Category: clinical study retractions

This may be the scientific publishing version of “the operation was a success, but the patient died.”

The retraction of a Trojan horse paper on the novel coronavirus has called into question the validity of another article in the same journal which found that hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19. 

The sting article, “SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?”  — was the brainchild of graduate student Mathieu Rebeaud, aka “Willard Oodendijk” and Florian Cova, of “The Institute for Quick and Dirty Science” (no, not really) in Switzerland. Their goal: to highlight a concerning paper in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health, which they and others suspect of being a predatory publication — one that is happy to take money to publish anything, while pretending to perform peer review. 

Xavier Argemi first heard the claim that tea made from artemisia herbs could be useful in the treatment of malaria from a TV documentary in 2017.

The documentary, featuring Lucile Cornet-Vernet, the director of the La Maison de l’Artemisia, a non-profit organization that grows artemisia and promotes its use in centers across Africa, focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The film claimed that for decades major pharmaceutical companies have been profiting from expensive malaria drugs based on artemisinin — the antimalarial for which Tu Youyou won a Nobel Prize in 2015, after distilling it from the Artemisia annua plant — while the tea itself, an ancient Chinese herbal remedy, was just as effective at treating the disease.

His interest piqued, Argemi reached out to Cornet-Vernet, an orthodontist at Paris’ Descartes University. She shared with him the unpublished manuscript of a study — their first large-scale clinical trial — which she said showed that artemisia outperformed a go-to treatment for schistosomiasis, a different parasite-induced disease.

Argemi immediately saw red flags. “I am not a specialist of malaria or schistosomiasis, but when I read the study I was simply totally surprised by the number of inconsistencies at the very first read,” Argemi, of the Clinique Axium in Strasbourg, France, told Retraction Watch by email. 

An infectious diseases researcher found by a federal U.S. watchdog to have “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions left his job as the investigation was coming to a close, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last week, Prasadarao Nemani, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and the University of Southern California (USC), “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly including falsified and/or fabricated data” in a 2009 paper — retracted in 2018 — and four NIH grant applications, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Earlier this week, in a statement provided to Retraction Watch, CHLA said that he was no longer with the hospital or with USC:

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 paper which argued that 5G cellphone technology could lead to infection with the novel coronavirus has been retracted, but not before scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wondered whether it was the “worst paper of 2020.”

The article, “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells,” came from a group from Italy, the United States and Russia, and appeared in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents. The journal is published by Biolife, which asserts that it’s peer reviewed but has not responded to a request for comment. [Please see an update on this post.]

The abstract is now marked “WITHDRAWN” on PubMed and the paper has disappeared from the journal’s website. The abstract has been preserved here. According to the authors: 

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: