Update (June 5, 2020, 12.45 PM IST):
The Lancet editor-in-chief Richard Horton won the 2015 Friendship award given by the Chinese Government
and here’s more about him from the Lancet website:
“He now works to develop the idea of planetary health – the health of human civilizations and the ecosystems on which they depend.”
The Spectator points out that Horton has been an unrelenting critic of the British government, blaming it for not doing enough, but has attacked any criticism of the Chinese government.
ORIGINAL POST:
This house of cards is tumbling down fast:
From Statnews.com:
“The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals, on Thursday retracted an influential study that raised alarms about the safety of the experimental Covid-19 treatments chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine amid scrutiny of the data underlying the paper.
Just over an hour later, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted a separate study, focused on blood pressure medications in Covid-19, that relied on data from the same company.
The retractions came at the request of the authors of the studies, published last month, who were not directly involved with the data collection and sources, the journals said.
“We can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources,” Mandeep Mehra of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zurich, and Amit Patel of University of Utah said in a statement issued by the Lancet. “Due to this unfortunate development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.”
A company called Surgisphere was responsible for the primary data on which the papers were based:
“As scrutiny grew, the authors on the paper not affiliated with Surgisphere called for an independent audit. In their Lancet statement Thursday, they said that Surgisphere was not cooperating with the independent reviewers and would not provide the data.
“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,” the researchers wrote.”
Who is Surgisphere?
The Guardian on June 3 had this report:
“Data it [Surgisphere] claims to have legitimately obtained from more than a thousand hospitals worldwide formed the basis of scientific articles that have led to changes in Covid-19 treatment policies in Latin American countries. It was also behind a decision by the WHO and research institutes around the world to halt trials of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine. On Wednesday, the WHO announced those trials would now resume.
Two of the world’s leading medical journals – the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine – published studies based on Surgisphere data. The studies were co-authored by the firm’s chief executive, Sapan Desai……
…A search of publicly available material suggests several of Surgisphere’s employees have little or no data or scientific background. An employee listed as a science editor appears to be a science fiction author and fantasy artist whose professional profile suggests writing is her fulltime job. Another employee listed as a marketing executive is an adult model and events hostess, who also acts in videos for organisations…..Until Monday, the “get in touch” link on Surgisphere’s homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database….
..Desai has been named in three medical malpractice suits, unrelated to the Surgisphere database. In an interview with the Scientist, Desai previously described the allegations as “unfounded”..
…In 2008, Desai launched a crowdfunding campaign on the website Indiegogo promoting a wearable “next generation human augmentation device that can help you achieve what you never thought was possible”. The device never came to fruition…
…Desai’s Wikipedia page has been deleted following questions about Surgisphere and his history, first raised in 2010…..
…The Guardian has since contacted five hospitals in Melbourne and two in Sydney, whose cooperation would have been essential for the Australian patient numbers in the database to be reached. All denied any role in such a database, and said they had never heard of Surgisphere. Desai did not respond to requests to comment on their statements.
…Another study using the Surgisphere database, again co-authored by Desai, found the anti-parasite drug ivermectin reduced death rates in severely ill Covid-19 patients. It was published online in the Social Science Research Network e-library, before peer-review or publication in a medical journal, and prompted the Peruvian government to add ivermectin to its national Covid-19 therapeutic strategy…
…The New England Journal of Medicine also published a peer-reviewed Desai study based on Surgisphere data, which included data from Covid-19 patients from 169 hospitals in 11 countries in Asia, Europe and North America. It found common heart medications known as angiotensin-converting–enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers were not associated with a higher risk of harm in Covid-19 patients.”
The Guardian report picked up the analysis from James Todaro at Medicine Uncensored.
Todaro shows that Surgisphere does not appear anywhere in Internet Archive records, and its portfolio of past cases is thin to non-existent, made up mostly testimonials and PR releases.
Errors in Surgisphere’s database that Todaro points out include:
Reporting 73 deaths from in Australia, when Australia had only a total of 67 deaths by April 21.
Claiming to have detailed patient records for 63,315 patients in the USA, when the total number of Covd-19 patients in the USA was 66,000.
Providing specific African data that would mean that over 40% of all patient deaths in Africa took place in Surgisphere-related hospitals with the sophisticated cardiac monitoring technology needed to collect such data.
What is amazing is not how this Desai shyster conned the world, but how these supposedly top-notch science journals and brilliant research scientists never bothered to check their sources for research that would have such a monumental impact.
We had the fraud Neil Ferguson. Now this.
On second thoughts, Desai almost deserves a medal for showing up how flimsy and pretentious the whole academic publishing industry is.
Added (June 5, 12.36 PM):
I have added an excerpt from Surgisphere’s response below:
“Our studies, including that published in The Lancet, use a registry, with data obtained from electronic health records (EHR). In our hydroxychloroquine analysis, we studied a very specific group of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and have clearly stated that the results of our analyses should not be over-interpreted to those that have yet to develop such disease or those that have not been hospitalized. We also clearly outlined the limitations of an observational study that cannot fully control for unobservable confounding measures, and we concluded that off-label use of the drug regimens outside of the context of a clinical trial should not be recommended.
In so doing, we join agencies including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as several other observational studies reported in the NEJM, JAMA and the BMJ, each of which have pointed to either no benefit of the drug regimens using hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine or even a signal of potential harm (also see this paper). The Brazilian CloroCovid-19 Study on chloroquine diphosphate was recently stopped in Brazil due to the noted safety hazards associated with this drug.
Our COVID-19 research was not funded by any drug company, private or public donor, or political organization. Our research collaborators on the piece for The Lancet devoted their time through personal funds and resources because they saw the urgent humanitarian need and opportunity to inform rapidly-evolving pandemic responses.”
