Author: Ivan Oransky

We have heard back this morning from the publisher of a journal that yanked a paper that linked 5G cellphone technology and the novel coronavirus last week — a paper that scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik mused was the “worst paper of 2020.”

The response to our request for comment from editor in chief Pio Conti reads a bit like a Mad Libs of excuses we hear from publishers when something goes wrong. Read carefully for:

A public health journal will be retracting a paper that argued for the adoption of homeopathy in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, according to the editor in chief.

We reported on Saturday that the Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice, a Springer Nature title also known by its German name, Zeitschrift für Gesundheitswissenschaften, had published “Homeopathy combat against coronavirus disease (Covid-19)” on June 5.

At the time, we had not yet heard from Joachim Kugler, the journal’s editor, about how this might have happened. Today, Kugler told Retraction Watch:

A peer-reviewed journal has published a paper that urges the adoption of homeopathy in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice — published by Springer Nature and also known by its German name, Zeitschrift für Gesundheitswissenschaften — published “Homeopathy combat against coronavirus disease (Covid-19)” on June 5. It is indexed in PubMed Central, although not on Medline.

Here’s the abstract:

Didier Raoult, whose claims that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 have been widely disputed, has had a 2018 paper corrected for what his team says was unintentional duplication of a figure.

Here’s the correction for “Identification of rickettsial immunoreactive proteins using a proximity ligation assay Western blotting and the traditional immunoproteomic approach,” which came four months after scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik pointed out potential issues in Figure 2 on PubPeer: