---
title: "Elisabeth Bik"
chunk: 2/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Bik"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:27:45.772187+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Hydroxychloroquine ====
In March 2020, commenting on the publication of the results of a clinical trial by Didier Raoult on the effect of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19, she identified a conflict of interest and strongly criticized the methodology of the study. The owners of the journal that had published the results admitted that the publication was not at the level expected by the society, in particular due to a lack of justification of the criteria for patient selection and triage. They then rebutted allegations of a conflict of interest, stating that the peer review process prior to publication had been respected because Jean-Marc Rolain, one of the co-authors of the article and editor of the journal, had not participated in the evaluation. The publisher Elsevier then announced an additional independent evaluation to determine whether the concerns about the article were well founded.
In May 2021, the French non profit association Citizen4Science, made up of scientists and citizens, published a press release in response to an announcement by Didier Raoult's lawyer that IHU Marseille was suing Bik. Citizen4Science linked a petition denouncing the harassment of scientists and defenders of science integrity, specifically mentioning Bik and calling on French authorities to intervene and journalists to look into the matter.  On May 8, 2021, Lonni Besançon, a French postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University, also wrote an open letter signed by scientists to support Bik. The letter, also mentioned in The Guardian, Science, and Nature, gathered signatures from more than 2,200 scientists and 30 scholarly societies. On May 22, 2021, The Guardian reported that Raoult had begun legal proceedings against Elisabeth Bik. A Science article updated on June 4, 2021, in print issue 6546, stated that more than 3,000 signatories supported the Citizen4Science petition.
In December 2024, Raoult's hydroxychloroquine trial article was retracted by its journal due to issues with "adherence to Elsevier's publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants, as well as concerns raised by three of the authors themselves regarding the article's methodology and conclusions." Bik commented that the article shouldn't have been published in the first place or at least should have been withdrawn immediately after publication.

== Awards ==
Bik received the following awards:

November 2020: the Peter Wildy Prize by the Microbiology Society for communication of microbiology in education and to the public.
2021: the John Maddox Prize for "outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers".
2021: the Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism by The Skeptic magazine.
July 2023: the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science commendation award.
2024: included on the STATUS List by STAT News in recognition of her work as a scientific integrity analyst and her expertise in scientific image analysis.
November 2024: Einstein Foundation Individual Award for research integrity.

== References ==

== External links ==

Microbiome Digest blog
Science Integrity Digest blog
Elisabeth Bik on X 
Elisabeth Bik publications indexed by Google Scholar