Didier Raoult

On 17 March 2020, Raoult announced in an online video that a trial involving 24 patients from southeast France supported the claim that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were effective in treating for COVID-19. On 20 March, he published a preliminary report of his study online in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.  The French Health Minister, Olivier Véran, was reported as announcing that "new tests will now go ahead in order to evaluate the results by Professor Raoult, in an attempt to independently replicate the trials and ensure the findings are scientifically robust enough, before any possible decision might be made to roll any treatment out to the wider public". In direct reference to the study conducted by Raoult and the possible health ramifications, Véran went on to state: "Dr. Raoult’s study involves 24 people. What kind of health minister would I be if, on the basis of a single study conducted on 24 people, I told French people to take a medicine that could lead to cardiac complications in some people?"

Didier Raoult initiated the construction of a new building to host the Institut hospitalo-universitaire (IHU) Méditerranée Infection. The IHU Mediterranée Infection, which opened in early 2017, is dedicated to the management and study of infectious diseases and combines diagnostic, care, research and teaching activities in one location.

According to the Thomson Reuters source "Highly Cited Researchers List", Raoult is among the most influential researchers in his field and his publications are among the 1% most consulted in academic journals. He is one of the 99 most cited microbiologists in the world and one of the 73 most highly cited French scientists. He is a world reference for Q fever and Whipple's disease. As of April 2017, he had over 104,000 citations and an h-index of 148. He is also on the list of the 400 most cited authors in the biomedical world.

Further studies found no benefit to hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19; rather, they found that hydroxychloroquine — long known to be associated with potentially fatal heart problems — only increased the risk of adverse reactions in patients who received it.

He was awarded the "Grand prix de l'Inserm" in 2010; Raoult was awarded the "Grand Prix scientifique de la Fondation Louis D." of the Institut de France in 2015; he shared the €450,000 prize with biologist Chris Bowler from the Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; the bacteria genus Raoultella was named in his honor.

Since 2008, Raoult has been the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes, (URMITE; in English, Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit), which employs more than 200 people.

Raoult has more than 2,300 indexed publications. As of 2008, he was "classified among the ten leading French researchers by the journal Nature, for the number of his publications (a credit of more than two thousand) and for his citations number". In 2014, according to ISI Web of Knowledge, he is the most cited microbiologist in Europe, and the seventh worldwide.

In 2006, Raoult and four co-authors were banned for one year from publishing in the journals of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), after a reviewer for Infection and Immunity discovered that four figures from the revised manuscript of a paper about a mouse model for typhus were identical to figures from the originally submitted manuscript, even though they were supposed to represent a different experiment. In response, Raoult "resigned from the editorial board of two other ASM journals, canceled his membership in the American Academy of Microbiology, ASM’s honorific leadership group, and banned his lab from submitting to ASM journals". In response to Science covering the story in 2012, he stated that, "I did not manage the paper and did not even check the last version". The paper was subsequently published in a different journal.

In 1982, Raoult married psychiatrist and novelist Natacha Caïn (born 1960). They have three children together.

En 1972, he sat his baccalauréat in literature as a free candidate, and gained entrance into the medical faculty in Marseille. Believing in a family tradition in medicine, Raoult senior refused to pay for the studies in any other subject. Raoult had wanted to become an obstetrician after qualifying, but this choice was denied him because he did not make the grade in his Internship examination. Instead, he specialised in infectious diseases in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Paul Legendre (1854-1936)

Didier Raoult (born March 13, 1952) is a French physician and microbiologist specializing in infectious diseases. In 1984, Raoult created the Rickettsia Unit at Aix-Marseille University (AMU). He also teaches infectious diseases in the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University. Since 2008, Raoult has been the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes. He gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease.

Raoult was born in March 13, 1952 in Dakar, French West Africa (present-day Senegal). Raoult's father, who came from Brittany, was serving there as a military doctor; his mother, originally from Marseille, was a nurse. His family returned to France in 1961, and settled in Marseille. For a time, he was schooled in Nice, then he attended a boarding school in Briançon.