"FRENCH TRUMPIAN" IS REDUNDANT:

Not surprisingly, Raoult's rapid rise raised as many eyebrows as huzzahs. While his fans applaud the 3,000 scientific articles Raoult has co-signed, his critics argue that these staggering numbers do not add up. Do the math, they remark, and it turns out the Marseillais researcher publishes more papers in a month than most productive researchers publish in a career. Raoult's method, according to one critic, is to task a young researcher at IHU with an experiment, then co-sign the piece before it is submitted to publication. "Raoult is thus able to reach this absolutely insane number of publications every year," according to one anonymous source quoted by the site Mediapart. More disturbingly, the critic added, "it is simply impossible for Raoult to verify all of these papers."

Indeed, the question of verification hovers over Raoult's clinical trial on the effects of hydroxychloroquine on the novel coronavirus. Combining a regimen of Plaquenil--the commercial name of hydroxychloroquine--and an antibiotic, Raoult treated 24 patients at IHU in early March who had tested positive for COVID-19. After six days, the virus had vacated the bodies of three-quarters of those same patients. On March 16, Raoult announced the results not in a scientific journal but in a YouTube video, in which he declared the jig was up for the virus. Predictably, his self-proclaimed victory then ignited the hysteria that has since swept the world and reached as far as the Oval Office. [...]

Critics argue that not only were there too few subjects in the chloroquine study, but that some of them dropped out during the trial, potentially skewing the results. In addition, Raoult has not released the raw data from the trial, which, remarkably, was not double-blinded. According to Dominique Costagliola, chief epidemiologist at the Pasteur Institute, the trial was so slapdash that "it is impossible to interpret the described result as being attributable to the hydroxychloroquine treatment."

If this sounds depressingly familiar, it should. There are several disquieting parallels between the stable genius who claims to "understand that whole scientific world" and the reputed genius who claims to have defeated COVID-19. Like Trump, Raoult has made himself a brand: the outsider who defies a sclerotic and corrupt establishment. Like Trump, Raoult is not just a climate skeptic--in 2013, he declared that climate predictions are "absurd"--but a pandemic skeptic. "Three people in China die from a virus, and that sparks a global alert," he observed in an IHU video. "This is crazy." The video was posted on Jan. 21, just one day before Trump reassured Americans that he had the virus "totally under control."

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