Category: clinical study retractions

A Wisconsin physician who has been pushing unproven treatments for Covid-19 has lost a paper on a hospital protocol his group says radically reduced deaths from the infection after one of the facilities cited in the study said the data were incorrect.  

Pierre Kory, whose titles have included medical director of the Trauma and Life Support Center Critical Care Service and chief associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, in Madison, has become a key figure in the controversy over the use of ivermectin — the deworming agent that proponents insist can treat Covid-19 despite a lack of evidence that it does.

In late December 2020, Kory — who rails on Twitter about unfair and incompetent journals — and another ivermectin advocate, Paul Marik, of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, and several other authors published a paper in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine on a group they’d created called the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Per the article: 

Continue reading Bad MATH+? Covid treatment paper by Pierre Kory retracted for flawed results

The authors of a study purportedly showing that ivermectin could treat patients with  SARS-CoV-2 have retracted their paper after acknowledging that their data were garbled. 

The paper, “Effects of a Single Dose of Ivermectin on Viral and Clinical Outcomes in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infected Subjects: A Pilot Clinical Trial in Lebanon,” appeared in the journal Viruses in May. According to the abstract: 

Continue reading Ivermectin-COVID-19 study retracted; authors blame file mixup

A virology journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 article on mosquito-borne infections in Africa after one of the authors identified errors in the publication — an episode that has prompted a change in practice at the journal to avoid similar issues in the future. 

The article, “Mosquito-borne arboviruses in Uganda: history, transmission and burden,” was written by a group in the United Kingdom and Uganda and appeared in the Journal of General Virology last June. 

According to the retraction notice: 

Continue reading ‘We have done a terrible job’: Journal retracts, replaces paper on mosquito-borne infections

The authors of a study comparing hydroxychloroquine and the antiviral agent favipiravir as treatments for COVID-19 have lost the paper after post-publication peer review determined that the data did not support the conclusions. 

“Safety and efficacy of favipiravir versus hydroxychloroquine in management of COVID-19: A randomised controlled trial” appeared in March in Scientific Reports, a Nature title. The authors, from institutions in Egypt, reported that: 

Continue reading Study comparing hydroxychloroquine and antiviral drug for COVID-19 retracted

A World Health Organization (WHO) database of papers about COVID-19 contains hundreds of articles published in hijacked journals whose publishers have stolen titles and legitimacy from the original publications. 

That’s what I found when I analyzed the WHO’s “COVID-19 Global literature on coronavirus disease,” which as of August 1 included more than 318,000 papers sourced from typically trusted databases including the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medline, Elsevier’s Scopus, and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But the collection hosts hundreds of papers published in hijacked journals with fraudulent publishing practices.  Hijacked, or clone, journals mimic legitimate publishers by creating a clone website or registering an expired one. They accept papers — often wildly out of scope of the original publication — without peer review, and collect fees from the authors.

Continue reading WHO COVID-19 library contains hundreds of papers from hijacked journals

A group of researchers in Canada and India have lost a paper on vaccine hesitancy and Covid-19 because they didn’t have the proper license to mine a database of news articles used in the study. 

The paper, “Tracking COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and logistical challenges: A machine learning approach,” was published in PLOS ONE on June 2. Led by Shantanu Dutta, of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, the researchers set out to:

Continue reading ‘A very unfortunate event’: Paper on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy retracted

Earlier this week, we reported on the retractions of two papers on Covid-19 in Texas inmates after the journal was told that the researchers did not have proper ethics approval for the studies. 

According to the senior author on the articles, however, that’s nowhere near the whole story. Kenneth Nugent, of Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock, told us that he’d repeatedly sought — and received — approval from an institutional review board (IRB) throughout their project, articles on which appeared last year in the  Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication.

The first study, published in August 2020, was titled “A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas.” 

The second, from November 2020, was titled “Basic Demographic Parameters Help Predict Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 During the First Wave of Infection in West Texas.” Only the first article has been cited (one time), according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

The retraction notice for the papers states that the authors requested their removal: 

Continue reading When a retraction notice leaves out important details: COVID-19, prisoners, and an IRB