Famous Hydroxychloroquine study retracted by Elsevier
A famous early study into the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine has been recalled by the journal Elsevier.
The reasons for the retraction seem quite spurious: I would call the 5th or 6th of March “early March”, wouldn’t you?
Elsevier’s editors claim that this is an inconsistency in the study:
The ethical approval dates for this article are stated as being 5th and 6th of March 2020 (ANSM and CPP respectively), while the article states that recruitment began in “early March”.
Azithromycin is a fairly common antibiotic used to treat pneumonia — Elsevier is also claiming that they didn’t get ethics approval to give it the patients, which seems like a ridiculous accusation, particularly in the context of early 2020:
The journal has not been able to establish whether the subjects in this study should have provided informed consent to receive azithromycin as part of the study. The journal has concluded that that there is reasonable cause to conclude that azithromycin was not considered standard care at the time of the study.
The study was actually published on the 20th March 2020, which is understandably quick: the pandemic was in full swing and people were panicking. And it was not unlikely that a medication from the chloroquine family might be useful for this virus:
Vincent MJ, Bergeron E, Benjannet S, Erickson BR, Rollin PE, Ksiazek TG, Seidah NG, Nichol ST. Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread. Virol J. 2005 Aug 22;2:69. doi: 10.1186/1743-422X-2-69. PMID: 16115318; PMCID: PMC1232869. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16115318/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857924003327
What really seems to have happened is that some of the authors of the study seem to have backflipped — one has to question whether the cost to their careers of being mentioned in the list of authors of this article was too great — how sad.
The great hypocrisy of the medical establishment is again in full public view: they are straining out gnats and swallowing camels by the dozen. The real crime in the past four years was coercing people to take an experimental gene therapy, and yet these authors are criticised for giving harmless, long-proven medications and reporting on it hastily in the peer reviewed literature, in order to save lives.
Elsevier has compromised their standing in the eyes of many people by retracting this article, and one has to wonder what kind of pressure was applied to the editors to cause this unjustifiable retraction.
Fortunately, thanks to archive.org, one may still read the original article, and come to one’s own conclusions:
