Prof Raoult’s study : he manipulated the facts to pretend efficiency

First point on the methodology : unlike many others I do not oppose the idea of blunt testing without comparison ; it is a pandemic and you don’t want to leave some patients without a trial (if you expect the answer to work !).

But, the product itself does not prove at all convincing. First, I want to mention the comments of Prof. Mathieu Molimard, pharmacologist responsible of an experimental pharmacology lab @ Bordeaux University Hospital, who explained how, in the first study of Prof Raoult with 80 subjects, few had fever, which is a KEY symptom of nCoV-19. So as he said the patients were kind of mild cases… very, very insufficient test panel.

Second, I am copying the very interesting Twitter comments of Lu Chen, NCATS data scientist (the NCATS is a subpart of the NIH) :

(1/n) Raoult’s team reported the result of hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin trial to treat COVID19 for > 1k patients. mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/upl mediterranee-infection.com/wp-content/upl Once again, data is broken, and I smelled their anxiety several days ago. twitter.com/houndcl/status Threads

(2/n) I closely monitor IHU’s COVID-19 website since the birth on 3/26. mediterranee-infection.com/covid-19/ This website reports the number of COVID positives & death in APHM/IHU, and num of positives & death with >3d treatment. Some major discrepancies have been found.

(3/n) Suspicious numbers: 3/30: number of patients with “H+A” treatment -8 4/4: no update 4/5: total death + 1, BUT “H+A” death +2. (NOBEL PRIZE PLEASE!) 4/5-4/6: >10k increase in total tests, >2k increase in total positive. 4/8: Total tests -10k, total positives -1.7k

(4/n) I had a gut feeling on 4/6 that they will take “some” action since the death in H+A start to increase dramatically. What a coincidence! -No data on 4/7 -Massive data loss on 4/8 -Rush a preprint out on 4/9 which reports the data till 3/31

(5/n) Let’s go back to the preprint. On April 6th, Raoult reported 20 ICU, and 7 death in Oz’s show. youtube.com/watch?v=vx0ikI (20 ICU, directly from Raoult) youtube.com/watch?v=Qc0e85 (7 death based on Oz)

The abstract:

I think the most important is tweet number 4, where the hypocrisy of the Raoult team becomes blatant, it’s obvious they decided to manipulate the data after their treatment started to fail. I add the next tweets as well…

(6/n)

I understand that the preprint might have been written several days ago.

However, by the time H+A group had 5 death, there were 3005 positives, and 1818 patients received 3d H+A treatment according to the website data.

The abstract: pic.twitter.com/iHhTrwyffH

— Lu Chen (@houndcl) April 9, 2020

(7/n)

Table 1. 1061 pts were from 3/3 – 3/31. OK.

On 3/31, website said there were 1283 patients that completed 3d H+A, and 1 death. Since the trial protocol was approved on 3/6, no patients received H+A before 3/3.

So, total should be 1283 or 1061? Need clarification. pic.twitter.com/iYG8jS3CSa

— Lu Chen (@houndcl) April 9, 2020

(8/n)

Intriguingly, there is a significant increase in the treatment group since 3/26 (+1782). Only +733 in the “control” group.

We can assume that most new patients were enrolled into H+A treatment group.

(ignore the suspicious dashed line, please) pic.twitter.com/SkvbegUPlA

— Lu Chen (@houndcl) April 9, 2020

(9/n) Conclusion

The data management is a disaster. No matter combo work or not, Raoult's team doesn't have a good system to handle the clinical data from thousands of patients properly.

Cannot wait to see the data from the other 1k patients who already received 3d treatment.

— Lu Chen (@houndcl) April 9, 2020

Lu Chen doesn’t say it entirely, but tweet number 4 implied it. Prof Raoult manipulated his research to fit the claim!

Third, a comment by Prof. Gilbert Deray, head of nephrology service @ Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris : the death rate in the HCQ / AZT test sample, for an average age of 43,8 y is exactly the death rate of non-treated patients in Spain, proving the inefficiency of the drug

La mortalité du groupe de patients de Marseille (0,5 %) traités par hydroxychloroquine/Azithromycine et pour un âge moyen de 43,8 ans est exactement celle des patients non traités en Espagne. Malheureusement une preuve d’inefficacité. pic.twitter.com/YJ62MZ1iOg

— deray gilbert (@GilbertDeray) April 9, 2020