Transcript of Prof. Raoult’s speech in YouTube video dated June 1, 2021 « What about hydroxychloroquine and Mrs. Bik? »

Transcription exercise starting at minute 17:51, feel free to point out any errors or omissions. YouTube video available at the end of thIs post.

« I start saying the word chloroquine, I start to be assailed and harassed by groups, I’ll talk about it, called NoFakeMed and Citizen4Science which are composed of people who, honestly, scientists, do not have the same level of discussion with me, do not have the level of my students. So, it is, it is a reactivity of an unsuspected violence and when we are going to publish that, by giving hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, which have been confirmed in all the works that have been willing to look at it, you have a decrease, we don’t say anything else than that. What we can evaluate is what we do in infectious diseases or what we should do in viral or bacterial infections, and that is to see if the virus leaves or if it does not. And then it’s something that is commonplace, so we say, look, when we give both, there’s really, there’s a very rapid decline in the virus. This article, which seemed very simple to me, is going to have an echo, in one way or the other, which is beyond comprehension, which, we find, we touch here a point of extreme sensitivity and about this chloroquine, we are going to have an outburst of hostilities which is quite astonishing with people attacking us at the Council of the Order by calling us charlatans, with someone who is a freelancer for Public Assistance who files a complaint here with the Public Prosecutor; this has been rejected, with people shouting on television, including Anna Ozouf who says, well she’s an historian I respect a lot, I don’t know what she’s getting into, saying that I’m a criminal. Wait, it’s, you have to calm down, there is, let the people who know what they are talking about. I have prescribed more hydroxychloroquine in infectious diseases than anyone else, so, I know what I am talking about, rheumatologists have been using hydroxychloroquine to treat one two diseases for a very long time, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. In 2019, 62 million tablets of hydroxychloroquine have been distributed and no one had died, no one was even doing an electrocardiogram before; now we have been so scared that there will be heart issues, that we are doing an electrocardiogram, before we never did it because no one was doing an electrocardiogram specifically, before giving hydroxychloroquine. The rheumatologists, by the way, who prescribe this by the hundreds of thousands, have published a paper, after I protested to the Lancet that it had not published this paper that I had reviewed, a paper in which they analyze 900,000 chronic treatments for, by hydroxychloroquine in rheumatoid arthritis in which they see absolutely no increase in cardiac arrests; all this is not true. And until we get back to explaining why this huge lie made by a bunch of, of guys who claimed to have access to 90,000 files that we don’t know where they came from and we, we knew that it was impossible to get them, they could never explain where they got them from, they were never prosecuted, even though they changed the whole history of the ability to deal with this, since our Minister, and WHO president on the weekend, instead of giving themselves the weekend to think, said: we must eliminate everything, eliminate the stops, the treatments, that’s it. Why, in a normal world, since we, we reported these data, why in France, it was not set up, a contradictory trial on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, at the doses that we use and not with fancy doses, we’ve seen in Recovery, normal doses; me, those that I use since 25 years, and giving concentrations [inaudible] micrograms per ml. Why hasn’t a well-done hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin trial been done in France to see how long viral carriage lasts and what the evolution of treated patients is? Why