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Medicine Science

Hydroxychloroquine-Promoting COVID Study Retracted After 4 Years (nature.com) 78

Posted by EditorDavid from the following-the-science dept.
Nature magazine reports that "A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published." Researchers had critiqued the controversial paper many times, raising concerns about its data quality and an unclear ethics-approval process. Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille's Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired.

The paper, which has received almost 3,400 citations according to the Web of Science database, is the highest-cited paper on COVID-19 to be retracted, and the second-most-cited retracted paper of any kind....

Because it contributed so much to the HCQ hype, "the most important unintended effect of this study was to partially side-track and slow down the development of anti-COVID-19 drugs at a time when the need for effective treatments was critical", says Ole Søgaard, an infectious-disease physician at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, who was not involved with the work or its critiques. "The study was clearly hastily conducted and did not adhere to common scientific and ethical standards...."

Three of the study's co-authors had asked to have their names removed from the paper, saying they had doubts about its methods, the retraction notice said.
Nature includes this quote from a scientific-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "This paper should never have been published — or it should have been retracted immediately after its publication."

"The report caught the eye of the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz," the Atlantic reported in April of 2020 (also noting that co-author Raoult "has made news in recent years as a pan-disciplinary provocateur; he has questioned climate change and Darwinian evolution...")

And Nature points out that while the study claimed good results for the 20 patients treated with HCQ, six more HCQ-treated people in the study actually dropped out before it was finished. And of those six people, one died, while three more "were transferred to an intensive-care unit."

Thanks to Slashdot reader backslashdot for sharing the news.

Hydroxychloroquine-Promoting COVID Study Retracted After 4 Years More | Reply

Hydroxychloroquine-Promoting COVID Study Retracted After 4 Years

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  • Idol of the uneducated (Score:4, Informative)

    by stud9920 ( 236753 ) on Saturday December 21, 2024 @01:52PM (#65031027)

    Raoult has been for 5 years the idol of the educated. I suspect he would never had been famous if not for some clickbait Facebook posts with titles that would be easily mistaken for boomer traps nowadays, à la "He cures the Covid with this one weird trick, siontists hate him". It was clear from the beginning his claims were easy to disprove, but even then "I wouldn't even qualify for a first-aid Red Cross course"-types took it to the extreme and were happy to almost litterally drink bleach because it looked a similar treatement to his fungicide miracle cure. With no effect or at best on par with the null hypothesis.

  • Great, but the damage is done (Score:5, Interesting)

    by spiritplumber ( 1944222 ) on Saturday December 21, 2024 @02:07PM (#65031049) Homepage
    same as with the "vaccines cause autism" paper. We need some actual peer review here.

  • There was at least a hypothetical way it could've. (Score:5, Informative)

    by schweini ( 607711 ) on Saturday December 21, 2024 @02:40PM (#65031091)
    I've found this awesome article on Nature.com which describes the exact lifecycle of a COVID19 case, on molecular level. Highly recommended. Anyhow, they mention HCQ:

    The virus’s speedy entry using TMPRSS2 explains why the malaria drug chloroquine didn’t work in clinical trials as a COVID-19 treatment, despite early promising studies in the lab10. Those turned out to have used cells that rely exclusively on cathepsins for endosomal entry. “When the virus transmits and replicates in the human airway, it doesn’t use endosomes, so chloroquine, which is an endosomal disrupting drug, is not effective in real life,” says Barclay.

    So, it seems that at least HCQ could make theoretical sense, but we now even know why id doesn't work. Full article: https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RobinH ( 124750 )
      If there was a theoretical way it could have worked, and just didn't, then why go through all the trouble of referring to it as "horse de-wormer"? I mean, it is used for that, but it's also used as an anti-parasite in humans. The media shouldn't have taken sides in this, and just reported facts, as you are doing.

    • Thank you for an actual scientifically-relevant, informative post on /.

  • ... when the original numerous idiots that cared do not care that much anymore. Still means these people were idiots and they very likely still are. Just with other dementend ideas now.

  • The right wing can never admit they're wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday December 21, 2024 @04:19PM (#65031281)
    So the entire reason for this nonsense was when COVID broke out the Republican party wanted to convince everyone that it was safe to go about your business as normal because we had these miracle cures.

