Within a few hours of each other last week, two of the world's most prestigious medical journals - the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet - each retracted an article about treatment of patients with Covid-19.
The medicine is on the World Health Organisation's list of essential medication. So the risk-benefit ratio is well in favour of using HCQ and it would take a lot to change that perception.Since HCQ could theoretically be used both for the treatment of Covid-19 patients and to prevent infection in healthy individuals, the world is understandably hungry for data to guide decision-making for this drug, both in hospitals and in the community.
As for the possibility of its ability to reduce the risk of infection, a Minnesota prevention trial using HCQ was published in NEJM last week, showing no benefit to high-risk healthcare workers.While both studies demonstrate that using HCQ is safe, neither supports using it in the fight against the virus.
This is an unpaid and unrecognised job that serves as a bastillion to ensure high-quality work is published in the best, most transparent and fairest way.But all this takes time.It often takes even longer for more prestigious journals. Part of this process would involve checking the quality of data sets and appropriateness of the analysis done. And that is where the two retracted papers fell short.
For 25,000 papers to be published in such a short period of time, something would have to give, leading to shortcuts in the usual well-established processes. In the age of Covid-19, many prestigious journals have published work they would not normally accept.But the collateral damage is the quality and reproducibility of work, substantial overlap of findings and, at worst, results which are wrong.We know this to be true as the ordinary reproducibility of highly regarded science is unfortunately low.
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