[22] 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.
[31] It opened in early 2017,[32] is dedicated to the management and study of infectious diseases and combines diagnostic, care, research and teaching activities in one location.
[33] 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.
[45] Yet, Raoult's extremely uncommon and high publication rate results from his "attaching his name to nearly every paper that comes out of his institute",[46] a practice that has been called "grossly unethical" by Steven Salzberg.
[47] Since 2013 he has been one of the overseas scientists co-affiliated with the King Abdulaziz University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,[48][49] known to "offer highly cited researchers lucrative adjunct professorships, with minimal requirements for them to be physically present, in return for being listed by them as a secondary affiliation", and so increase its own institutional citation index.
[51] In 2006, Raoult and four co-authors were banned for one year from publishing in the journals of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), after a reviewer for Infection and Immunity discovered that four figures from the revised manuscript of a paper about a mouse model for typhus were identical to figures from the originally submitted manuscript, even though they were supposed to represent a different experiment.
[54] On 17 March 2020, 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.
[56] The French Health Minister, Olivier Véran, was reported as announcing that "new tests will now go ahead in order to evaluate the results by Professor Raoult, in an attempt to independently replicate the trials and ensure the findings are scientifically robust enough, before any possible decision might be made to roll any treatment out to the wider public".
"[59] Raoult was one of 11 prominent scientists named on 11 March to a committee to advise on scientific matters pertaining to the epidemic in France.
[62] Following reports and a complaint filed in July by the French-speaking Society of Infectious Pathology (Spilf), the departmental council of the French Order of Physicians opened a formal case against Didier Raoult.
[72] On May 18, 2021, Lonni Besançon, a French postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University, wrote an open letter supporting Elisabeth Bik.
[74] On June 1, 2021, CNRS published a press release[75] denouncing the "judiciarization of controversy and scientific debates", condemning Raoult's legal proceedings against Elisabeth Bik.
[78] In October 2021, the Mediapart online investigative journal brought to light illegal clinical trials of a treatment against tuberculosis, which Raoult and IHU had been conducting since 2017.
Its report was forwarded to the Marseille prosecutor for potential criminal prosecution, and ANSM additionally threatened to suspend all on-going clinical trials at IHU.
[82] In May 2023, researchers representing sixteen French organizations wrote that Raoult and his subordinates engaged in "systematic prescription of medications [...] to patients suffering from Covid-19 [...] without a solid pharmacological basis and lacking any proof of their effectiveness," and that those drugs continued to be prescribed "for more than a year after their ineffectiveness had been absolutely demonstrated.
"[83] In January 2024, BMC Microbiology retracted an article after Raoult and his co-authors failed to provide evidence of approval from an appropriate ethics committee.