Gilbert,
You probably regard him as a hero and are therefore not willing to consider any evidence to the contrary that anyone mentions.
However, because you’re here on the forum and talking, I’m going to hope that you are in fact open to evidence. So consider:
Raoult's HcQ paper is rife with grave procedural errors
In strong clinical trials, the control group (who are given a placebo) and the treatment group (who are given the drug) should be as similar as possible so scientists can be confident any effects are from the medication alone.
Bik pointed out that patients should be of similar age and gender ratio, be equally sick at the start of treatment, and analysed in the same way, with the only difference being whether they received treatment or not. She said the treatment and placebo groups in Raoult’s study differed in important ways that could have affected the results.
Six patients enrolled in the treatment group at the beginning of the study were not accounted for by the end, missing from the data.
“What happened to the other six treated patients?” Bik said.
“Why did they drop out of the study? Three of them were transferred to the intensive care unit, presumably because they got sicker, and one died. It seems a bit strange to leave these four patients who got worse or who died out of the study, just on the basis that they stopped taking the medication … which is pretty difficult once the patient is dead.”
I consider the erasing of 4 test subjects with no good reason to be the moral equivalent of fabrication of data.
Do you have any good answers for Bik’s questions and objections, @Giltil ?
His publisher denounced his HcQ paper
After identifying ten (10) major flaws in the paper, the Elsevier reviewer concluded:
This is a non-informative manuscript with gross methodological shortcomings. The results do not justify the far-reaching conclusions about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19, and in the view of this reviewer do not justify any conclusion at all. [emphasis added]
PLOS One retracted his 2013 paper because of problems with "integrity of data"
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1009031
Twenty-two of his papers contain images whose integrity is in doubt
He has apparently performed human studies without following ethics procedures
His employer no longer thinks he is fit to serve
His colleagues think he is unethical
The professional society to which he belongs (SPILF), which has 500 members, has lodged an ethics complaint against him.
The data are overwhelmingly against Raoult. That you would extol such a scientist, @Giltil, makes me question your good judgment about anything and everything–to put it as gently as possible.
Best,
Chris Falter