5 ms·

Infamous paper that popularized unproven Covid-19 treatment retracted

dfxm12 2y ago
As far back as August 2020, this paper was known to be "fully irresponsible": https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/19/french-hydroxychloroquine-study-has-major-methodological-shortcomings-and-is-fully-irresponsible-says-review-but-is-not-being-retracted/ https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/19/french-hydroxychloroq... This retraction is better than nothing, but it's about four and a half years too late.
- lelandfe 2y ago
  I'm a little appalled that it went completely undiscussed why it took 4 days for the paper to be reviewed and published and 4 years for it to be retracted.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Journals do want to publish, especially when information is exciting. The usual process of science is to trust that writers have at least some integrity. Peer reviewers aren't expected to be able to reproduce the work. They're more of a sanity check. Bad papers usually aren't retracted. More often, they're forgotten. And that usually works out well enough. Retractions are needed only when a paper has enough attention that it isn't sufficiently forgotten. So it's very common for a retraction to take a long time. It takes a while even to notice that a retraction is needed, and then you make quintuple-certain that the call for retraction is correct.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  The retraction also won't get anywhere near the same publicity. It should not be possible for people to promote snake oil treatments without bearing any responsibility. Unfortunately, our timeline puts the responsibility onto the general public and the quality of scientific education means that a sizeable proportion simply don't have the tools to understand publications/retractions etc.
  - throw0101c 2y ago
    > The retraction also won't get anywhere near the same publicity. Even if it did, it may not be helpful (at least for the general public): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect
- weebull 2y ago
  "Responsible" or "irresponsible" is not a valid criticism of a scientific paper. Those words have no part to play in the search for facts. The biggest way that I think the reputation of the science community is being harmed is that it's not holding true to it's own tenets. The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. Not to call it "irresponsible" or "immoral", label it "disinformation" or "pants-on--fire". Bad science gets proved wrong, but nobody is interested in reproducing results. As a result our journals are full of accepted papers documenting unreproducible crap. They have been for a long time. When COVID hit and we needed science to be clean and authoritive, it was already in disarray. Unable to tell us what actually worked, we just got a bunch of folklore from all sides some of which got "blessed" by the high priests and some which was "sacrilegious", but very little of it was backed up with any data beyond modelling (which is just predictions). Nobody should be claiming the high ground w.r.t. COVID IMHO. The science community failed us by acting in response to politics and not science.
  - tim333 2y ago
    > The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. The issue with the paper in question is stuff like: >six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. So you can point out their research is crap without actually falsifying the claim that hydroxychloroquine helps with covid. It's hard to prove a negative experimentally but easy to show stuff like the above is iffy.
mritun 2y ago
> investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern. I am not a scientist but it of 32 faulty widgets, 28 widgets are made by a guy called Raoult, then even blue collar workers know Raoult is an idiot with no business making widgets. If that does not happen, ACME Widgets will eventually go out of business. This is how science gets discredited - by allowing idiots do “science”. Here Raoult does not get kicked out, but is Director of the ACME - this is how entire field of medicine research gor tainted.
- ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
  > This is how science gets discredited - by allowing idiots do “science”. Not really - science has to be open to all as otherwise we risk having a "priesthood" of scientists. What we need are better systems to deal with rogue researchers and retracted papers. The scientific principle is fine, it's just our implementation that is lacking.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    The biggest issue, I think, is what happens after a paper is released; it gets spread, reinterpreted, diluted, popularised, editorialised, etc through three or four layers of media (university press room -> serious news/science outlets -> popular news/science outlets, going from "these numbers indicate with 89.1346% certainty that this exoplanet may contain traces of h2o" to "EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND PACK YOUR STUFF WE'RE GONNA COLONISE IT"), then onto social media. The Wakefield paper linking autism to vaccines has become so mainstream in certain communities it's impossible to undo the damage even though it was (finally) retracted in 2010 and Wakefield himself was struck off the register. At this point only through a very long, slow and arduous process can you get this idea out of people's heads, thanks to constant repetition, reinterpretation, scaremongering, and a whole community forming. It's going to be the same with this paper and the idea that dewormer is effective against the 'rona, or any quack 'rona countermeasures for that matter.
