You're conflating many "they" here. The retraction is by the study authors. The data is from a company that's entirely different, and that company claims their

You're conflating many "they" here. The retraction is by the study authors. The data is from a company that's entirely different, and that company claims their data is "proprietary" and they can't share it. There's strong suspicion that that proprietary data is in fact made up, but the study authors cannot prove it. And you really don't want to retract a study by making unproven allegations. "We can't vouch for the veracity" is all they can truthfully say. For the full statement: "“Our 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.”[1] The authors tried for an independent audit. Surgisphere failed to cooperate. Given the history of its principal, not a surprise. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lancet-retracts-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lance...