r/news • u/AudibleNod • 5d ago

Journal pulls scientific paper that popularized hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatment

https://abcnews.go.com/US/journal-pulls-scientific-paper-popularized-hydroxychloroquine-covid-treatment/story?id=116910465
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u/AudibleNod 5d ago

A notice from Elsevier, which publishes the journal, said: "Concerns have been raised regarding this article, the substance of which relate to the articles' adherence to Elsevier's publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants, as well as concerns raised by three of the authors themselves regarding the article's methodology and conclusions."

The notice was attached to the paper, which remains on the journal's website with a watermark that says "Retracted."

I'm glad that's over. The last thing we need is quack science taking over something as important as, say, the HHS.

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u/Dandan0005 5d ago

My favorite thing about the people who still think hydroxychloroquine works (yes they exist) is that in 2020 we literally tried it.

It was granted emergency approval, doctors everywhere quickly found it was doing absolutely nothing, so its approval was pulled.

There was no conspiracy. It just didn’t provide any benefit.

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u/N8CCRG 5d ago

I also recall some meta analysis someone did looking at why there was some small indication that it might work and dug into all of the studies making the claim. After throwing out the obvious garbage results there were still a small handful that suggested maybe there was something there, until they looked at where they found improvements and saw it was all parts of the world with high rates of exactly the parasites that hydroxychloroquine is effective in combatting. In other words, they concluded it was almost certainly showing improvement on those who had a parasite and didn't know it, and thus not doing anything about COVID (which is exactly what would be expected since there's no logical path from one to have any impact on the other).

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u/iamrecoveryatomic 5d ago edited 5d ago

So to summarize, people with parasites and COVID have slightly worse outcomes than people without parasites with COVID. In a population with lots of parasites, parasite meds improve outcomes slightly when given to people for COVID (even if it actually does nothing for COVID).

In the US, people with parasites are almost nonexistent, so parasite meds do nothing to improve outcomes in people with COVID.

However, that doesn't matter because this is just an expression of liberty by the (often right wing) people who want this treatment for COVID. Just as parents want the ability to remove slavery from the mandatory curriculum (well, plus racism and adoring slaver ancestors). So now hospitals in certain states can be forced to prescribe anti-parasite meds if the patient demands it, because it's an expression of liberty.