Medicine Publisher withdraws study on antimalarial drug against corona
A controversial study on the effect of the antimalarial drug hydroxyquloroquine against coronavirus has been withdrawn. The then US President Donald Trump had also jumped on the alleged positive effect of the ancient malaria drug.
19.12.2024, 08:23
SDA
The study published four and a half years ago in the "International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents" by French scientists with co-ownership of the International Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC) had caused an unprecedented stir. This also influenced the Covid-19 policy of entire countries. It has now been withdrawn by the publisher Elsevier.
The study was cited 3,600 times worldwide by other experts in studies. This makes it the second most cited study ever to be retracted.
Hype in the US media
The way the story unfolded is unbelievable for serious scientific publications. As the science magazine "Nature" explained, Didier Raoult, the now retired former head of the IHU research institute in Marseille (France), and his colleagues published a preprint of a study on March 16, 2020. This stated that hydroxychloroquine, in some cases together with the antibiotic azithromycin, had reduced the SARS-CoV-2 viral load in 20 participants.
According to "Nature", the study was immediately hyped by US television stations. Four days later, the work was published in the "International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents", where co-author Jean-Marc Rolain was editor-in-chief. The scientific journal accepted the submitted manuscript within a day. Normally this takes at least weeks.
Trump even described the ancient malaria drug as a "gift from God". The matter was "groundbreaking". Several countries, including the USA, even allowed the use of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19.
Concerns about data quality
Researchers had repeatedly criticized the controversial study and expressed concerns about data quality, unclear ethical backgrounds and other factors.
"Nature" listed: "...including a lack of clarity about the timeline for the ethics committee and potentially confounding differences between the characteristics of participants in the control and treatment groups, suggesting that participants were not randomly assigned to these groups. Six people treated with hydroxychloroquine dropped out of the study - one of them died and three were transferred to an intensive care unit."
