitioner. But it is clear that Didier Raoult has multiplied the errors since the emergence of this coronavirus, which he presented from the start as ” the easiest respiratory infection to treat “, as Ariane Chemin and Gilles Rof remind us in their investigation for the World entitled “ How far will Didier Raoult, the antivax idol who clings to his post, go? “. Unfortunately, no one today talks about his protocol based on hydroxychloroquine, outside of conspiratorial circles. The more it goes, the more Didier Raoult gets stuck in the argument, of the one who – alone against all – knows the solution. It is true that this posture that he adopts on the sets of certain programs in search of audience has allowed him to collect more than two million views on his YouTube channel. Whatever the accuracy of his observations on the power of large laboratories, a source of potential conflicts of interest, the credibility of his assertions is today well under way on the scientific level.