    It of course wasn't. Epidemiologists knew that even if COVID was only going to kill two to 3% of the population (which is still around 10 million dead) that the strain on our health care system would mean that figure would at least double maybe triple. Once that was explained to the Republican party and they realized it letting 20 or 30 million Americans die would be bad for them politically they relented and allowed restrictions and lockdowns until vaccines became generally available...

    But like I said the right wing can never admit they are wrong. Fundamentally the right wing is about authoritarianism and authority requires correctness. It's a classic emperor's new clothes problem. Once you realize the emperor is naked you can't ever see the invisible clothing again. So the right wing will always always double and triple down.

    So here we are 5 years or so later and there is unequivocable proof that these miracle cures were bullshit but I can tell you right now that's just like how when the link between autism and vaccines turned out to be made up by a guy who was hoping to sell separate vaccines for mumps, measles and rubella this will be ignored by the same people still pushing horse paste as a cure all.

    It's frustrating that we all see snake oil salesmen in our media and we recognized that they are crooks and liars, hell there's an old western about a guy named Trump offering the build wall to protect the city from meteorites... We know it's all bullshit when it's on TV but as soon as we get into the real world suddenly we fall for carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen...

    I understand why. It's been extensively studied and it's just that people want to feel like they have direct agency and control and that they are the ones making the choices and not some scientist or another telling them what to do but it's still frustrating.

    • They are good at sound bites. Most importantly though, people are more apt to believing in simplified "solutions" especially when coupled with induced fear (which abrogates concern for others, promotes categorization by "pattern", and diminished logic), without deep reasoning.

      • it's that they have unlimited money for focus groups and total control of the media so they can try out every possible sound bite until they get the right one.

        There were plenty of failures until they came up with "woke", "SJW" and "DEI". But unless you work in that field you only see the hits, not the misses.

        • it's that they have unlimited money for focus groups and total control of the media so they can try out every possible sound bite until they get the right one.

          Don't be silly.

          Social media provides that service far faster and more effectively, and it not only doesn't cost anything, people actually pay to use it. The same thing happened before social media, but back then the memetic evolution had to happen in chain letters or xeroxed papers passed around the office, which was much slower, less effective and harder to observe.

      • They are good at sound bites. Most importantly though, people are more apt to believing in simplified "solutions" especially when coupled with induced fear (which abrogates concern for others, promotes categorization by "pattern", and diminished logic), without deep reasoning.

        Except that the allegedly simplified solutions aren't simple at all, in fact they're dramatically more complicated. Believing in hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin in spite of the consensus of the medical community requires the believer to assume a massive conspiracy. Not just any conspiracy, either, but one that is either deeply evil (if COVID is a real danger and the conspiracy is trying to suppress cheap and effective treatments, thereby causing large numbers of unnecessary deaths to no purpose) or simply

  • “The journal has been unable to confirm [sciencedirect.com] whether any of the patients for this study were accrued before ethical approval had been obtained.”

    “The journal has not been able to establish whether all patients could have entered into the study in time for the data to have been analysed and included in the manuscript prior to its submission on the 20th March 2020, nor whether all patients were enrolled in the study upon admission as opposed to having been hospitalised for some time before star

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jsonn ( 792303 )
      The burden of proof for any of those points is on the paper's authors. If they can't, the paper should be considered unsound. It's not the job of the journal to prove that the research is valid or not.

      • "co-author Jean-Marc Rolain was editor-in-chief; the journal had accepted the submitted manuscript in one day"

        The guy that co-authored the paper was the editor of the journal.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jsonn ( 792303 )
          Sure, but that makes the study even more shoddy, not less. OP tries to paint the retraction in a bad light, but all the points they highlighted are concerns that the paper and its authors need to address.

  • "This will be the standard of care"

    Fauci et el get to hawk insanely expensive dangerous drugs like Remdesivir on national television with no statistically significant evidence of useful benefit. For a whole year even the WHO wouldn't bite on what Fauci et el was selling due to lack of evidence.

    I am also waiting on the public apology for the FDA corruptly approving Aduhelm when the entirety of their advisory panel disapproved of the decision, three resigned in protest and their own statistician said they d

  • The only credible study I remember showing hcq in a positive light was one showing hcq to be useful in prophylaxis.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]

    This was the "Argentina study" as it was called. I never heard anything about Dr. Raoult.

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