Two papers related to COVID-19 appearing in major journals that relied on data from Surgisphere Corp. were retracted on Thursday.
The HCQ study, which made headlines worldwide, found hospitalized COVID-19 patients receiving the drug with or without an antibiotic had increased mortality and higher rates of cardiac arrhythmias. It purportedly analyzed data from around 96,000 patients, 15,000 of whom received HCQ or chloroquine, with or without an antibiotic. Surgisphere was said to have provided the data from 671 hospitals on six continents.
Surgisphere founder Sapan Desai, MD, PhD, was the paper’s fourth author; he did not participate in the retraction request to The Lancet.
The New England Journal's retraction statement was much shorter, and did include Desai in the request.
"Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article," Mehra and colleagues wrote. "We therefore request that the article be retracted. We apologize to the editors and to readers of the Journal for the difficulties that this has caused."
Last Updated June 04, 2020
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