COVID-19 research scandal

WASHINGTON: The first research scandal of the coronavirus pandemic has created unnecessary distraction around the politically divisive drug hydroxychloroquine, scientists say, as questions swirl around the tiny health care company at the center of the affair. On Thursday, most of the authors of major studies that appeared in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) retracted their work and issued apologies, saying they could no longer vouch for their data after the firm that supplied it - Chicago-based Surgisphere - refused to be audited.

At any other time the matter might have led to hang-wringing within academia, but it has taken on a new dimension as the world grapples with a virus that has claimed some 400,000 lives. Of particular interest was the paper in The Lancet that claimed to have analyzed the records of 96,032 patients admitted to 671 hospitals across six continents, finding that hydroxychloroquine showed no benefit and even increased the risk of death.

Its withdrawal is seen as a boost to backers of the decades-old anti-malarial drug, who include US President Donald Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro. “It’s very politicized - there is a group, probably not

particularly small, who have learned to mistrust science and scientists, and this just feeds into that narrative,” Gabe Kelen, a professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University said. This is despite the fact that even without The Lancet paper, evidence has been building against hydroxychloroquine’s use against COVID-19. On Friday, results from a fourth randomized controlled trial - carefully designed human experiments considered the most robust form of clinical investigation - showed it had no impact against the virus.

Mystery company

The Lancet, which first published in 1823, is one of the world’s most trusted medical journals. As a result, the hydroxychloroquine paper had an outsized impact: the World Health Organization, Britain and France all suspended ongoing clinical trials. But things soon began unraveling after researchers noticed numerous red flags, from the huge number of patients involved to the unusual level of detail about the doses they had received. Both The Lancet and the equally prestigious NEJM, which had published a paper on whether blood thinners elevated the risk of COVID-19 that relied on the same company, issued expressions of concern - before the authors themselves pulled both papers. Surgisphere, founded in 2007 by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai, had refused to share data with third-party reviewers, saying it would violate privacy agreements with hospitals. — AFP