Authors of the Lancet hydroxychloroquine study retract it
Yesterday I wrote about that influential Lancet study that had become suspect. Well, today its authors have retracted it.
The statement from the journal can be found here. Excerpt:
…[O]ur independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process.We always aspire to perform our research in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines. We can never forget the responsibility we have as researchers to scrupulously ensure that we rely on data sources that adhere to our high standards. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources. Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.
They deeply apologize blahbity blah blah blah.
My hunch is that this is a case of garbage in garbage out, perhaps purposeful on the part of someone (although not necessarily the authors). I believe that it was one of those reports too good to fact check, since it disproved the narrative of the evil Trump. But the defects in the study were blatant enough that it didn’t take much time for online sleuths to come up with valid doubts based on anomalies in the data.
Sadly, many academic papers are not reproducible, and are likely false. But certainly suspicious that this one in particular was politically motivated. Similar to climate papers–many even refuse to allow others to look at their original data.
“. . .it disproved the narrative of the evil Trump.”
And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. “We’ve been caught out, so we’ll drop this particular effort to make Trump look bad and go elsewhere”.
I cry for my country. Alan Paton (whom I met in the early seventies) wrote “Cry the Beloved Country.” Too bad the title has been taken already; it perfectly suits our situation today. Dear God, help us. . .
Richard Horton is quite the politicized MD and he has been the editor of the Lancet since 1995 and he’s still there.
God knows why. Under his editorship the Lancet has an impressive record of controversies, even fraud, starting with the infamous study linking vaccinations within autism.
In 2004, as an October Surprise against Bush 43, Horton rushed into a print bogus study exaggerating Iraq War civilian deaths. In 2006 the Lancet published a follow-up study even worse.
For more, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet#Controversies.
huxley:
I wrote about that Lancet Iraq study in this 2008 post.
With the Lancet study (and apparently with the present one, too), Horton didn’t really care if the results were bogus:
neo: Back in the 00s I used to worry that climate change was going to erode people’s faith in science. I believe I even mentioned my concern here.
Little did I realize then how far things could go. We haven’t seen the worst of it either.
huxley – if the Lancet has kept the same editor after this many “mistakes” then they aren’t mistakes.
Yet more lies, and among the worst because of the plausible deniability of “lie” and conversion into a mere “mistake”. (You write about lies next!)
Which liar is worse:
1) One who tells lies 50% of the time,
2) One who tells lies 20% of the time, 80% true,
3) One who tells lies 10% of the time, 90% true,
4) One who tells lies 1% of the time, 99% true?
For most decision makers, (4) is the worst, because so often they are relied on and they are true and reliable. The “harm” of any lie is partly how much one relies on the truth of the liar.
I was going to have just 1% & 50%, but realize that 10% & 20% lie areas are also important. Politicized science is now about 10%, with the Lancet and many other peer-reviewed journals still being fairly trustworthy altho now, already, overly trusted.
The Dem news media is more in the 20% lies, with enough truth to be useful but also lots of lies, especially about politics.
Was it Montage who quoted WaPo with some 19,837 (or some other high, specific number) of “lies or misleading statements” by Trump.
None of the exaggerations of Trump was as bad as Obama’s lie “you can keep your doctor”.
The Lancet couldn’t ignore that Plaquenil has been used effectively in Italy and France since the virus inception – as I told here months ago reporting my physician nephew’ witness. She gave it to her father – my elder brother – during his covid19 pneumonia crisis.
It’s really a concerted tide of mud against Trump – what could have been the reason to give international credit to Surgisphere?
The Lancet…also the source of the discredited Andrew Wakefield ‘study’ erroneously linking MMR to autism. It appears Richard Horton has managed to turn a once a venerable medical journal into a politicized pile of garbage causing untold damage in the process.
Every major left-wing talking point has a “study” like this supporting it. Every single one. People should actually go check the studies out for themselves. They’re ridiculous garbage. Global warming, sex assault on campus, minimum wage, gender pay gap, polar bear study, the hockey stick, women don’t lie about rape, income inequality, gun control studies, old growth forests, racist cops …. on and on and on.
It’s standard lefty political strategy. Throw together some crap. Get a friendly editor to publish (really easy to do). Make blatantly political conclusory statements about the ‘findings’ in the abstract. Mount PR campaign to news media. And the narrative has a new “FACT” handed down from on high and impossible to ever refute. Because science.
WE have to demand that all science/academic studies which are relied upon to make public policy must have two independent replications.
How would ANYONE believe the Lancet any more?
They (in-)famously declared in 2004, after the US invasion of Iraq, that over 600-thousand civilians had died. This number was trumpeted all around the world before the Lancet walked-back their report. (And the revised report is still escaping me as I try to Google it.)
So, Lancet ONCE had a good reputation, but it was a Progressive cesspit 16 years ago and has sunk even further since then.
There is NO reason to believe *any* “expert report” from *any* source at this point. EVERYTHING YOU HEAR OR SEE EXISTS IN SERVICE TO SOMEBODY’S NARRATIVE. Period.
Yep, I’ve become … somewhat jaded. Even the videos of current events are lies. (Sorry X-Files lovers, there is -NO- Truth “out there”; not any more).
The number 1 problem is the Media and E-News.
They are in a constant war for attention, not accuracy or truthfulness.
If President Trump says something helps base on a medical panel of experts. Then the Media will seek out and help the 1st person presenting a study saying otherwise. When the attention seeker is outed as wrong, then there is a quite retraction, the original E-Story is deleted or edited for historical reasons. Resulting in once again 100’s of 1000’s … if not Millions…. with have been infected with BAD misleading information.
Heck we still have some that think Epstein hung himself.