A scientific article that caused a stir in the early days of the pandemic by suggesting that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, was effective at treating COVID-19, has been retracted. The paper, published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents in March 2020, argued that hydroxychloroquine reduced the viral load of SARS-CoV-2 in patients with the disease and was even more effective if applied together with the antibiotic azithromycin. The lead author was Didier Raoult, then head of the Institute of Infectious Diseases at the University Hospital of Marseille (IHU) in southern France. The results were subject to criticism and distrust because they were based on data from just 36 patients. Later studies with larger samples refuted the drug’s effectiveness.
According to the retraction note, it was not possible to prove that the participants gave ethical approval for the study and there were problems with the way the control and treatment patient groups were selected, making the results questionable. The controversy over the paper drew attention to other problems in Raoul’s scientific work, leading to a wave of retractions of articles written by his team—the hydroxychloroquine study is his 28th retraction. In 2022, the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products concluded that Raoult broke the rules in a study on travel-associated diseases and multidrug-resistant pathogens in which IHU students collected vaginal and anal samples from participants before and after stays outside France. In October, the French doctor’s medical license was revoked.
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