Dr. Didier Raoult: Bad science on COVID-19 and bullying critics
Didier Raoult is the French “brave maverick doctor†who’s been promoting hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to treat COVID-19. Like all true cranks, he’s now lashing out at critics as the science trends towards the conclusion that his treatment doesn’t work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a golden opportunity for quackery and conspiracy theories, such as the willful misinterpretation of a study in order to claim that the influenza vaccine makes people more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, or that 5G networks and glyphosate somehow make the infection more deadly. Pseudoscience like this is to be expected from cranks, of course; so it is no surprise that antivaxxers, anti-GMO cranks, and other conspiracy theorists are fusing their favorite pseudoscience and conspiracy theories with conspiracy theories about COVID-19 in order to create meta-conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has also revealed just how weak the allegiance to evidence- and science-based medicine is among physicians, who have embraced unproven treatments, in particular chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, the latter sometimes with azithromycin. True, President Trump and his allies have been promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine with minimal evidence as the latest bright shiny object that let Trump’s magical thinking run wild with the hope that a magic bullet had been discovered to get us out of this crisis. However, before that it was Chinese and European physicians who had embraced the idea of using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, none more prominently than French brave maverick doctor Didier Raoult, who is now not reacting well to criticism at all. In fact, he just doxxed a French physician and critic and threatened to sue him, as you will see...………….
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/04/14/didier-raoult-bad-science-bully/
