Research Publication Retractions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

On May 22, 2020, a paper was published in the Lancet by researchers from Surgisphere Corporation. Titled 'Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis', it retrospectively analyzed data of hospitalized COVID-19 patients from a registry that included 671 hospitals across 6 continents. Because of this significant coverage, 96,032 patients met the study's inclusion criteria - hospitalized with COVID-19 between Dec 2019 and April 2020, and treated with a chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) regimen (14, 188) or in the control no treatment group (81,144). The study found that all treatment regimens examined (HCQ alone or with macrolide, chloroquine alone or with macrolide) was independently associated with increased death in hospital. The study noted that the use of early-treatment regimens including HCQ or chloroquine since March 2020 had thus far been based on small, low-powered studies. The Surgisphere study was the first large multi-national registry-based study to show a significant negative effect of early-treatment regimens using HCQ.

The response to the study was swift. In a day or two, major public health authorities, including the World Health Organization ordered clinical trials of HCQ to cease. This included the Solidarity Trial (https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-hydroxychloroquine). Several nations ordered its use to stop.

But many had questions. Who was Surgisphere? How did their researchers acquire access to such a large-multinational registry? Who were the participating hospitals? Where was the raw data, and why didn't the data align with national records of COVID-cases for those dates? On May 28, 2020, nn open letter was sent to the lead authors and Lancet editor with 201 signatories from 6 continents (https://zenodo.org/record/3871094).

On June 5, 2020, the paper was retracted by Lancet and the authors. But by then, the damage to HCQ had been done. The WHO reinstated the Solidarity HCQ trial following the retraction and then officially halted it on June 19, 2020.