LONDON - Two studies on Covid-19 were retracted on Thursday by the scientific journals in which they had appeared.
The studies, published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine in May, had produced astounding results and altered the course of research into the pandemic.
The Lancet paper reported dismal findings about the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 patients. It led to the suspension of some clinical trials of the medications, including by the World Health Organization. (Some have since resumed.)
President Trump has repeatedly promoted hydroxychloroquine despite the lack of evidence that it works against the virus. His endorsement had the effect of politicizing scientific questions that normally would have been left to dispassionate researchers.
The Lancet paper, which was purportedly based on data from a huge, privately held registry of patient records from hundreds of hospitals around the world, had concluded that the anti-malaria drugs were associated with dramatically higher rates of heart arrhythmias and deaths in Covid-19 patients. The database belonged to a company called Surgisphere, which is owned by Dr. Sapan Desai, one of the four co-authors.
The other three co-authors, including Dr. Mandeep R. Mehra, a professor at Harvard Medical School, retracted the article on Thursday after their attempts to verify the database’s veracity and authenticity were stymied by Dr. Desai.
Later on Thursday, The New England Journal of Medicine retracted a heart study that was published in May by the same authors, using data from the same registry. That study was said to analyze 8,910 Covid-19 patients hospitalized through mid-March at 169 medical centers in Asia, Europe and North America. The authors concluded that cardiovascular disease increased their risk of dying.
“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,” the authors wrote in the retraction of the study.
