Didier Raoult
Didier Raoult, the French infectious illness scientist who got here to prominence for selling hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 remedy, has misplaced two papers for ethics issues after different scientists flagged problems with masses of publications from the institute he previously led.
Each papers, “Greater Intestine Redox and Depletion of Anaerobic and Methanogenic Prokaryotes in Serious Acute Malnutrition,” and “Intestine Microbiota Alteration is Characterised via a Proteobacteria and Fusobacteria Bloom in Kwashiorkor and a Bacteroidetes Paucity in Marasmus,” seemed in Clinical Reviews in 2016 and 2019, respectively. They’ve been cited roughly 160 occasions, in keeping with Clarivate’s Internet of Science.
The retraction notices, printed Monday, have been just about similar. They said:
Editors have retracted this Article.
After newsletter of this paper issues about moral oversight of this learn about have been delivered to the eye of the Editors. The Authors weren’t in a position to supply documentation of suitable approval from an ethics committee in both Niger or Senegal, the place the individuals on this learn about have been based totally.
Raoult disagreed with each retractions, in keeping with the notices. He didn’t in an instant reply to our requests for remark.
PubPeer customers, together with sleuth Elisabeth Bik, posted feedback in March 2021 calling out problems with the ethics approvals within the research.
Bik, who has known moral issues with a lot of Raoult’s papers, and gained harassment and felony threats because of this, posted a thread on X (previously Twitter):
The 2 retracted papers have been additionally amongst masses from Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée An infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille, France, that critics flagged as being performed below the similar ethics approval quantity, “despite the fact that the topics, samples, and nations of investigation have been other.”
The critics indicated that that they had contacted Clinical Reviews about their issues, in addition to a couple of dozen others within the magazine, in the summertime of 2022, and didn’t obtain a reaction.
In December, the writer PLOS marked just about 50 papers via Raoult with expressions of outrage whilst it persevered to research the ethics approval knowledge. On the time, PLOS mentioned it anticipated to take no less than any other yr to finish the investigation.
Closing yr, Raoult retired as director of IHU-MI, which he had overseen since 2011, following an inspection via the French Nationwide Company for the Protection of Medications and Well being Merchandise that discovered “severe shortcomings and non-compliances with the rules for analysis involving the human particular person.”
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