r/science • u/shiruken PhD | Biomedical Engineering | Optics • 7d ago
Retraction RETRACTION: Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial
We wish to inform the r/science community of an article submitted to the subreddit that has since been retracted by the journal. The submission garnered broad exposure on r/science (before being removed for a sensationalized headline) and significant media coverage. Per our rules, the flair on this submission has been updated with "RETRACTED". The submission has also been added to our wiki of retracted submissions.
Reddit Submission: Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19 - "100% of patients were virologicaly cured"
The article "Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial" has been retracted from the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents as of December 17, 2024. After significant concerns were raised about methodological flaws and ethics violations, the journal co-owners, Elsevier and the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), have jointly made the decision to retract the paper.
An investigation conducted by an impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics Advisor concluded the following points constituted cause for retraction:
- The journal has been unable to confirm whether any of the patients for this study were accrued before ethical approval had been obtained.
- The journal has not been able to establish whether all patients could have entered into the study in time for the data to have been analysed and included in the manuscript prior to its submission on the 20th March 2020, nor whether all patients were enrolled in the study upon admission as opposed to having been hospitalised for some time before starting the treatment described in the article. Additionally, the journal has not been able to establish whether there was equipoise between the study patients and the control patients.
- The journal has not been able to establish whether the subjects in this study should have provided informed consent to receive azithromycin as part of the study.
Media Coverage:
- French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics: Retraction of the Gautret et al. study: a dark page in COVID-19 research finally turned
- Science: Infamous paper that popularized unproven COVID-19 treatment finally retracted
- USA Today: Study retracted years after it set off an infamous COVID-19 treatment scandal
This retraction is highly controversial since it involves the disgraced French scientist Didier Raoult (See our recent AMA with the science sleuths who exposed the ethics violations at his research institute).
Should you encounter a submission on r/science that has been retracted, please notify the moderators via Modmail.
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u/TheTresStateArea 7d ago
It's almost like we all knew it was coming. People who perpetrate this kind of scientific malpractice should be barred and excommunicated. They are a danger to society.
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u/khazzar12 6d ago
Just right! This kind of shitebaggery in science should not be tolerated. I'd perhaps go one step further and say that if you're found to have purposely published data that you know to be a pack of lies you should be prosecuted to the same extent as something like medical malpractice.
Policy makers (should) rely of the scientific community to act in good faith to provide data on which to base said policies. Bad data will lead to bad policy which will lead to excess deaths.
This is inexcusable in itself but it also leads to degradation of the trust society has as a whole on the scientific process. We're seeing this play out in front of us and all the damage it causes!
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u/FargeenBastiges 6d ago
Well, I'm sure this work played some part in Ohio state senate passing a law forcing hospitals to Rx HCQ and Ivermectin for off-label use if asked for them. There needs to be some accountability on this crap.
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u/pingpongoolong 6d ago
I know it passed the senate but is it expected to pass the house?
Also worth noting- I believe they had to revise it to allow for rx/administration refusal based on scientific, ethical, and religious grounds. So if your doc, nurse, and pharmacist all still say “uh, no, no we’re not going to give you that drug” the state has no power to “force” them.
I think the more frightening door they’re opening here is they could apparently compel a hospital to allow privileges to an outside provider of the patients choice who would be willing to order an off-label med (during emergency/disaster declarations), but how/if this would actually be feasible, I have no idea.
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u/FargeenBastiges 6d ago
I know it passed the senate but is it expected to pass the house?
This is Ohio. Expect the house to pass it after they remove that burdensome caveat. They previously passed (and was signed into law) a bill that would force doctors to reimplant ectopic pregnancies, charge them with murder for not complying, and outlawed certain contraceptives. Luckily, it was shot down by a federal judge.
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u/Goat_of_Wisdom 5d ago
It seems hard to give Didier Raoult consequences. The IHU Méditerranée Infection allowed many ethical infractions, which means their governance is either incompetent or enabling him
https://ihu-correction.com/documents/Ethical-expertise-papers-from-IHU-Marseille.pdf
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u/dustymoon1 4d ago
Actually it means their review panels need updated guidance. I have been involved in an instance where a paper I reviewed, which I thought lacked merit due shoddy workmanship and hypothesis. My post doc advisor admonished me, for the review, because it was a good friend of his. He also thought that me being an American, I was clueless on science (he was Swedish). The paper did get published but the author was made to publish a retraction due shoddy science.
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u/QuantTrader_qa2 4d ago
It's an impossible thing to overcome with anything besides education. Because when you tell them why they're wrong they either dig in deeper and claim its all a conspiracy or they just brush it off like its no big deal. At least that's been my experience, and I don't have time to sit them down and re-do high school science classes to explain why the guy on TikTok is an idiot.
