Retracted: Hydroxychloroquine study pulled over suspect data [Updated]

Enlarge / A bottle and pills of Hydroxychloroquine. US President Donald Trump announced May 18 he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for almost two weeks as a preventative measure against COVID-19. (credit: Getty | George Frey)

The Lancet medical journal on Thursday announced the retraction of a dubious study suggesting that the anti-malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine significantly increased the risk of death and heart-rhythm complications in hospitalized COVID-19 patients worldwide.

Three of the study's four authors made the decision to retract the study after they were unable to independently verify the data used for their analysis. The data was provided by an obscure data analytics company, Surgisphere, which is run by the fourth author of the study, Sapan S Desai, who did not appear to agree to the retraction.

The three retracting authors-Mandeep R. Mehra of Harvard, Frank Ruschitzka of University Hospital Zurich, and Amit Patel of the University of Utah-said in their retraction notice that Surgisphere refused to hand over its full dataset and an audit report of its servers for an independent peer review. Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources," the wrote.

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