Prof. Didier Raoult is a world-renowned specialist in infectious diseases. He is the head doctor of the hospital (IHU Marseilles Mediterrannée) that has treated the most cases of the new coronavirus in the world, and that has had the lowest mortality rate globally (0.33%). He was an early proponent of the treatment hydroxychloroquine + azithromycine.
In this bombshell video report, he explains why Western countries have had much more deaths than Asia and poor countries, and directs the blame at the medico-pharmaceutical establishment that prefers ineffective but expensive/new medicines rather than old, tried, tested, cheap and effective ones. You need to watch the video until the end.
We have transcribed and translated it, and created the subtitles in French and English.
Prof. Didier Raoult is very famous in France. If you don’t realize who this guy is, see his Wikipedia entry. He is among the world’s foremost experts in respiratory viral infections. He was viciously attacked and defamed on French TV for his pragmatic approach, despite his extraordinary credentials.
He is indeed hated by the Parisian medical establishment (archive) presumably because of the well-established international reputation of his IHU in Marseilles (our readers should know that snobbish Parisians feel contempt for anything that happens in the “Province”, i.e. anywhere that isn’t Paris).
Here is the video. Please make sure you enable subtitles. We don’t usually ask our readers to advertise our publications, but this video must be seen the world over. You may save lives merely by forwarding it.
Video archive 1, archive 2. English transcript at the end of this post. Here are subtitle files in French and English. (We encourage you to download and archive this, although if you publish it elsewhere, we would be grateful if you linked back to us).
Of course and as you know the debate around hydroxychloriquine is absurdly politicized, because Trump dared tweet in favor of it. As we have already explained, we believe this nonsensical controversy to be fake and scripted; regardless of whether we are right or not, Prof. Didier Raoult deserves the ear of anyone interested in the truth.
This is the previous video Prof. Raoult had made (Feb 25 2020), that became viral in France. See our previous post which contains the video archives and an English translation.
Here is the English transcript of the video we are publishing today:
Professor Didier Raoult, what is the evolution of the epidemic currently, and what is its situation in the history of sanitary crises?
Well, the evolution of the epidemic, as you will see, as far as we are concerned, the epidemic is progressively disappearing. So we had, at the maximum, at its peak, we had up to 368 new cases per day, and now we are closer to 60-80 per day, so we have a very significant decrease of the number of cases detected; even more significant among people who come to get tested when they are asymptomatic.
So it’s possible, it was one of the possibilities I had talked about among others, that the epidemic will disappear this spring, and that in a few weeks there will be no new cases for reasons that are often very strange, and that are things that we are used to seeing most of the time with viral respiratory diseases. So it is quite unoriginal. If we try to place this, to place it in the context of epidemics, of sanitary crises, you see that we can measure sanitary crises with these images.
One, you see that for summer sanitary crises; you remember the heat wave in 2003, the heat wave of 83 that I saw, you see that in summer, if you monitor as things progress, you can detect sanitary crises very easily. It was one of the propositions that I had made when I had done a report for the ministry of health, its cabinet DGS didn’t want to take it into consideration unfortunately, as that is what has to be done because it allows detecting real sanitary crises.
So if we try to see if currently the sanitary crisis has an incidence on mortality in France, the answer is no, sanitary crises that during the winter made a significant difference were in 1997, 2000, 2009 and 2017. But we are very far currently if we cumulate, you see, the months of December until March of the sanitary crisis in 2017, where there had been a lot of cases of the H3N2 flu. It happens to be the case that this year there was much less flu and less VRS, which means that the increase in mortality linked to this new virus is not noticeable significantly in the totality of the population.
Of course, there are other phenomenons, it is multifactorial, but we cannot say, and you know that I hate making predictions, but still I had predicted that this sanitary crisis would not modify the life expectancy of French people. It is the case, we will do the accounting. No more by the way than in China, 3000 or 4000 deaths don’t modify significantly the life expectancy of 1.3 or 1.4 billion Chinese for the year, it is not true. So it is, again, a good thing to react to sanitary crises, to manage them, but we should manage them without anxiety, without worry, being the most professional possible, managing things as they come, trying to diagnose, isolate, treat the patients to avoid having more deaths than elsewhere. That’s it.
So that is something that seems to me very important.
Regarding the treatment, where are you at?
Regarding the treatment, we are very happy, we are now, which is often the case when we confront a problem, we have generally, very quickly, the highest number of cases in the world. So it is practically the case on all diseases we have engaged. There are about ten like this in which we have had the largest series of patients in the world. And so I think that on Covid we have now probably the largest series in the world in a single hospital center. Here we have tested, were positive. Here we have treated at the IHU [hospital] Méditerranée [Marseilles] infections for more than 3000 patients 2600 were treated according to our protocol hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycine, among which 10 are dead, which means we confirm that we have a mortality that is less than 0.5% for the time being, which is one of the results, or THE result hat is the most spectacular in the world today. That’s it, we are very happy.
The therapies, by the way this therapy is so spectacular, in reality, people have so much ease in seeing that it works, that it is spreading, and there are studies that are done, in particular an institute that surveys doctors that is called SERMO, that shows globally, among doctors that are taking care of this, the first treatment among all of them currently is azithromycine in 50% of cases and hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine in 44% of cases. That’s massive. It means that practitioners are adopting it because, simply, it works.
