This post was initially written in French, and published in April 2020.

In a conference given on February 13, 2020[i], entitled Against the Method, Didier Raoult stated “I have never done randomized trials […] to do that on infectious diseases, it makes no sense“. This view was repeated in a more detailed article, where Didier Raoult defended (what he called) “the morality [and] the humanism” of the Hippocratic oath against “the method” (and “mathematics”). As he reminds us, doing control groups is “telling the patient that we are going to give him at random either the drug we know works or the drug we do not know works” (Raoult (2020a, 2020b)). While this method of randomized experiments is now hailed in all disciplines – as the Nobel Prize in Economics awarded in 2019 to Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer and Abhijit Banerjee reminds us – how can a researcher take such a position today?
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