The disgrace of Didier Raoult, the scientific giant who touted a worthless Covid “cure”
Wilde’s quip, though without its lightness of tone, might have served as the title of Professor Didier Raoult’s autobiography. A man eminent in his field of microbiology, he shot to fame and media attention at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic when he vigorously promoted the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as both preventive and life-saving. He soon attracted a cult-like following, not least among whom numbered Donald Trump. Raoult became infatuated with his own infallibility.
He was certainly made for gurudom. A man of large presence and personality, to put it mildly, his appearance was not at all what might have been expected of a medical scientist. On the contrary, he looked as if he had stepped out of the pages of Asterix. Raoult has given more than one explanation for this choice of appearance: a proud Marseillais, he once wrote that he adopted it to irritate his snooty Parisian peers and competitors, but in his autobiography also claims that it was purely at the behest of his wife.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
