Category: infectious disease

Lancet, NEJM retract controversial COVID-19 studies based on Surgisphere data

Two days after issuing expressions of concern about controversial papers on Covid-19, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have retracted the articles because a number of the authors were not granted access to the underlying data.

The Lancet paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” which relied on data from a private company called Surgisphere and had concluded that hydroxychloroquine was linked to a higher risk of death among some COVID-19 patients, has been dogged by questions since its publication in late May. Some of those complaints led to a correction about aspects of the data, but at the time the authors stood by their conclusions — namely, that hydrochloroquine and chloroquine do not to appear to be effective against the viral infection. 

That correction was followed earlier this week by the expression of concern, and now three of the four authors of the article have decided to pull it entirely. The abstaining author, Sapan Desai, is the founder of Surgisphere, whose mission statement declares that the goal of the company is to: 

Continue reading Lancet, NEJM retract controversial COVID-19 studies based on Surgisphere data

Race to be first to report first case of COVID-19 death during pregnancy leads to a retraction

A group of researchers in Iran has retracted their case report on what they claimed was the first known case of a pregnant woman who died of Covid-19. 

The reason: According to the corresponding author, another group of researchers in Iran, who had first seen the patient at their hospital, had beaten them to the submission punch without their knowledge. (This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a case like this.)

The paper appeared in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, an Elsevier title, on April 11. Sometime in early May, it seems (the dates are unclear on the journal website) the group, led by a team at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences, retracted the article. 

Elsevier allows authors to withdraw papers without explanation if they have appeared online but not yet in print, which is the case here. So the retraction notice says, well, nothing: 

Continue reading Race to be first to report first case of COVID-19 death during pregnancy leads to a retraction

A convicted felon wants people to enroll in a COVID-19 clinical trial. What could go wrong?

Richard Fleming

Richard Fleming, a felon convicted of health care fraud who has been debarred by the US Food and Drug Administration, would like to invite you to participate in a clinical trial.

Fleming has registered a study on ClinicalTrials.gov to evaluate what he calls the “Fleming Method for Tissue and Vascular Differentiation and Metabolism” — a method he claims can help physicians assess pneumonia resulting from Covid-19. 

According to the notes for the study: 

Continue reading A convicted felon wants people to enroll in a COVID-19 clinical trial. What could go wrong?

What it takes to correct the record: Autopsy of a COVID-19 corrigendum

Richard Jones

We’ve been keeping track of retracted coronavirus papers, but what about corrections? Here’s a guest post from Richard Jones of Cardiff University about a paper that earned widespread media coverage but turned out to be wrong.

According to our best knowledge, this is the first report on COVID-19 infection and death among medical personnel in a Forensic Medicine unit.

So ended a letter from Thailand to the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, accepted on 9th April 2020 within 3 days of receipt, and published as an ubiquitous “Pre-Proof.” 

The authors of that letter stated that there had been only two COVID-19 patients amongst medical personnel in Thailand at that time, one of whom was a “forensic medicine professional” working in Bangkok. 

Continue reading What it takes to correct the record: Autopsy of a COVID-19 corrigendum

‘Aggressive’ COVID-19 strains: What it takes to correct a flawed paper

A group of researchers in Scotland have taken aim at a study published in early March which reported surprising findings on the genetics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. 

But the story of what it took to correct the record about the paper is likely to be all too familiar to those who attempt such feats. It involved a blog post and a new paper — neither of which appeared on the site of the original journal that published the work, and neither of which is seeing the kind of attention paid to the original article.

The paper, “On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” appeared in National Science Review, published by Oxford Academic. According to the abstract: 

Continue reading ‘Aggressive’ COVID-19 strains: What it takes to correct a flawed paper

Hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study did not meet publishing society’s “expected standard”

Didier Raoult

The paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement of concern from the society that publishes the journal in which the work appeared. 

The April 3, 2020, notice, from the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, states that the March 20 article, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of Covid-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial” 

Continue reading Hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study did not meet publishing society’s “expected standard”

Hepatitis expert up to five retractions and one expression of concern denies reusing images

Gulam Waris

A microbiology journal has issued an expression of concern over image reuse in a 2010 paper whose senior author has already racked up five retractions for duplicating figures. 

The article, “Activation of transcription factor Nrf2 by hepatitis C virus induces the cell-survival pathway,” appeared in the Journal of General Virology, a publication of the Microbiology Society. The last author of the paper is Gulam Waris, an expert in viral hepatitis who is on the faculty of the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago. The paper has been cited 75 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

By our count, Waris — whose work has made several appearances in PubPeer — has lost at least five papers to retraction for image duplication and questionable data. 

Continue reading Hepatitis expert up to five retractions and one expression of concern denies reusing images

Caught Our Notice: Former rising star loses fourth paper

Title: Haemophilus influenzae responds to glucocorticoids used in asthma therapy by modulation of biofilm formation and antibiotic resistance

What Caught Our Attention: This is the fourth retraction for Robert Ryan, formerly a high-profile researcher studying infections that can be deadly in people with lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis. In 2016, the University of Dundee in Scotland determined that Ryan had committed research misconduct, including misrepresenting clinical data and duplicating images in a dozen different publications. (Ryan tried to appeal the decision, then resigned.) The latest retraction cites a few problems with the paper, including uncertainty about the provenance of some data.

According to the notice, the second-to-last author, George A. O’Toole at Dartmouth, disagrees with the text of the notice, not the decision to retract. We contacted O’Toole, who declined to comment.

We received a statement from Ryan about the retraction:

Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Former rising star loses fourth paper

Overlooked virus “generated a mess,” infected highly cited Cell, PNAS papers

When Alexander Harms arrived at the University of Copenhagen in August 2016, as a postdoc planning to study a type of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, he carried with him a warning from another lab who had recruited him:

People said, “If you go there, you have to deal with these weird articles that nobody believes.”

The papers in question had been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and Cell in 2013. Led by Kenn Gerdes, Harms’s new lab director, the work laid out a complex chain of events that mapped out how an E. coli bacterium can go into a dormant state, called persistence, that allows it to survive while the rest of its colony is wiped out.

Despite some experts’ skepticism, each paper had been cited hundreds of times. And Harms told us:

I personally did believe in the published work. There had been papers from others that kind of attacked [the Gerdes lab’s theory], but that was not high-quality work.

But by November 2016, Harms figured out that the skeptics had been right.  Continue reading Overlooked virus “generated a mess,” infected highly cited Cell, PNAS papers

Florida investigation can’t ID culprit who falsified data in retracted PNAS paper

When the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted a gene therapy paper in December, it declared that some of the data had been falsified and mentioned a research misconduct investigation. But the notice said nothing about who was responsible.

Via a public records request, Retraction Watch has obtained investigation documents from the University of Florida, which show the focus had been narrowed down to two of the paper’s three co-first authors. But the investigation committee didn’t assign blame to either one. According to their final report, dated Oct. 24, 2016:

there was not enough direct evidence to either implicate or exonerate either of these individuals.

Over the course of the formal investigation, which lasted from early August to late October 2016,  the committee was able to determine that data in the PNAS paper had been falsified. However, it said: Continue reading Florida investigation can’t ID culprit who falsified data in retracted PNAS paper