Category: clinical study retractions

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 paper, “Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China,” appeared Aug. 25, 2020, in Nature Communications. It has been cited 154 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and by at least two international policy documents. 

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have died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in hospitals was retracted in August after advocates for the drug launched a campaign criticizing the study. 

French media have reported criticism of the retraction as inappropriate, and speculation the journal caved to pressure from hydroxychloroquine advocates. 

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.”

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. 

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.

The article, “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection,” appeared online September 25, 2020. Michael F. Holick, a professor of medicine at Boston University and a proponent of the use of vitamin D, was the last author among a group of other researchers from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran. 

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 paper, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial,” was published in the International Journal for Antimicrobial Agents. It has been cited more than 3,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.