    - 2y ago
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
It won't make much of a difference to be honest; the Wakefield paper that "proved" a link between MMR vaccines and autism was published for nearly 22 years until it was pulled in 2010, but it's still cited and vaguely referenced as being definite proof. It's this weird absolute but super selective belief in certain science that gets me, it's both "this paper PROVES it", but also "all these other papers that fail to replicate the findings or outright disprove it are FAKE SCIENCE pushed by LIZARD PEOPLE and I'm NOT GOING TO READ IT". It's maddening. I mean don't get me wrong, I don't read scientific papers at all because I'm not smart enough and don't have the attention span but I can criticise those that say they do and believe in science nevertheless.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  It kinda reminds me of how people say they "don't trust" safe, effective medications that went through a gauntlet of clinical trials... so instead they trust random unregulated supplements that anyone can sell online. At the end of the day I think it's about in-group signalling more than anything else, and certainly wishful thinking more than evidence, but the cognitive dissonance is still shocking. (See also: antivaxxers who cling to HCQ and ivermectin while ignoring that these drugs are manufactured by companies who make vaccines.)
tejohnso 2y ago
I thought it was going to be about Ivermectin but it's Hydroxychloroquine.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  If I remember it right, it was the first study on HCQ, that removed patients from the tracking if they became too ill.
- tim333 2y ago
  Hydroxychloroquine was touted as a treatment about a year before ivermectin became popular. I was actually prescribed HCQ in a hospital for covid in April 2020. In the early days it was unclear if it helped or not.
timr 2y ago
HCQ doesn't work for Covid, but this is a fundamentally political retraction that won't accomplish anything. If I had to line up Covid-related papers that should be retracted on the grounds that the science was shoddy this paper would certainly be on the list, but it would be on a list with other, absolutely horrible, irresponsible stuff related to (for example) masks [1], that the same people who railed against this paper continue to believe, almost as religion. In the Covid debates "both sides" have their shibboleths that are based on atrocious science, so let's not get too sanctimonious about retraction of a single paper. [1] Since people are downvoting because I said the word "masks", here is just one high-profile example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 This paper was found, in subsequent analysis, to have cherry-picked their data sets to achieve a pre-determined outcome: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 If you find yourself reacting emotionally to this particular topic (or any other related to Covid), you should take a step back and consider that you might be an example of what I'm talking about.
- spondylosaurus 2y ago
  What horrible irresponsible stuff about masks are you referring to?
  - timr 2y ago
    Literally hundreds of papers. Basically any paper published about masks during the pandemic was bad, save for a few RCTs. But I'll give you one particularly egregious example that comes to mind. The "Boston school mask study" in NEJM [1] claimed that mask mandates led to an almost 30% reduction in school cases during the pandemic. Subsequent reanalysis of the work -- including going back to the original source data -- showed that not only is that not true, the researchers blatantly cherry-picked their data, and also chose analysis time windows to optimize their desired outcome. The original paper should be retracted. Full stop. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974
    - 2y ago
Izkata 2y ago
Maybe in some circles? But not any I remember. It got popularized because of early reports from China that HCQ+Zinc seemed to help, not really HCQ alone.
- amyames 2y ago
  whether it did or not, HCQ (among other things like methylene blue from which it is derived) can’t be given to people who are g6pd deficient. That will indeed cause the side effects of hemolytic anemia (loss of red blood cells, heart attacks, ICU, anemia) we see giving the drug to certain populations for say, malaria. (Or HIV when they tried that.) you won’t find many g6pd Deficient people in china, however you will find g6pd adaptations for malaria that we don’t have. so HCQ may work differently in their bodies than it does ours. a study that says “HCQ did something a certain way in their bodies” doesn’t mean it will mine. G6PD deficiency - Prevalence of 0.6% - 2.0% nationwide in china depending on who you ask. So may be easy to dish it out and say no one had deadly side effects. In the USA it’s about 7%, and then in black males it’s 11%. You can’t give out hcq like candy here without testing for g6pd deficiency. Because even if it did “work,” it would be deadlier than Covid for these populations.

