Didier Raoult

Didier Raoult (; born 13 March 1952) is a retired French physician and microbiologist specialising in infectious diseases. He taught about infectious diseases at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University (AMU), and in 1984, created the Rickettsia Unit of the university. From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes. He 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.

As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies. his mother, originally from Marseille, was a nurse. His family returned to France in 1961, and settled in Marseille. He was for a time schooled in Nice, then attended a boarding school in Briançon.

A poor student, Raoult repeated a year at high school, then dropped out in the second year of high school to board a French merchant ship called Renaissance and spent the next two years at sea.

In 1972, he sat his baccalauréat in literature as an independent candidate, and registered at the medical school in Marseille. Believing in a family tradition in medicine, Raoult senior refused to pay for his studies in any other subject.

In 1982, Raoult married psychiatrist and novelist Natacha Caïn (born 1960). They have two children, and Raoult has an estranged daughter from a previous marriage, angiologist Magali Carcopino-Tusoli.

Career From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes, (URMITE; in English, Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit), which employs more than 200 people. He 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.

Raoult was awarded the Grand prix de l'Inserm in 2010 and in 2015 shared the €450,000 prize of the Grand Prix scientifique de la Fondation Louis D. of the Institut de France with biologist Chris Bowler from the Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 2003 Raoult was amongst the main co-discoverers of the Mimivirus alongside Jean-Michel Claverie. The bacteria genus Raoultella was named in his honor by his right-hand man and longest-serving collaborator, Michel Drancourt.

Raoult initiated the construction of a new building to host the , an instance of the Institut hospitalo-universitaire (IHU) network. It opened in early 2017, is dedicated to the management and study of infectious diseases and combines diagnostic, care, research and teaching activities in one location.

In May 2022 the French drug safety agency ANSM announced it would file charges against the IHU for potentially criminal research misconduct during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June 2022, ANSM implemented "a series of particularly severe sanctions" against the Raoult-led IHU.

In September 2022 it was reported that Raoult's laboratory was being investigated by the Aix-Marseille University for "serious malfunctions," that in response to this "scientific misconduct investigation by the University of Aix Marseille" four papers from Raoult's group appearing in journals published by the American Society for Microbiology had received expressions of concern, and that a criminal investigation had been initiated.