Dr. Oz Emailed Jared Kushner to Hype a Study That Just Got Flagged on 853 Ethics Violations

853 Papers. One Institute. Zero Accountability from the Guys Who Promoted It.

An international team of scientists published findings this month in the journal Research Integrity and Peer Review identifying serious ethical and legal concerns in 853 articles coming out of the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection, known as the IHU, according to The Guardian. That number dwarfs what previous investigations had flagged. Institute founder Didier Raoult was listed as co-author on 758 of those papers.

Raoult, for anyone who blissfully forgot the early pandemic news cycle, is the French researcher who shot to global fame in March 2020 by publishing research claiming hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin was an effective treatment for COVID-19. The paper was eventually retracted in 2025 for ethical and scientific reasons. The drug has not been shown to be effective as a COVID-19 treatment. What has been shown, clearly and repeatedly, is that the men who treated Raoult like a prophet are now in charge of a combined $1.6 trillion in federal health spending.

Oz Said His Jaw Literally Dropped. It Should Have.

Let's go to the tape. Two days after Trump tweeted that hydroxychloroquine had 'a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,' Oz appeared on Fox and Friends and told the audience he was 'flabbergasted' by Raoult's research. 'I read the study. I was stunned. Literally, a jaw dropped. I didn't know it was possible,' Oz said, per The Guardian.

Lonni Besançon, an assistant professor at Linköping University in Sweden and one of the researchers behind the new analysis, put it simply: 'If Oz had reviewed/read the study correctly he would have found many of the problems' that critics raised about it almost immediately.

So either Oz read the study and missed glaring problems that an international team of scientists later catalogued across hundreds of papers, or he did not read it as carefully as he claimed in front of a national television audience while urging the U.S. government to go procure the drug. Neither option is a great look for the man now running CMS.

Behind the Cameras, Oz Was Lobbying the White House

The Fox appearances were just the public half. Behind the scenes, according to emails later obtained by a House select committee on the coronavirus crisis and reported by The Guardian, Oz was actively emailing Trump administration officials to vouch for Raoult's research quality.

On March 22, 2020, Oz wrote that the French researcher 'confirmed clinical benefits' and called it 'a potential pandemic solution' in an email to Jared Kushner, who was then coordinating the administration's pandemic response. Six days later, Oz wrote again saying Raoult had sent updated research and that 'the treatment appears safe and results are better than expected.'

This is the man who now oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He was privately lobbying the president's son-in-law based on research that had not been through a randomized trial, from a researcher whose institute has since been connected to hundreds of papers with ethical violations. The Department of Health and Human Services did not return requests for comment, which tracks.

RFK Jr. Dedicated a Book to This Guy

Kennedy, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, named Raoult among the 'heroic' scientists to whom he dedicated his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, according to The Guardian. The book attacked Fauci specifically for his skepticism toward hydroxychloroquine.

Fauci's skepticism, for the record, was that the early research was anecdotal, not done in a controlled clinical trial, and needed rigorous scientific testing before anyone started mass-prescribing it. Standing next to Trump at a March 2020 press conference, Fauci said flatly that the answer to whether there was evidence for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment was 'no.' Trump tweeted the opposite the next day.

A Republican-led Senate committee recently voted to hold Fauci in contempt for invoking the Fifth Amendment during a hearing about COVID's origins. The scientist who was right about hydroxychloroquine is facing contempt proceedings. The people who were wrong about it are running HHS and CMS. American governance, ladies and gentlemen.

The Real Damage Was Never Just Medical

Besançon told The Guardian the now-retracted paper caused cascading harm that went well beyond the clinical. It led to shortages of hydroxychloroquine for patients who actually needed it for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It pulled scientific attention and resources away from other potential treatments. And it handed ammunition to anti-vaccine activists who argued the paper was being suppressed 'because if there was a cure for Covid then they couldn't sell their vaccines.'

'A lot of time was wasted,' Besançon said. 'It's been a massively influential paper, and it's also been used to push for an antivax agenda.'

Emmanuel Macron even made a high-profile visit to the institute to meet Raoult personally, so this particular embarrassment is not limited to American politicians. But Macron is not currently overseeing $1.6 trillion in annual U.S. healthcare spending while claiming to restore 'gold-standard science' to federal policy. Oz is.