This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

Emmanuel Macron called for clinical trials of a controversial coronavirus “cure” as he hailed the French infection specialist who promoted it as a great scientist.

The French president said on Wednesday that he would like the treatment, which was backed by Didier Raoult, tested rigorously as soon as possible.

The treatment is a combination of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin.

Macron’s comments are likely to ignite fresh controversy over Raoult, whose research has been boosted by populist leaders, such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, but which is regarded with scepticism by other members of the medical establishment.

“I’m convinced that he’s a great scientist, and I’m passionate about what he explained,” Macron told RFI radio.

Macron, who last week visited Raoult at his workplace, Marseille University hospital, qualified his praise with an admission that he remained “wary” about the treatment’s efficacy.

The president said: “It’s not for the president of the French republic to say what treatment is good and what isn’t. What I did in going to Prof Raoult’s office – and he is one of the leading experts in this area – was to make sure that what he is working on is within the framework of a clinical trial protocol. It’s not a question of belief, it’s a question of science.”

Macron’s closed-door visit to Raoult’s hospital on Thursday came after an online petition calling for wider distribution of the treatment appeared to be drawing support across France.

Raoult’s supporters had accused the French government of ignoring his research, which have been widely boosted on social media despite not having been proven to work under strict clinical trial conditions.

A small study using chloroquine on Covid-19 patients in Brazil was halted this week after some patients experienced heart rhythm problems.

Hydroxychloroquine: how an unproven drug became Trump’s coronavirus 'miracle cure' Read more

Rony Brauman, a doctor specialising in tropical diseases and epidemiology and a former president of Médecins Sans Frontières, said: “The way in which Didier Raoult has presented chloroquine as a miracle drug is more like a prophet than a health specialist.”

Raoult, born in 1952 in Dakar, Senegal, is a specialist in infections and tropical diseases and a professor of microbiology. He studied at the Marseille medical faculty.

After the Sars outbreak in 2003 he was commissioned by the French government to compile a report on the risks of biological terrorism, and he wrote a paper on the French medical system’s lack of preparation for dealing with a pandemic. He recommended a new political approach to health.

In 2010 Raoult won one of France’s highest scientific distinctions, the INSERM Grand Prix, which is awarded to a scientists who have made “remarkable progress in the field of human physiology”.

Known for his unusual appearance – long hair and a chunky ring – and reputed to be a blunt speaker, before the Covid-19 outbreak Raoult was recognised internationally for his research into the previously unexplored “girus” or giant viruses.

At the start of the current health crisis he was invited to take part in the French government’s Covid-19 advisory committee but pulled out before attending any meetings in opposition to the strict lockdown.

After two studies involving 24 and 80 patients, Raoult presented Macron with a third study carried out on 1,061 patients, but with no control group, of whom he claimed 973 were cured in 10 days. Experts said the lack of a control group meant the results were meaningless.

Xavier Lescure, an infection specialist at Bichat hospital, in Paris, told France 2: “Any study without a control group does not show anything at all.”

In a blogpost on the Mediapart site, Olivier Belli, a specialist in molecular biology working in Zurich, wrote: “It is possible that hydroxychloroquine is a viable therapeutic option for the treatment of Covid-19 infections, especially since it has recently shown promising in vitro activity. However, the evidence that we currently have is too weak to justify an important resources shift in this direction.

“Proper science communication is a difficult exercise and research progresses are often slow and sometimes counter-intuitive. Even if we enjoy ‘lone genius vs the system’ narratives that Raoult has been using during the past week, let us collectively remember that consensus is what makes scientific research so powerful.”

Even so, Raoult has won support from across France’s political spectrum, from Jean-Luc Melenchon on the hard left, to Marine Le Pen on the far right. His research was described by Trump as “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine” and has been repeatedly boosted by Brazil’s right-wing president, Bolsonaro.

“I don’t care what others think,” he told his local newspaper La Provence. “I’m not an outsider, I’m the one who is the furthest ahead.”