As far back as August 2020, this paper was known to be "fully irresponsible": https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/19/french-hydroxychloroquine-study-has-major-methodological-shortcomings-and-is-fully-irresponsible-says-review-but-is-not-being-retracted/ https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/19/french-hydroxychloroq... This retraction is better than nothing, but it's about four and a half years too late.

lelandfe 2y ago
I'm a little appalled that it went completely undiscussed why it took 4 days for the paper to be reviewed and published and 4 years for it to be retracted.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Journals do want to publish, especially when information is exciting. The usual process of science is to trust that writers have at least some integrity. Peer reviewers aren't expected to be able to reproduce the work. They're more of a sanity check. Bad papers usually aren't retracted. More often, they're forgotten. And that usually works out well enough. Retractions are needed only when a paper has enough attention that it isn't sufficiently forgotten. So it's very common for a retraction to take a long time. It takes a while even to notice that a retraction is needed, and then you make quintuple-certain that the call for retraction is correct.
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
The retraction also won't get anywhere near the same publicity. It should not be possible for people to promote snake oil treatments without bearing any responsibility. Unfortunately, our timeline puts the responsibility onto the general public and the quality of scientific education means that a sizeable proportion simply don't have the tools to understand publications/retractions etc.
- throw0101c 2y ago
  > The retraction also won't get anywhere near the same publicity. Even if it did, it may not be helpful (at least for the general public): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect
weebull 2y ago
"Responsible" or "irresponsible" is not a valid criticism of a scientific paper. Those words have no part to play in the search for facts. The biggest way that I think the reputation of the science community is being harmed is that it's not holding true to it's own tenets. The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. Not to call it "irresponsible" or "immoral", label it "disinformation" or "pants-on--fire". Bad science gets proved wrong, but nobody is interested in reproducing results. As a result our journals are full of accepted papers documenting unreproducible crap. They have been for a long time. When COVID hit and we needed science to be clean and authoritive, it was already in disarray. Unable to tell us what actually worked, we just got a bunch of folklore from all sides some of which got "blessed" by the high priests and some which was "sacrilegious", but very little of it was backed up with any data beyond modelling (which is just predictions). Nobody should be claiming the high ground w.r.t. COVID IMHO. The science community failed us by acting in response to politics and not science.
- tim333 2y ago
  > The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. The issue with the paper in question is stuff like: >six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor. So you can point out their research is crap without actually falsifying the claim that hydroxychloroquine helps with covid. It's hard to prove a negative experimentally but easy to show stuff like the above is iffy.

mritun 2y ago

> investigators did not receive a response from Raoult, the corresponding author. To date, 32 papers published by IHU authors have been retracted, 28 of them co-authored by Raoult, and 243 have expressions of concern. I am not a scientist but it of 32 faulty widgets, 28 widgets are made by a guy called Raoult, then even blue collar workers know Raoult is an idiot with no business making widgets. If that does not happen, ACME Widgets will eventually go out of business. This is how science gets discredited - by allowing idiots do “science”. Here Raoult does not get kicked out, but is Director of the ACME - this is how entire field of medicine research gor tainted.

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
> This is how science gets discredited - by allowing idiots do “science”. Not really - science has to be open to all as otherwise we risk having a "priesthood" of scientists. What we need are better systems to deal with rogue researchers and retracted papers. The scientific principle is fine, it's just our implementation that is lacking.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  The biggest issue, I think, is what happens after a paper is released; it gets spread, reinterpreted, diluted, popularised, editorialised, etc through three or four layers of media (university press room -> serious news/science outlets -> popular news/science outlets, going from "these numbers indicate with 89.1346% certainty that this exoplanet may contain traces of h2o" to "EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE FOUND PACK YOUR STUFF WE'RE GONNA COLONISE IT"), then onto social media. The Wakefield paper linking autism to vaccines has become so mainstream in certain communities it's impossible to undo the damage even though it was (finally) retracted in 2010 and Wakefield himself was struck off the register. At this point only through a very long, slow and arduous process can you get this idea out of people's heads, thanks to constant repetition, reinterpretation, scaremongering, and a whole community forming. It's going to be the same with this paper and the idea that dewormer is effective against the 'rona, or any quack 'rona countermeasures for that matter.
  - 2y ago

