A search has been underway since Wednesday, May 31 in the morning at the IHU Méditerranée Infection, founded by Professor Didier Raoult, as part of the judicial investigation opened in 2022 by the Marseille prosecutor's office. "It's going very well", commented to Agence France-Presse (AFP) the secretary general of the IHU, Camille Grosso, specifying that this search, revealed by the JDD and carried out by the gendarmes of the Central Office for the Fight against Damage to the Environment and Public Health (Oclaesp), takes place "in the continuity of reports" by the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM), in October 2021 and May 2022.
It was following these reports from the ANSM that the Marseille public prosecutor's office opened a judicial investigation on July 4, 2022, for "false writing", "use of forged writing" and "interventional research involving an intervention on the person not justified by his usual care without obtaining the opinion of the committee for the protection of persons and the authorization of the ANSM".
The ANSM had in particular noted "serious breaches of the regulations for research involving the human person", during clinical trials. At this stage of the judicial investigation, there has been no indictment, the Marseille prosecutor's office told AFP at the end of May.
This search takes place three days after the publication on Sunday in Le Monde of a column denouncing the absence of sanctions in the face of the treatments offered by the IHU teams to patients with Covid-19, based in particular on hydroxychloroquine, treatments referred to as "the largest known 'wildcat' therapeutic trial".
Discredited positions
In this forum, sixteen learned medical societies involved in the research criticize the teams of the IHU Méditerranée Infection for “the systematic prescription to patients with Covid-19 (…) of drugs as varied as hydroxychloroquine, zinc, ivermectin or azithromycin (…) without solid pharmacological bases, and in the absence of any proof of efficacy”.
More serious, according to them, these prescriptions were continued "for more than a year after the formal demonstration of their ineffectiveness". The authorities must take "measures adapted to the faults committed", in particular in the name of the "credibility of French medical research", they concluded.
Professor Didier Raoult, who had acquired media fame by taking now discredited positions on Covid-19, in particular concerning the supposed effectiveness of treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, published in March a "pre- print”, i.e. a non-peer-reviewed version, of his study of more than 30,000 patients with Covid-19.
