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.
A group of OB/GYNs in the Middle East with a history of testing the patience of editors has lost a paper — and received in expression of concern for another — over concerns about the validity of their data.
The articles appeared in the BJOG, a Wiley publication. Both were led by Mohammad Maher, who is affiliated with Menoufia University in Egypt and the Armed Forces Hospital Southern Region, in Saudia Arabia.
Maher was first author of a 2017 paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology that the journal retracted earlier this year, after the editors were unable to resolve serious questions about the reliability of the data. As the retraction notice states, the journal made little headway with Menoufia University when it tried to follow up on concerns that the researchers’ results were almost certainly fabricated.
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.
The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper.
Yesterday, a Federal U.S. judge ruled against Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, in a case Croce had filed against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017. As Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, writes in the 36-page ruling — which we’d recommend reading in its entirety:
The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted.
Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found replication of the virus that causes Covid-19 in the dialysis fluid of a patient with kidney disease. Again, hasty publication appears to be involved. We’ve been tracking retractions of Covid-19 articles on our website, and, let’s just say, the list is almost certainly a trailing indicator of the robustness of the science here — as it is with retractions during any period.
Back to the letter. “COVID-19: Should sexual practices be discouraged during the pandemic?” was written by ZhiQiang Yin, of the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, in China. Yin submitted the article on April 14. The journal accepted it on the 16th and published it on April 30th.
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:
In a world increasingly haunted by fake news, email scams and trolls on the internet deliberately emotionalizing debate and making unfounded attacks, trust is perhaps more endangered than ever.
That sounds like the breathless text of a movie trailer, but it’s how the editors of Ethnologia Europaea announce the retractions of seven more papers by Mart Bax, the Dutch anthropologist whose misconduct includes not only making up data but making up papers — at least 61 of them — as well. Bax is now up to nine retractions.
Gliske’s paper, which received a modest amount of media attention, argued for what he calls a “multisense theory” of gender identity. As he told Newsweeklast December:
