Effects of vaccines and corruption, the analysis of Didier Raoult

https://www.francesoir.fr/societe-sante/effets-des-vaccins-et-corruption-analyse-de-didier-raoult

Professor Didier Raoult published his analysis of the epidemic situation on his Youtube channel IHU Méditerranée-Infection on Tuesday, May 11. FranceSoir offers you the transcription of the essential moments of this video.

Professor Didier Raoult, how is the epidemic developing in Marseille?

For now, all markers are down. If we take Marseille, we are on a downward trend. On intensive care patients, the number of people in intensive care did not exceed what we had during the first epidemic.

Regarding deaths, despite better means of care, there are many more patients who have died because the epidemic has lasted for a long time. On the other hand, the average age of deceased patients is the same.

There is an evolution which seems to be satisfactory. The IHU is not full, the number of patients diagnosed is decreasing. At one point, we were at 200 a day, we went up to 100 a day. Now, there are more than 50 per day diagnosed here on site, so we can clearly see the rate decreasing.

Do you have elements that allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of the vaccination?

We have preliminary elements. There have been 350 people vaccinated and diagnosed here. The incidence in vaccinees, first or second dose, regardless of vaccine, is half of those who are not vaccinated. There are 20% of people who come to be tested here and who have been vaccinated and the proportion of vaccinated in the population is 25%, these figures are quite representative, when we see that we are more around a protection of 50%. This is what we see in practice, which is not antagonistic to what we have in the literature if we do not want to read press releases or just simply abstracts of studies. You have to look at the real numbers. In many publications, we put cases that are not documented. When we want to show that the vaccine works, we only include people who have both PCR positive and who are symptomatic, knowing that the definition of symptomatic is a definition that is partially subjective.

In the AstraZeneca abstract, it is 70% protection for the English virus in symptomatic forms and 30% protection in people who are asymptomatic. If you compare that to the data we also have, it means that 50% of people are protected against covid 19 infection with AstraZeneca .

For Pfizer , the only data we have are those from Israel, where there was only the old strain (Wuhan) circulating. There was no English variant, you have to take the protection rates with care. The summary and conclusions relate only to people who are symptomatic and do not count people who are asymptomatic. When  we tell you that we have a protection rate of 95%, that is not real life . You have to really look at the data in the text, not the abstracts. It's the first time I've seen this, but in the abstracts we don't say the same thing as in the text . It does not represent all of what is found. 

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So, I told you we have about 350 vaccinated who are positive. And of course, we do not know very well what will happen to this protection given these variants that are circulating. In addition, we now have this Variant 501 that we just released. 

Among those vaccinated, there are fewer hospitalizations, but there are no fewer deaths . We have 1% of deaths. And among the dead, we have a dead with this variant 501 which also presents a different spike, which is perhaps less well protected. We know that English and especially South Africa and Brazilian are less well protected by vaccines which are based on the Wuhan strain and which are only on the spike protein and not on the virus as a whole.

With current data, it cannot be said that vaccines significantly protect the circulation of viruses because the proportion of asymptomatic carriers remains extremely high. So the idea of ​​the vaccine being made to protect the rest of the population is not realistic in this situation. The second thing is that given the mutants that are circulating, we will have to be careful.

Then there is one last thing I want to say about vaccines, we  have 46 patients who had a covid in the week following the injection and that is significant compared to everything we do here.  Are these people who were carriers, asymptomatic, and in whom the vaccination triggered a reaction that made them become symptomatic? this is a real question. This is a new and important phenomenon that must be taken into account.

Do you have anything that explains why the abstracts you were talking about are different from the text?

I know that it amuses people a lot to talk about conspiracy, to deny the fact that the circulation of money at this level risks being associated with corruption. Corruption is as old as the world, and so I did a little work to stop talking nonsense, because all the partners we have have all been convicted of corruption.