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

It won't make much of a difference to be honest; the Wakefield paper that "proved" a link between MMR vaccines and autism was published for nearly 22 years until it was pulled in 2010, but it's still cited and vaguely referenced as being definite proof. It's this weird absolute but super selective belief in certain science that gets me, it's both "this paper PROVES it", but also "all these other papers that fail to replicate the findings or outright disprove it are FAKE SCIENCE pushed by LIZARD PEOPLE and I'm NOT GOING TO READ IT". It's maddening. I mean don't get me wrong, I don't read scientific papers at all because I'm not smart enough and don't have the attention span but I can criticise those that say they do and believe in science nevertheless.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
spondylosaurus 2y ago
It kinda reminds me of how people say they "don't trust" safe, effective medications that went through a gauntlet of clinical trials... so instead they trust random unregulated supplements that anyone can sell online. At the end of the day I think it's about in-group signalling more than anything else, and certainly wishful thinking more than evidence, but the cognitive dissonance is still shocking. (See also: antivaxxers who cling to HCQ and ivermectin while ignoring that these drugs are manufactured by companies who make vaccines.)

tejohnso 2y ago

I thought it was going to be about Ivermectin but it's Hydroxychloroquine.

marcosdumay 2y ago
If I remember it right, it was the first study on HCQ, that removed patients from the tracking if they became too ill.
tim333 2y ago
Hydroxychloroquine was touted as a treatment about a year before ivermectin became popular. I was actually prescribed HCQ in a hospital for covid in April 2020. In the early days it was unclear if it helped or not.

timr 2y ago

HCQ doesn't work for Covid, but this is a fundamentally political retraction that won't accomplish anything. If I had to line up Covid-related papers that should be retracted on the grounds that the science was shoddy this paper would certainly be on the list, but it would be on a list with other, absolutely horrible, irresponsible stuff related to (for example) masks [1], that the same people who railed against this paper continue to believe, almost as religion. In the Covid debates "both sides" have their shibboleths that are based on atrocious science, so let's not get too sanctimonious about retraction of a single paper. [1] Since people are downvoting because I said the word "masks", here is just one high-profile example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 This paper was found, in subsequent analysis, to have cherry-picked their data sets to achieve a pre-determined outcome: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 If you find yourself reacting emotionally to this particular topic (or any other related to Covid), you should take a step back and consider that you might be an example of what I'm talking about.

spondylosaurus 2y ago
What horrible irresponsible stuff about masks are you referring to?
- timr 2y ago
  Literally hundreds of papers. Basically any paper published about masks during the pandemic was bad, save for a few RCTs. But I'll give you one particularly egregious example that comes to mind. The "Boston school mask study" in NEJM [1] claimed that mask mandates led to an almost 30% reduction in school cases during the pandemic. Subsequent reanalysis of the work -- including going back to the original source data -- showed that not only is that not true, the researchers blatantly cherry-picked their data, and also chose analysis time windows to optimize their desired outcome. The original paper should be retracted. Full stop. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11974
  - 2y ago

Izkata 2y ago

Maybe in some circles? But not any I remember. It got popularized because of early reports from China that HCQ+Zinc seemed to help, not really HCQ alone.

amyames 2y ago
whether it did or not, HCQ (among other things like methylene blue from which it is derived) can’t be given to people who are g6pd deficient. That will indeed cause the side effects of hemolytic anemia (loss of red blood cells, heart attacks, ICU, anemia) we see giving the drug to certain populations for say, malaria. (Or HIV when they tried that.) you won’t find many g6pd Deficient people in china, however you will find g6pd adaptations for malaria that we don’t have. so HCQ may work differently in their bodies than it does ours. a study that says “HCQ did something a certain way in their bodies” doesn’t mean it will mine. G6PD deficiency - Prevalence of 0.6% - 2.0% nationwide in china depending on who you ask. So may be easy to dish it out and say no one had deadly side effects. In the USA it’s about 7%, and then in black males it’s 11%. You can’t give out hcq like candy here without testing for g6pd deficiency. Because even if it did “work,” it would be deadlier than Covid for these populations.