Didier Raoult (French pronunciation: [didje ʁa.ul(t)]; 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As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his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.
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Personal life
Raoult was born on 13 March 1952 in Dakar, French West Africa (present-day Senegal). Raoult's father, who came from Brittany, was serving there as a military doctor; 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.