Gilead sentenced to $ 97 million ; Pfizer was fined $ 60 million for corruption; AstraZeneca was ordered to pay US $ 5.52 million for foreign bribery; GSK has been convicted of corruption in China . So, you shouldn't think that I am inventing the fact that corruption exists in the pharmaceutical industry.

Scientific publishing is a profitable sector, 35% profit per year for the large newspaper groups and an extremely significant part of the revenue of scientific journals of this size comes directly from contacts with the pharmaceutical industry. For example, Merck had bought for 500,000 dollars of proofs, that is to say articles theoretically made to be distributed. In practice, they paid $ 500,000 to the newspaper that published it. What constituted an important part of its receipts. It is corruption in disguise . 

When there is a lot of money on the one hand, and less money on the other, there is a phenomenon of fluid mechanics. You don't give someone money if you don't expect a service from it . You don't invite someone to a convention, to lunch without expecting anything in return. It has been known for a long time, it is Milton Friedman who says that "there is no free meal".

When I was an intern, I was invited with my wife in business class to go to Boston, to an extraordinary hotel where we had brought in the best scientists. There were about thirty opinion leaders or future opinion leaders. In the end, the guy they invited was familiar with me and familiar with my wife and created relationships that are abnormal in professional relationships. Because then you have a hard time when someone has become a buddy to deny them what they have to sell. The case here was that of a drug which had no use and which had suddenly become prescribed because a colleague had married the girl who sold this drug. This exists, it is part of human nature. It is not horrible but it is the law which must regulate it. Therefore, we will have to go to the end of the law that had been put in place with Dominique Maraninchi and Xavier Bertrand on conflicts of interest. I am very happy because it is progressing. I have a colleague who told me that in his CNU they oblige candidates to declare their conflicts of interest and do not appoint people who have had conflicts of interest for less than five years.

The corruption of major scientific journals is a huge problem . People who reflect on this issue are saying that we must have separate journals or no journals at all for therapeutic trials  so that we have reliable comments. But that the same journals are not used to report science that is independent and science that is akin to marketing. Because fiddling with data, methodological and mathematical analyzes to make something effective, you know, it's very mundane. And as soon as a scientific journal reaches a sufficient audience, it becomes a target of marketing.

We must recreate the seal between public activities and industry. It is an essential thing. Theoretically, the law requires you to declare your conflicts of interest each time you intervene, including for all these characters who appear on television sets, this would avoid having a mixture of genres and justified suspicions or no corruption.

I think this is a point that is neglected in France and  we must stop saying that it is conspiracy because there are people who have been condemned to absolutely colossal sums for corruption . 

Personally, I do not find that participating in laboratory-led therapeutic trials contributes to knowledge . Some of these tests are done because someone has to do them, whether in France or England or Spain, whatever. Then it has to be confirmed in the field, independent of the pharmaceutical industry, so that we can have a real assessment . 

And it is not doing research to include patients in a program that has been carried out by the pharmaceutical industry, whose analysis is made by the pharmaceutical industry, whose methodology was put in place by the pharmaceutical industry and even the paper of which was written by the pharmaceutical industry and then offered and accepted in the biggest newspapers in the world.

We must return to science to contribute to knowledge . It is not to supply patients or to create doubt about the link of the theoretical contract that one has with the patient, which is to take care of him and him only, which is a real intellectual and philosophical problem which is not raised enough. And secondly, it is necessary that the ethics committee, rather than looking at the methodology, should ask itself questions about the morals of therapeutic trials. And what I regret is that certain decisions of the Committee for the Protection of Persons of the Ethics Committee do not seem to me to have been analyzed first from a moral point of view before having been analyzed from a moral point of view. methodology.

But the fact that we do this to do good for people or that we do this to see that it is not worse, although it is more expensive, than the previous treatment which are the trials of no- inferiority poses a moral problem.

See also: Are non-inferiority trials ethical? Dominique Costagliola invited to Thursdays at the IHU on February 14, 2020

Author (s): FranceSoir