It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his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.
Raoult's case is so strange.. he's not the usual fringe doctor, up until covid, he had a center seat in national health institution and everybody around him was listening. I still don't get why nobody was wary of him there..
> Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time.
It seems a captain obvious now but it wasn't so at the time. (Or maybe my.braincells.count() < 2)
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).
But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
They probably mean people like Robert Malone [1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.
Yet in officialdom, that kind of thing was perfectly acceptable. In Scotland we had a dentist running Covid lockdown, which is ironic since public dental services were decimated by it and never recovered.
You can simply do a Wikipedia search for "misinformation doctor" and get plenty of results, even with its search system, let alone if you use a search engine to power the search.
I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?
If there is misinformation on Wikipedia it can be corrected. Unless you are claiming that all hits for "misinformation doctor" are incorrect, a few examples to verify and correct would be helpful.
I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.
Have you ever tried changing something on Wikipedia regarding politics (which now includes several health issues) or religion?
Edit: also, I did write "I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited." and yet you're suggesting I get into that argument. I quite clearly don't want to because it's pointless, and we had years of it anyway.
> I can point you to several pages that are protected by groups of interested admins that will make changing even blatantly obvious misinformation impossible, let alone contentious stuff.
Some 'misinformation' is hard to correct because the corrections are reversed by those who are intent on spreading the 'misinformation'. This is especially prevalent around contentious and/or politically sensitive subjects like the mentioned SARS2-related cases. This is what makes it hard to trust articles on such subjects on Wikipedia.
If this is quite widespread, it should be fairly straightforward to point to an example of a page that's being defaced with misinformation, which would include an edit history and perhaps a Talk page documenting whatever sides to the debate there is that's preventing consensus.
I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
My go-to example is the "Constitution" of Medina[1]
> It is widely considered to be one of the first written constitutions of mankind.
Now go to the page on constitutions in history[2] and see how far down the list that one is.
Now go back to the Constitution of Medina (itself an example of misinformation, since it should be charter or even more precisely, treaty, but those protecting the page have meddled with the title too) and look at the reference it uses[3] and what it says to get a feel for the kind of "reference" that is being used there, and then try and update said Wikipedia page by removing the parts about its being the first.
The talk pages of both show that invested groups have been trying to force their views, and they've done it quite successfully.
Let us all know how you get on with that, and then I'll point you to the next example, and the next example…
Some other notable things to check are co-founder Larry Sanger's 9 theses[4], and the news that broke yesterday about a PR firm doing "Wikilaundering"[5].
Aeropress is great. If you like a large mug of coffee have a try of the Clever Dripper. Had Aeropress at home and CD at work and eventually bought a CD for home because it’s so good.
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
This is also possible in the first and second Monkey Island games, using hotkeys ctrl+W or maybe alt+W.
The cheat code will immediately end your game while informing you that you scored 800 of 800 points (presumably a Sierra reference; this is the only way to score any number - including zero - of points).
There's no particular reason you'd discover this while playing either game, but if you play the third one, a mandatory plot point will show the message "You lose. You scored 0 of 800 points," referring back to the obscure joke in the earlier games.
I have both Mastondon and Bluesky accounts and in my experience I find Bluesky is just simpler to use which attracted more of the types of accounts I wanted to follow. Nothing aggressive about that, just good UX resulting in a richer pool of accounts.
It's not obvious from the UI but you can enter small mass changes and watch things slowly fall apart. E.g. 1.0001 will work even though the UI displays 1.0 after you hit enter.
According to this interview [1] and a recent Economist podcast blackouts were a huge driver of the decision of those that could afford it to go for solar and batteries. Now the utilities are in a death spiral. Customers disconnect, prices rise, more incentive to go for solar and storage as prices continue to fall while price of unreliable grid energy rises.
Chances are this spiral can happen everywhere, not just where supply is unreliable.
This is a problem that started because the IMF forced Pakistan to get rid of energy subsidies after Pakistan over invested in tradition fossil fuel burning power infrastructure.
This meant that Pakistan started charging such high unsubsidized prices that it was cheaper for those with money to buy cheap solar panels and batteries. This drop in demand exacerbated the oversupply issue and meant that the unsubsidized price had to go even higher creating a feedback cycle.
You are very defintly confused here,;) or there, in Pakistan where some of the rulling class will brag about never getting utility bills, but the reality is that every built thing, down to the roads is there for them, but at root the main concepts of fuedal societies are intact, and going solar, fits in quite well, as it can be set up as distributed systems that will literaly conect into a larger grid, based on alliegences.
The adoption of electric cars and especialy trucks/tractors/farm/industrial will follow quickly and allow fossil fuels to be reserved for strategic use.
The real kicker will be batteries that have decadal life spans allowing for predictable,
"one time" infrastructure investments that can the become self supporting through use "fees"
Pakistan has the highest per capita slavery except for communist countries with forced labor regimes, in the world. Their country is built on the backs of slavery.
As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.
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