This archive report was first published on 6 June 2020.
On June 4, 2020, the world witnessed a significant development in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The first research scandal of the pandemic created unnecessary distraction around the politically divisive drug hydroxychloroquine, scientists say, as questions swirled around the tiny healthcare company at the center of the affair.
Chicago-based Surgisphere, founded in 2007 by vascular surgeon Sapan Desai, had supplied data to major studies published in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). However, the firm refused to be audited, leading the authors of the studies to retract their work and issue apologies.
The Lancet paper, which claimed to have analyzed the records of 96,032 patients admitted to 671 hospitals across six continents, found that hydroxychloroquine showed no benefit and even increased the risk of death. Its withdrawal is seen as a boost to backers of the decades-old anti-malarial drug, who include US President Donald Trump and his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro.
"It's very politicised -- there is a group, probably not particularly small, who have learned to mistrust science and scientists, and this just feeds into that narrative," said Gabe Kelen, a professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
Despite the retraction, evidence has been building against hydroxychloroquine's use against Covid-19. On Friday, results from a fourth randomised controlled trial showed it had no impact against the virus.
The Lancet, one of the world's most trusted medical journals, first published in 1823. As a result, the hydroxychloroquine paper had an outsized impact: the World Health Organization, Britain, and France all suspended ongoing clinical trials.
However, things soon began unravelling after researchers noticed numerous red flags, from the huge number of patients involved to the unusual level of detail about the doses they had received. Both The Lancet and the equally prestigious NEJM issued expressions of concern before the authors themselves pulled both papers.
According to the Guardian newspaper, Surgisphere's employees included an adult model, and until last week, the contact page on its website redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website. Meanwhile, Desai has three outstanding medical malpractice suits against him and has written extensively in the past on research misconduct.
"The most serious cause of fraud in medical publishing is manufactured data that authors use to support high impact conclusions," he said in a 2013 paper.
For Ivan Oransky, who founded Retraction Watch in 2010, the affair is far from surprising, serving instead to highlight systemic issues in science publishing and the way science is reported to the public.