didn’t we do that? In the country where it was developed, when there are many people who have done it in the world? So, these are real questions, which raise major issues, once again, the day after I talk about hydroxychloroquine, there is a colleague in infectious diseases called Professor Raffi in Nantes, who calls me, we finally identified him thanks to the police and thanks to the fact that I filed a complaint, who threatens me if I don’t withdraw what I was saying about hydroxychloroquine by Monday before noon, threatens me with the worst, calls me at home at midnight, while I’m sleeping with my wife, well, how can we accept behaviors of this nature. But what was so dramatic about saying that we were going to use the most banal drug in the world? Especially since, knowing that this drug is totally harmless, that there were elements and that, as you can see, in the literature, there are a lot of elements that allow us to do this, we could benefit from something that had been developed by my friend Dominique Maraninchi, I suggest you really watch his video on our website, he was the first director of ANSM, worked with Xavier Bertrand to set up sante.gouv. fr which reports the conflicts of interest reported by the industry themselves and therefore, why we have, on the one hand, journalists are, have relatively little interest in knowing why the people who were the most aggressive were also at the top of the list of people who had received the most money from the pharmaceutical industry, I’m not paranoid, I make coherent reasoning, the most financed of all being the one who threatened me, secondly, the, the real question is but why was everybody so ready to believe this and why did nobody, not the journalists, not the ministry, not anybody make a mea culpa about this. Why from the day it was said, both studies that were underway in France on chrloroquine, not even on hydroxychloroquine given at the doses I recommend with azithromycin were stopped, were never resumed, even though the preliminary data showed that these were the only treatments that were starting to give something, which was not yet significant, of course, if they were stopped before people were included, but how did they give a temporary authorization for use to Gilead’s Remdesivir? I remind you that the only study that showed that there was an hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin effect, apart from ours, was a Parisian study that was not analyzed, It’s incredible, you can look at it in the British Medical Journal, there are the data, there is a significant difference for anyone who knows how to do basic statistics and they didn’t analyze it, they didn’t say that it worked, it’s incredible! Zero ICU visits, zero deaths. There is another paper that was published on the collection of all the data of the public assistance, so, these data in bulk, from different services, I am less convinced than those that are made in a single institute in which the data are homogeneous but globally, the general conclusion of this paper, which was conducted on several thousands of people was that hydroxychloroquine shortened the duration of hospitalization, as it was then claimed for Remdesivir, so there was no less evidence for hydroxychloroquine than for Remdesivir, except that it doesn’t cost anything, how the ANSM gave a temporary authorization for use for Remdesivir, I don’t know, how it banned the same for hydroxychloroquine, I don’t know, but if you know, explain it to me. Because I don’t understand it and how did they buy the moment, the day before the WHO says it’s useless, for a billion Remdesivir, that they are going to propose to us, the General Director of Health is going to suggest distribution for free and, What I was told, and I cannot guarantee its true, is that now this Remedivir, which we did not know what to do with in France, we were planning to send it to Indians so that they could use it, since we were not prescribing it. So, there is something extraordinarily mysterious here that deserves a thorough explanation.

