Call it the retraction that shook the coronavirus world.
We’ve known this sordid truth for years: Cheats and charlatans lurk amongst us. With the two high profile retractions, it has become public knowledge and it is the reputation of science that has been tarnished.
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The peer-reviewed paper, which the Lancet had published on May 22, said that treating COVID-19 with the antimalarial drugs chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine raised the heart-related death risk for COVID-19 patients in the hospital without showing any benefit.
Yes, this is a wake-up call. But we’ve had the wake-up call for years.
IVAN ORANSKY, RETRACTION WATCH
The lead author of the paper, which employed a worldwide database of 96,000 patients from nearly 700 hospitals on six continents, was a highly regarded Harvard cardiac surgeon.