French research institute faces criminal charges over “serious breaches”

The French Medicines Agency (ANSM) has said that it will file criminal charges with the Marseilles public prosecutor against the local hospital-university institute (IHU) for infectious diseases, which is run by the microbiologist Didier Raoult.

The agency said that an inspection had revealed “serious breaches” in the IHU’s biomedical research before the covid pandemic and that two of the breaches might qualify as criminal.1 These relate to research said to have been conducted without approval from an external evaluation committee and alleged falsifying of a document from the IHU’s internal ethics committee.

Raoult gained notoriety at the beginning of the pandemic when he claimed that hydroxychloroquine, a derivative of the antimalarial drug chloroquine, …