Didier Raoult taught about infectious diseases at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University, and in 1984, created the Rickettsia Unit of the university.
17 Facts About Didier Raoult
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From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unite de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes.
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Didier Raoult gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for vocally promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease, despite lack of evidence for its effectiveness and the subsequent opposition from NIH and WHO to its use for the treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients.
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Didier Raoult was born on 13 March 1952 in Dakar, French West Africa.
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Didier Raoult's father, who came from Brittany, was serving there as a military doctor; his mother, originally from Marseille, was a nurse.
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Didier Raoult's family returned to France in 1961, and settled in Marseille.
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Didier Raoult was for a time schooled in Nice, then attended a boarding school in Briancon.
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Didier Raoult had wanted to become an obstetrician after qualifying, but his grade in the resident's examination was too low for that choice.
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Didier Raoult specialised instead in infectious diseases, in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Paul Legendre.
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Didier Raoult retired in the summer of 2022, after being allowed to stay on for at most one year after retiring from his professor position on August 31,2021 upon reaching the compulsory retirement age.
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Didier Raoult initiated the construction of a new building to host the IHU Mediterranee Infection, an instance of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire network.
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Didier Raoult is one of the 99 most cited microbiologists in the world and one of the 73 most highly cited French scientists.
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Didier Raoult is a world reference for Q fever and Whipple's disease.
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Didier Raoult is on the list of the 400 most cited authors in the biomedical world.
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On 17 March 2020, Didier Raoult announced in an online video that a trial involving 24 patients from southeast France supported the claim that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin were effective in treating for COVID-19.
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Didier Raoult denounced the "absence of anything scientifically sound", and criticised its members for "not having a clue".
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Didier Raoult defended chloroquine as a benchmark drug for lung diseases, saying that it had suddenly been declared dangerous after having been safely used for 80 years.