Earlier this week, we reported on the retractions of two papers on Covid-19 in Texas inmates after the journal was told that the researchers did not have proper ethics approval for the studies.
According to the senior author on the articles, however, that’s nowhere near the whole story. Kenneth Nugent, of Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock, told us that he’d repeatedly sought — and received — approval from an institutional review board (IRB) throughout their project, articles on which appeared last year in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication.
The first study, published in August 2020, was titled “A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas.”
The second, from November 2020, was titled “Basic Demographic Parameters Help Predict Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 During the First Wave of Infection in West Texas.” Only the first article has been cited (one time), according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The retraction notice for the papers states that the authors requested their removal:
after their institutional review board found that the previously approved study protocols appear to violate IRB guidelines around prisoner research.
But according to Nugent:
This study underwent an initial review by the IRB and had its approval. I subsequently submitted four amendments to the protocol and each had approval. Consequently the IRB reportedly had looked at this proposal 5 times. In the proposal we indicated we would collect information on prisoners. At no point during this review and approval process did they provide feedback suggesting that there were limitations on the publication potential of papers on prisoners. I am not certain why they started to review the publications on this proposal. I am guessing that there were complaints from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Nugent expressed frustration about the episode:
Two medical students did substantial amounts of work on chart reviews. The IRB and school are indifferent to that situation.
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I think these IRB issues have become needlessly fastidious and even senseless at times.
Does Prof. Nugent have documentation to back up these claims? It should be fairly easy to show, say, email correspondence about the corrections/alterations he made.