Less than a month after the withdrawal of a widely touted preprint claiming that ivermectin could treat COVID-19, the authors of a meta-analysis that relied heavily on the preprint say they will retract their paper.
According to an expression of concern posted yesterday and announced by Paul Sax, the editor of the journal that published the paper:
On July 6, 2021, Open Forum Infectious Diseases published the article “Meta-analysis of Randomized Trials of Ivermectin to Treat SARS-CoV-2 Infection” by Hill, et al. Subsequently, we and the authors have learned that one of the studies on which this analysis was based has been withdrawn due to fraudulent data. The authors will be submitting a revised version excluding this study, and the currently posted paper will be retracted.
The original version of the meta-analysis has yet to include a link to the expression of concern.
The withdrawn study, posted on Research Square, was withdrawn on July 14, as The Guardian reported at the time. The move came after medical student Jack Lawrence and others raised serious concerns about the work, but not before the preprint was circulated widely by politicians and others promoting use of the drug.
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The original study that had “fraudulent data” actually was criticized incorrectly. The activists that attacked it did so based on “original data” not the actual data used in the study. Raw “original” data often has issues in formatting and duplicates that must be corrected before it can be used. Everything after that idiotic accusation is political.
Thank you. Clearly the political drive to wipe out anything treatment is very powerful and corrupt, using any excuse or reasoning to ensure life saving drugs cannot be used.
Thank you very much.
Oh dont be so stupid. If they are using cheap drugs like aspirin steroid and heparin which have evidence of efficacy then it doesnt take a genius to work out its not about monwy its avout using things that work
Thank you very much.
Oh dear, so the data that was provided with the paper, as the basis for the whole study, was no good, but an unpublished cleaned up data set that is not available for anyone to look at was the basis for the paper, which by the way also was largely written with plagiarised press releases from people pushing an anit-parasitic drug as an anti-viral drug.
That does not sound like a paper on which one should put much reliance.
If ivermectin is indeed a good treatment for COVID-19 there needs to be reliable data that is correctly analysed to show that.
So far, not. Just some unsupported claims on social media.
If the original raw data is such a mess, you cannot trust the final result. Period.
How to ensure that the original data is authentic when used in meta- analyses?
Retraction Watch is nothing more than a political and ideological watchdog. Those who operate and finance it care not a bit about science and truth. They only care about advancing political and ideological objectives. Can’t believe anyone would take this site seriously.
If you have data and facts that confutes the RW work, publich them. Otehrwise, shut up.
Can you provide any evidence for your claim?
LOL
The updated version was published on 17 January 2022, with a reduced list of authors (Andrew Hill, Manya Mirchandani, Victoria Pilkington).
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/9/2/ofab645/6509922
” We present a subgroup meta-analysis to assess the effects of stratifying by trial quality on the overall results. The stratification is based on the Cochrane Risk of Bias measures and raw data analysis where possible. The results suggest that the significant effect of ivermectin on survival was dependent on largely poor-quality studies.”