Lancet published hydroxychloroquinone study is a sham

Lancet study

From the source:

On its face, it was a major finding: Antimalarial drugs touted by the White House as possible COVID-19 treatments looked to be not just ineffective, but downright deadly. A study published on 22 May in The Lancet used hospital records procured by a little-known data analytics company called Surgisphere to conclude that coronavirus patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were more likely to show an irregular heart rhythm—a known side effect thought to be rare—and were more likely to die in the hospital.

But just as quickly, the Lancet results have begun to unravel—and Surgisphere, which provided patient data for two other high-profile COVID-19 papers, has come under withering online scrutiny from researchers and amateur sleuths. They have pointed out many red flags in the Lancet paper, including the astonishing number of patients involved and details about their demographics and prescribed dosing that seem implausible. “It began to stretch and stretch and stretch credulity,” says Nicholas White, a malaria researcher at Mahidol University in Bangkok

LANCET LATER RETRACTED THE STUDY.

My thoughts (based on my reply to a friend on fb who argued that this did not indicate a bigger problem in science. I asserted that it did).

Here are my thoughts.

My comments are harsh but are not unfounded. I think you have an idealized view of science or a representing a vision that is no longer supported by the evidence on hand. There is a well known replication crisis that has impacted the social sciences and has moved into the harder sciences. I wish that this was not the case but unfortunately it has become more pervasive. A great deal of this is driven by the public or perish culture. Also the dirty hand of politics seems to be playing a disruptive role in certain areas of science that impact public awareness. The Lancet case was one example. They have since retracted this study.

For lovers of science such as myself, this is most concerning. As a society we rely on science to provide us with the evidence to make informed decisions regarding policy. If this evidence is tainted by various externalities then we have a problem - a very big one in fact. While it is tempting to view the day-to-day practice of science as being above the fray of human folly one would be naive to think that it is in reality.
A crisis such as the COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted this problem. Take a look at this. https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2045

.. (BMJ – British Medical Journal)

A look at 2181 COVID-19 related papers were categorized. These were taken from a variety of international sources and fell under the rubric of unique studies. Here is the shocker – only 304 (14%) of the studies were based on primary research . Of these primary research studies only 27% were peer reviewed.

As reported by lead researcher Malcolm Macleod - Seventy two per cent of the primary research studies have been observational stuff: ‘This is what it looks like in five patients of mine,’” Macleod explains. “Hardly any of those are peer reviewed or preregistered, so there is no protection against bias.

He continued with this - “There are a lot of journals that do not even say if the work has been peer reviewed, so they are presumably arrogant enough to believe we assume their papers have been peer reviewed, and yet there are some that have been accepted and published on the same day. That’s an issue for the journals going forward—they need to be more transparent.”

This is a problem. Now it does not mean that the science is poor in all of these cases but it does place into question the methodology we employ to bring scientific evidence to the foreground. If we don’t challenge this we risk drowning out the good science with a great deal of nonsense.