The ECG from the retracted paper, which the journal said was mislabeled.
A paper by a medical student and an associate professor in Florida has been retracted for errors with the central finding of the study, an electrocardiogram whose labeling “does not actually represent any of the characteristics” of the tracing.
The authors of an influential but controversial 2020 paper on the activity of bat coronaviruses in China which proposed the animals as a “likely origin” for the virus that causes COVID-19 have retracted their work and republished a revised version of the analysis. They say their results and conclusions did not change.
The authors are affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the New York City-based nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, which has come under intense scrutiny by members of the U.S. Congress and others. The U.S. government in May suspended funding for EcoHealth amid concerns the COVID-19 pandemic virus may have developed from research on which the nonprofit and Wuhan lab collaborated – a so-called “lab leak.” EcoHealth has denied the pandemic virus could have emerged from its work.
An article estimating how many people might have died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in hospitals was retracted in August after advocates for the drug launched a campaign criticizing the study.
In a statement to Retraction Watch, the journal stood by its decision to retract the article due to “some clear fatal flaws” identified in letters to the editor, which it said it declined to publish due to their tone it deemed “not suitable for publication in a scientific journal.”
The University of Iowa found a cardiology researcher violated multiple of its policies, including harassing his former mentees when they tried to leave his lab to establish labs of their own, according to an investigation report obtained by Retraction Watch.
The researcher, Kaikobad Irani, left the school last month with a six-figure settlement, and has a new job lined up, Retraction Watch has learned.
Irani studies the molecular mechanisms of the function and dysfunction of blood vessels. He’s listed as an inventor on four patents, including an active one regarding a compound that could lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
One of Irani’s active grants names the Providence VA Medical Center as the awardee organization. A spokesperson for the VA Providence Healthcare System confirmed Irani “is in the process of onboarding and is expected to begin working around November.”
A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections.
In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was given weekly progesterone injections to prevent preterm birth for her daughter, as reported by STAT. Six years later, after her daughter showed symptoms of an unknown hormonal condition which still hasn’t been formally diagnosed, Skopelitis discovered she should have received synthetic progesterone variant 17α-hydroxyprogesterone caproate, often referred to as 17-OHPC, 17P, sold as Makena. When the drug wasn’t available, her doctor had ordered the wrong replacement from a compounding pharmacy. Skopelitis suspects her daughter’s condition could be a result of the mixup.
The confusion lies within the literature, Skopelitis says: Many clinical trials and papers refer to 17P as intramuscular progesterone, as if they are interchangeable or even the same compound.
JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition.
The article – a research letter titled “Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children” – was written by a group of researchers in Canada led by Lyndsey Hahn, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and garnered significant attention on mainstream and social media sites, including by critics who said the authors fatally botched the definition of long COVID.
According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. Symptoms of infection in kids typically resolve within two weeks, they added.
But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.
In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.”
The scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, became even more concerned when he realized the paper, which had the word “elderly” in its title, had been published in a pediatric journal.
“I started reading other issues of the same journal and noticed that this is a widespread problem: Chinese papers about older adults being published in pediatric journals!” he said.
A paper that purported to find vitamin D could reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms has been retracted from PLOS ONE, four years after the journal issued an expression of concern about the research.
Soon after publication, the paper gained traction on platforms like Twitter (now X) as evidence vitamin D could treat COVID-19 symptoms.
Amidst this discussion, Nick Brown, a science integrity researcher at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, a research fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia, pointed out potential flaws with the work, including the small sample size of the study and a lack of patient information such as how the patients died.
A March 2020 paper that helped spur the discredited claim hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19 is under investigation – again – after some of its authors asked to take their names off the article.
The lead author, retired researcher Didier Raoult, has 12 retractions, according to The Retraction Watch Database. Those retractions involved violations of ethics rules. Journals are investigating many other articles by Raoult and his colleagues, including their work on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID.
The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”
