Retraction—Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, 2020, Mehra

Jaybee00

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
This one’s for the Lancet editorial board: A trolley problem for our times (involving a plate of delicious cookies and a steaming pile of poop)

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia....elicious-cookies-and-a-steaming-pile-of-poop/

This one’s for the Lancet editorial board: A trolley problem for our times (involving a plate of delicious cookies and a steaming pile of poop)


Criticism of the Lancet editorial board over the publication of a probably problematic hydroxychloroquine study.

p.s. this post is written in a ironic/satirical style--it took my brain a couple of minutes to sort it out--he is criticising Richard Horton, the Lancet Editor for not following his own advice that he published in 2015.
 
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Some interesting commentary follows. People who are involved in scientific inquiry questioning the motives of Elsevier etc regarding quality vs money.

Sadly, things are set up such that, in order to survive, one must continually be slave to profit first even when the product is this important.
 
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine


Governments and WHO changed Covid-19 policy based on suspect data from tiny US company
Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies

https://ahrp.org/the-lancet-published-a-fraudulent-study-editor-calls-it-department-of-error/


The Lancet Published a Fraudulent Study: Editor Calls it “Department of Error”
 
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The Lancet has published an expression of concern:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31290-3/fulltext
Important scientific questions have been raised about data reported in the paper by Mandeep Mehra et al—Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis
1
—published in The Lancet on May 22, 2020. Although an independent audit of the provenance and validity of the data has been commissioned by the authors not affiliated with Surgisphere and is ongoing, with results expected very shortly, we are issuing an Expression of Concern to alert readers to the fact that serious scientific questions have been brought to our attention. We will update this notice as soon as we have further information.
 
Science:
A mysterious company’s coronavirus papers in top medical journals may be unraveling
[...] But just as quickly, the Lancet results have begun to unravel—and Surgisphere, which provided patient data for two other high-profile COVID-19 papers, has come under withering online scrutiny from researchers and amateur sleuths. They have pointed out many red flags in the Lancet paper, including the astonishing number of patients involved and details about their demographics and prescribed dosing that seem implausible. “It began to stretch and stretch and stretch credulity,” says Nicholas White, a malaria researcher at Mahidol University in Bangkok.
[...]
 
Other researchers immediately took issue with the analysis. The study doesn’t properly control for the likelihood that patients getting the experimental drugs were sicker than the controls, says Matthew Semler, a critical care physician at Vanderbilt University. “If you have a physician sitting with two patients who have coronavirus, and the physician chooses to give one of them hydroxychloroquine, they’re doing it for a reason,” he says.
That's pretty much with what I was getting at here:
It occurred to me when listening to the news a day or two back, that the people most likely to risk an unproven treatment are probably those whose Covid 19 outlook is already bleak anyway - it's human nature. So those taking the treatment would likely be more likely to die anyway.
 
Just retracted

retraction-1591293148567.jpg


https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140673620313246
 
Moved from the Covid biology thread

The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?

The Lancet is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. Recently, they published an article on Covid patients receiving hydroxychloroquine with a dire conclusion: the drug increases heartbeat irregularities and decreases hospital survival rates. This result was treated as authoritative, and major drug trials were immediately halted – because why treat anyone with an unsafe drug?

Now, that Lancet study has been retracted, withdrawn from the literature entirely, at the request of three of its authors who “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources”. Given the seriousness of the topic and the consequences of the paper, this is one of the most consequential retractions in modern history.
 
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Covid-19 studies based on flawed Surgisphere data force medical journals to review processes

Some of the world’s leading medical journals are reviewing their processes after they were forced to retract studies based on flawed data.

None of the peer reviewers who examined a questionable study on the impact of blood pressure medications on Covid-19 saw the raw data behind the findings before it was approved for publication in world-renowned medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.

The study was based on a massive dataset supposedly gathered from hospitals worldwide by a US company called Surgisphere, but a Guardian investigation has since revealed the database to be seriously flawed. The revelation, combined with concerns highlighted by scientists worldwide about the data, prompted the journal to retract the study. The Lancet, another leading medical journal, also published a study based on the Surgisphere database.
 
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