The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper.
The preprint, “Hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin: a potential interest in reducing in-hospital morbidity due to COVID-19 pneumonia (HI-ZY-COVID)?” was posted to medRxiv on May 11 by authors at Hopital Raymond Poincare, and sometime yesterday replaced with this statement:
The authors have withdrawn this manuscript and do not wish it to be cited. Because of controversy about hydroxychloroquine and the retrospective nature of their study, they intend to revise the manuscript after peer review.
It’s unclear why exactly the authors changed their minds about posting the preprint. Hydroxychloroquine was already controversial by May 11, and the nature of the study — retrospective — didn’t change in the intervening days.
Benjamin Davido, the corresponding author of the paper, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Before being withdrawn, the paper was tweeted by Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Didier Raoult, whose work on hydroxychloroquine has been questioned. Raoult called the paper “Très bon.”
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by May 11, and the nature of the study — retrospective — didn’t change in the intervening days
Though of course the nature of the study did change from “prospective” to “retrospective” at some point after the trial was registered.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04364698
The withdrawal makes sense then, so it’s not so much a retraction as a sign of moving forward with the investigation.