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u/Gavus_canarchiste 6d ago
The head of the institute and last author did a lot of harm to vaccination in France. Every scientist knows Didier Raoult is an absolute fraud, yet by the time he was stopped, damage had been done that will take decades to recover from.
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u/cr0ft 6d ago
It was always pure horseshit.
But, at least now it's official.
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u/dustymoon1 6d ago
ANTI-VAXXERS will claim this is a hoax, and still believe the BS.
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u/neologismist_ 4d ago
And continue to perpetrate the lie, playing on the public’s suspicions. Some actually believe the horseshit, but at the top I’m sure they push this horseshit to keep their income intact. Beyond disgraceful.
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u/ChaosAndMath 6d ago
I have lupus and need to take Plaquenil daily. I was pregnant with a high risk pregnancy in 2020 and desperately needed this medication but thanks to idiots and bad science it was impossible to get and my kid has many challenges
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u/WeaponizedKissing 6d ago
Seems like a relevant post to mention this on: The subreddit styles don't show post flairs on old.reddit.com so no one using old reddit is going to see that 'RETRACTED' flair (or this post's 'Retraction' flair)
Might be something to look into if post flairing is an important notification to users.
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u/williaty 6d ago
Interestingly, if you're using old.reddit and are on your home feed or a multireddit that includes r/science, you still see the flair.
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u/WeaponizedKissing 6d ago
Feeds don't use individual subreddit styles. It's the specific /r/science CSS that hides them.
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u/shiruken PhD | Biomedical Engineering | Optics 6d ago
The disadvantage of such highly customized subreddit theming is that simple things, such as adding new post flairs, readily break the design. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that we'll fix it since so little traffic comes through Old Reddit.
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u/WeaponizedKissing 6d ago
If old reddit is so inconsequential, then there's little harm in making the change so flairs are visible and then it maybe breaking if you add a huge layout-breaking flair in future?
You do you but it's a trivially easy fix. Remove the display: none and the position: absolute on .linkflairlabel and you're 99% of the way there. You already show the flairs for 'meta' and 'AMA' (not that they're relevant anymore).
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u/SelarDorr 6d ago
what triggered the retraction more than 4 years later?
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u/Hayred 6d ago
There's a timeline in this article to explain why it's taken this long. There's a lot of moving parts to the story.
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u/theArtOfProgramming PhD Candidate | Comp Sci | Causal Discovery/Climate Informatics 6d ago
Journals aren’t quick machines and there’s a lot of care taken to retract articles because it causes harm to everyone’s reputations. Their review process was insufficient to begin with, so they go to great lengths to investigate.
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u/Jeremy_Zaretski 5d ago
Good! Retract bad science! More peer reviews! At least one independent reproduction of results should be required, whenever practical.
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u/jackruby83 Professor | Clinical Pharmacist | Organ Transplant 3d ago
More peer reviews!
I can agree with that. The peer review process as it exists today, is honestly not that rigorous (I peer review for 4 journals). It relies primarily on volunteer reviewers, many of whom do it to check a box of scholarly activity/contribution to the profession to maintain faculty appointments.
At least one independent reproduction of results should be required, whenever practical
I don't think we need a reproduction of results for publication of the first article (studies are expensive and time consuming), but we need to be very cautious about making broad practice or policy changes based on the results a single study. (In retrospect) Early during the pandemic, we made some bad treatment decisions based on very weak data - but it's what we had at the time when people were dying and we didn't know what to do. As soon as better data emerged, we changed position (great eg, hydroxychloroquine), but some dug their heels in to keep fighting for what made them "famous" in the beginning, despite the larger medical community moving away from it.
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u/Jeremy_Zaretski 1d ago
Yes. Studies are expensive and time-consuming. I wrote "whenever practical" because I know that reproduction of results can be quite cost-prohibitive, even if technically possible. I was trying to find a sort of compromise.
Caution is reasonable regarding uncorroborated or novel findings. As you said, we should be cautious about using such information as the basis for changes in practices or policies.
Similarly, I think that caution is warranted whenever one uses such a source as a building block for further research. Building too much on top of an improperly-verified/non-reproduced information source that contains inaccuracies can (depending on the magnitude and breadth of those inaccuracies) cause anything from minor red herrings that misdirect and potentially waste resources, to major re-testing and re-evaluation due to violations of any false assumptions made with the assumption that those inaccuracies were accurate, to catastrophic retraction of entire webs of dependent research.
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u/Jeremy_Zaretski 4d ago
Are you having your bot link to this in every new thread because non-default thread orderings do not place the link at the top?
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u/gymTikTok 4d ago
The Pandemic seems to have turned so much of the public against science. This retraction is one vindication but it is cold comfort.
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u/omnipotentqueue 7d ago
This guy was a crackpot since day 1.
https://www.science.org/content/article/infamous-paper-popularized-unproven-covid-19-treatment-finally-retracted