Trump, Covid, Hydroxyquinone, Ethics, and Fraud at a Major "Failure at Every Level" in France.

[NNadir]

I believe the news article in Science that I'll discuss in this post is open to the public, and I won't excerpt a lot of it, but recall that the orange idiot was pushing hydroxyquinone as a "cure" for Covid, and led to Magats and family members screaming for it while dying from failures to vaccinate.

The article is here: The Reckoning CATHLEEN O’GRAD Cathleen O'Grady, Science March 7, 2024.

Subtitle:

Didier Raoult and his institute found fame during the pandemic. Then, a group of dogged critics exposed major ethical failings.

A few excerpts:

With six studies published in the 2010s, French microbiologist Didier Raoult added to his already vast publication record. He and his colleagues conducted a wide range of investigations into infectious diseases and their treatments. They took stool samples from patients on long-term antibiotic treatment, looking for alterations in their gut microbiome. They swabbed the throats of pilgrims leaving France for Mecca, searching for evidence of a bacterium that causes brain abscesses. And they studied samples of heart valves and blood clots from patients with heart inflammation to refine tests for the bacteria that cause the condition.

But in January, the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journals that published the papers announced they were retracting all six, along with a seventh by Raoult’s colleagues. Aix-Marseille University had investigated the research, which was done at its affiliated Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU), a research hospital that Raoult led until his retirement in 2021. The investigation found the work had not been reviewed by one of France’s highly regulated national ethical committees...

...In a written statement sent to Science, Raoult says ASM retracted the papers without accounting for his team’s rebuttals to the critiques. But to Lonni Besançon, the retractions are vindication of concerns that he and others have been voicing since Raoult and the IHU burst into the media spotlight in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, downplaying its severity and touting prospects for a successful treatment...

...The Linköping University computer scientist and his fellow critics—a gaggle of dogged individuals, many of them academic outsiders—originally set out to challenge poor-quality research coming out of the IHU, especially the claim that COVID-19 could be treated with the antimalaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). But they soon embarked on an all-consuming attempt to raise the alarm about ethical failings in the institute’s research, going back at least 15 years...

...ON 11 MARCH 2020, French health minister Olivier Véran invited Raoult to join the Scientific Council advising the government on its pandemic response. A few days later, Raoult and his team published a bombshell paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, reporting that the IHU had found HCQ combined with the antibiotic azithromycin to be an effective COVID-19 treatment.

Although the results were preliminary and other researchers doubted Raoult’s conclusions, HCQ hype surged, with then–U.S. President Donald Trump touting its promise and Raoult enthusing over it on YouTube. “Raoult was saying, ‘I understand everything, I have a solution,’ and people want that kind of information in troubled times,” Bristielle says...

...Besançon and others say France’s institutional response has been unacceptably weak. There has been “failure at every level,” Garcia says: at the health ministry; in the justice system; within the university and regional hospital board, which had oversight of the IHU; and at ANSM, which only conducted a full inspection after media investigations brought the problems to light. Journal editors have also been too slow to react, Besançon says. “More often than not, it seems that they don’t give a damn about integrity...”

I added the bold to reflect the title on the tab for the article and the credulous, ignorant, vicious orange freak who once sullied the White House..

In the old days of paper dictionaries, pictures often accompanied the definitions of words. Were there still paper dictionaries, the word "failure" could do far worse than putting up a picture of Trump.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. K&R. Scientific fraud -- especially in Medical science -- does happen, and politicians should be cautious ...

... about accepting controversial results. Most in gov't have staff who can research and fact-check any claims that affect matters under their purview, or know how to contact better experts than themselves. Anus Orange thinks he has infallibly expert judgement on every single subject, and worse yet, his followers don't care about facts any more than he does.

Republicans argue on the basis of fabricated emotions and authoritarianism, not facts. That's why it's so ineffective to argue facts with MAGAts. And that's why we ended up with bogus science driving decisions on life-and-death national policies.

We don't need a President who thinks he's smarter than everyone. We need a President who knows he isn't, but who also knows how to find the true experts -- not the "best" people based only on the standard of personal loyalty.