26 :19 Question: « What do you think of these reactions, this violence of reactions towards hydroxychloroquine? »

Look, until now, as long as it was individual, that people talk nonsense on television, on the radio, in the newspapers, honestly, I don’t care, as long as it is me personally, when it becomes collective with my colleagues, I defend myself, So I asked for the functional protection of my institute because it is the institute as a legal entity that is attacked and now I recognize that I have had enough, there are, you know, there are many similarities because human behaviors are reproduced. Karl Marx said that history repeats itself, the first time as a drama, the second time as a joke. Well, here we start again like a joke that we saw in 1940′, I thought that from the beginning, first the terror, the flight, it’s there, stay at home, hide, curfew, but it looks a lot like the war in 1940′, then the denunciation, a terrible thing, the specialist of the denunciation is a site that calls itself of control that is called Pubpeer in which you can denounce anonymously errors that you saw in the works of the others. If you want, it’s called blackmailers in our country, people who send anonymous letters, like this, to denounce people. You see, that was one of the high points of the war. I have absolutely total contempt for these people. I don’t fear them and I have total contempt, but I find it excessive for two reasons: it’s Mrs. Bik’s gang, with Mr. Barbour, there, in Pubpeer ended up finding 250 mistakes in my 3,500 papers, I’m sure they continue to look for them, which are sometimes so laughable that it’s ridiculous, it doesn’t prevent them from circulating in the press, for example, to illustrate that microbes had genomes of different sizes and well we showed that genomes that had the same origin could have a consumption of sugars that was very very different, so we took as an example a photo that was free of right, to look at it well. These are things that have been tested billions of times, not original photos at all. And so, Pubpeer got excited by saying that we had duplicated photos to make it look like an original work, and all you had to do was read the paper to tell that it wasn’t an original work at all and that it was an illustration of the theory that we were putting out. So, it’s okay to use pictures without rights and say, we never claimed, there was never any material to my fault. There are other people who have asked us, so now she’s obsessed with knowing if we have the necessary ethical elements, so the ethical elements are, because people have forgotten that ethics is theoretically morality, not blind regulation, and so we had already had, We had already had, and this is not their fault, but it was with journals because they put someone in charge of ethics who generally has a knowledge of ethics and the law that is approximate, so we were already asked if we had asked the chimpanzees for informed consent before taking their stools. No, we told them, we didn’t ask them. And then, my colleague Michel Drancourt who was working inpaleo-microbiology once had someone ask him if the mummy had been asked for informed consent. Okay, so, if you want, there are people who answer in a somewhat automatic way that is not reasonable. So, we were asked if we had asked, if we had no conflict of interest with the fact that we had a short-lived attempt to develop a start-up to be able to treat in a very efficient way and we gave up, it is not possible in the current conditions because it was based on ivermectin and ivermectin has become almost as taboo as hydroxychloroquine.
Well, then we were persecuted, both by Pubpeer and by the journal in which we published it, to tell us that we had not declared any conflict of interest by publishing the genetics of lice which had absolutely nothing to do with, with the information in question. It’s like asking a human geneticist if he had a conflict of interest for testing, I don’t know, an antibiotic in pneumonia. That’s fool’s stuff. So, uh, if you want, but, it’s harassment, so, I know there’s a whole group, in there, so, talking to, so, the Citizen4Science people, so, it’s really, in there. There are no scientists, but, a lot of people who are directly or indirectly affiliated with the pharmaceutical industry whose president has a twitter account [looks at his notes] called @zenutopia1, I suggest you look at the level of aggression against me, because this woman, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but I don’t know, several times a day, she launches murderous tweets, but I don’t know her, I don’t know who she is, I don’t talk to her, she’s nobody to me [laughs] How upset is this one? I would be, same thing, there’s another one who writes stuff who even proposed to send a suicide car on the IHU called Lonni Besançon, but who are these people? What are they? Do they recruit that from psychiatric hospitals? Or I don’t know what’s going on. It’s, so, something, and then there’s another one, there who says that he was in class and that he did his science internship with the Minister of Health, and who thinks he’s defending me, who’s called Guillaume Limousin, uh, but who are these people, there, who are getting excited with each other, among others. Here, to annoy us, I, it bothers me, honestly, I, I’ll tell you, I don’t care, I don’t have any doubts about what I’ve done and for there to be a fraud you know you have to have a profit, as I don’t work for the industry, and that, frankly, to have one more publication or less, I don’t even know how many publications I’ve done I can tell you that really it’s not going to be [inaudible] I don’t really care, it’s not the, it’s not my problem. I don’t have any doubts either about the trace I will leave because you know I discovered, I described with my team for the first time 700 microbes that are present in humans. You know that I named, you look or not, the most common names of all the microbes in the World is Massiliensis from the old name of Marseille and it is Timonensis, the name of the hospital, it is not by chance, so, it is because it is here that it was discovered and so that, you know, to know if I asked their opinion to the lice, also the other thing that I had been asked is if I had had an Ethics Committee to analyze the lice. So that’s an interesting story too. So, it means that people are going out of their way to ask me questions that are completely crazy and of course, I can’t let this harassment continue, not only of me but of all my collaborators, because now all the people who have published the same ones with me are going to look for a body at their feet and persecute them, So, that’s enough, these people are not institutionally authorized to judge what I do, and so there are people whose job is justice and so I would go to justice every time I think that someone has crossed the line. I assure you that for me to consider that we have crossed the line, it is necessary to go very far for me to consider that we have crossed the acceptable line, so I will no longer accept that neither I nor my collaborators are harassed on this pubpeer, harassed by the people who feed it, I will not accept it, I put it in the hands of Justice, we are building a file in which, I reassure people, you can remove your tweets we have all photographed so we have a document that is extremely voluminous on the fact that there is a harassment in pack against us with people for whom, for many of them, have links with the pharmaceutical industry and I advise the people who have financed and who employ these people to distance themselves so that there is no backlash because in any case I am not afraid of either of them and when I consider that it is not wise to let people drift at that level, I think that justice must be involved because there must be a counter power to this kind of media madness and aggressive social networks, it is necessary to put, to whistle the end of the play, that is enough.

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