In a very interesting way, that will probably give a lot to think to people on the method, came out a paper on the redemsivir in the New England [Journal of Medicine] that defies every [known] methodology, as for the first time we dare publish a study where there is no comparison, i.e. we compare this treatment with nothing else, not even historically. It is extraordinary, and so the only thing that is noted, is that there is a considerable toxicity i.e. there is 60% of side effects, which means that this medicine cannot be used except for patients that have a form very serious, but patients that have a form very serious, we know it here, in reality, have almost no virus, or no virus at all: they are not at that stage. They are at another stage. Which means that if this medicine cannot be given to patients other than those who have a very serious form, and that in very serious forms it is useless, the debate will slowly decrease, as the other medicine that was also proposed in the Discovery arm [research], Vidovira, showed that it was totally ineffective in the same indication.
So this means that things, the outlook will become clearer for molecules that we can actually use and for when we can use them. But in all forms, in cases that are at this stage, in reanimation, in reality the antivirals will have an effectiveness relatively modest, because there is very little virus, it is our experience, we even had patients that died and that had no virus left. We don’t see how an antiviral prescribed at this stage could be the least effective.
So the treatment, it’s in the moderate forms, in the forms that are serious but that are not in reanimation, that will allow to get things done. But it is interesting because among the others, the people who had commented on our methods, it is the first time I see a paper published without any comparison, neither historical, or geographical, or anything else. It’s just that, I don’t know in how many cities in the world, we have given a bit of remdesivir to people who were sick, and all that maybe with a ghost writer, meaning an ad hoc author, gathered all this data, with very little biological data, to say listen we have given remdesivir. That’s all.
It is interesting because maybe that it is one of the publications that will allow following with interest the absolutely extraordinary fluctuations of the Gilead stock price, and so I know that there is a publication that is accusing me of having conflicts of interest with Sanofi, because I talked with Sanofi at the time we created the IHU [hospital], it was what was asked of us, we had to find at least one, two or three industrial partners that were associated in order to do development in France, and translational research. So I had talked with Sanofi to do what I’m doing now but without Sanofi, i.e.repositioning of molecules that exist already, and then the discussions failed so we did not work with Sanofi, but you see, you look at all this thing, if I had to, I was the consultant for Sanofi, I would be an extremely bad advisor, because Sanofi is losing money non-stop, while the advisors of Gilead are very good advisors because Gilead made a lot of money since the beginning of Covid, even though the stock price is modulated by the fact that we communicate on the fact that there are alternative treatments, chloroquine, or that the WHO decides that remdesivir is the big treatment … pssht! We see the stock price climb, and all that are things that are interesting, and it is certainly among the parameters, I don’t know how to interpret it more than that, but the sums of money are absolutely gigantic.
We are, by the market capitalization of Gilead, it’s something absolutely huge, so it’s interesting to see, you see, the fluctuations of its stock price depending on the announcements made in the press, and the efficacy of substitutive treatments. And so you see that if I was, again, a hidden consultant for Sanofi, I would recommend that they fire me, because frankly, they are losing money, they have lost 20% of value in their stock since the beginning of this action. So, what I already knew, I’m not a very good financial advisor. I think that the financial advisors – despite the total absence of efficacy of remdesivir, their [Gilead’s] advisors are much better than me, as it has taken an absolutely huge proportion in financial terms. That’s it.
Do you have new data regarding the toxicity of treatments based on hydroxychloroquine and azithromycine?
Well we have seen, here and now, we have, well of course we did that with our friends the cardiologists, there are a few patients for which they tell us listen, these ones we would rather that you not treat them, so we don’t treat them, it does not represent a lot of people, but it is unnecessary to take risks that are not useful, so on the 2600 we did include, we didn’t have any problem; it’s starting to be a lot, 2600.
So I think that all these debates at the beginning, when we start, I still think that the first work that we did, methodologically, nothing to do with the work of the New England [Journal of Medicine], there was an external geographic group,that was mixed, there was comparison, there was a point of comparison that was viral carriage, while in the paper of the New England there is no point of comparison. They don’t look at healing rates, there is no comparison, neither clinical, nor viral, and we had internal comparisons, between hydroxychloroquine and hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycine.
As far as I’m concerned, what surprises me the most in the current situation, is that mortality currently in the richest countries is much higher than either in the eastern part of the World, China, Korea, eastern countries that are rich too but have a lower mortality, or in the poorest countries. So we finish by asking if having an industry with medicine that are very new, is actually an advantage or a disadvantage in such conditions. I mean that people in Africa don’t have much choice so for them there isn’t much problem to take Plaquenil [hydroxychloroquine], and azithromycine, it doesn’t cost them anything, while in France however there is a struggle that is extremely brutal against the usage of very simple medicine that are very cheap and that … I don’t know if that has consequences on mortality in France, but it is an interesting question.
In any case when we observe the difference in mortality between here, in Marseilles, and other places in France where the population and the state of the epidemic is comparable, we can honestly ask whether it is indeed best to take old medicine that work well or new medicine that we are not sure whether they work at all, and that we know have complications, very serious side effects.
Thank you.