This is the latest provocation from Didier Raoult, whose record is already very heavy in the field. The Mediterranean Infection University Hospital Institute (IHU) which he still directs, has planned to host in its auditorium in Marseille, on March 30 and 31, a congress bringing together many figures of the antivax movement.
Entitled “Covid-19, first assessment of scientific knowledge and controversies”, this symposium is organized by the association Réinfo Liberté, support structure of the Réinfo Covid collective of the Marseille anesthetist Louis Fouché and by the union Teaching, research, freedoms! A lesser known structure whose statutes were filed in July 2021 in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), and whose purpose is to “to denounce the so-called health policy of a government and a presidential majority which for two years have lost all measure, all benchmarks and all ethics”.
Among the speakers at the congress, in addition to members of the IHU, we find the American biologist Robert Malone, author of alarmist messages on the safety of messenger RNA vaccines, the doctor Pierre Kory, apostle of the use of ivermectin in the treatment of Covid-19, or the French epidemiologist Laurent Toubiana, author of a study on excess mortality in 2020 challenged by the scientific community. The cast was brought together under the leadership of Laurent Mucchielli, a sociologist at the CNRS, a time renowned for his work on delinquency and who, since the start of the pandemic, has published analyzes on the health crisis which have earned him reminders to the public. order of his guardianship.
“Relocation” of the congress requested
The international Covid Summit will be opened with a speech by Didier Raoult, the inviting power. As usual, the microbiologist from Marseille lines up behind the argument of scientific debate to promote an event whose positioning he knows perfectly well. If the IHU receives this congress for two days, it is, explains the Marseille professor on Twitter, “for the sake of freedom of expression, without censoring or condoning it”. However, it is indeed a guarantee that it is and it does not pass to the representatives of the six founding members of the IHU foundation, some of whom, at the height of the antivax wave, were targeted by threats of died and had their home addresses posted online.
After hesitating to react so as not to give more echo to the event, five of the six founding members of Aix-Marseille University, the university hospitals of Marseille, the Research Institute for Development, the French Blood Establishment and the army health service finalized a joint press release on Wednesday March 23. They ask the management of the IHU to “to give up holding this meeting” and an “relocation” of the congress. “The title and nature of the participants and partner associations leave no doubt about the objectives”write the six signatories. “No breach of the requirement of rigor and excellence that our respective institutions pursue can be tolerated”continues the press release, which specifies that the “founding members were not consulted and are in no way associated with this meeting”.
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