Instead of covering this up or ignoring until people forget, they’re actually running an article exposing the story behind the bizarre rushed studies and subsequent retractions. And they even call it a scandal.
Three unlikely collaborators are at the heart of the fast-moving COVID-19 research scandal, which led to retractions last week by The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and the withdrawal of an online preprint, after the trove of patient data they all relied on was challenged. The three physician-scientists never were at the same institution nor had they ever before written together, but they are the only authors in common on the disputed papers, and the other co-authors all have ties to at least one of them. Their partnership, which seized a high-impact role during a global public health crisis, has now ended disastrously.
It’s a detailed story and examines the three participants in detail.
The first author for both retracted papers was cardiac surgeon Mandeep Mehra, an eminent Harvard University professor who works at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and is known internationally for cardiovascular medicine and heart transplants. He provided the kind of gravitas that can fast-track papers to leading journals. In a statement provided by BWH, Mehra said he had met another of the trio, cardiac surgeon Amit Patel, in “academic and medical circles,” and that Patel had introduced him to Sapan Desai, a vascular surgeon and founder of Surgisphere, the tiny company that supplied the data. Journal disclosures, however, also indicate Mehra received compensation from Triple-Gene, a gene therapy company Patel co-founded to develop cardiovascular treatments.
It breaks down their stories individually.
Sapan Desai
Desai had a history of convincing respected researchers of his skill and integrity. One of them, Gilbert Upchurch, department of surgery chair at the University of Florida, wrote last year in a journal commentary that he had only brief encounters with Desai but had nonetheless mentored him remotely and developed an online friendship with him. Upchurch placed the scientist in a group of “amazing and talented young vascular surgeons.”
Amit Patel
Before and after his stint at the University of Miami, which appears to have started in late 2016 or early 2017, Patel’s academic home was the University of Utah. He started as a full-time faculty member at Utah in 2008 and kept that position until he left for Miami. The website for Foldax, a heart valve company that he serves as medical adviser, describes him as a “Tenured Professor of Surgery in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Utah School of Medicine and Director of Clinical Regenerative Medicine and Tissue Engineering at the University of Utah.”
Mandeep Mehra
In contrast, Mehra—author of more than 200 scholarly articles, editor of The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, and head of the cardiology division of the University of Maryland before moving to BWH in 2012—enjoys considerable support even after the unraveling of the recent studies. “Obviously, you don’t rise to the position he’s risen to without being ambitious, but I’ve never had any indication whatsoever that he would do anything unethical,” says Keith Aaronson, a cardiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who collaborated with Mehra on several studies, including a clinical trial of a mechanical pump for heart failure patients.
Mehra, the first author on both retracted papers, was the only one to issue a personal statement of apology, for failing “to ensure that the data source was appropriate for this use.”
I’d like to know the politics of these 3 scientists and if they are or have been involved in political advocacy.
Personally I think Horton, the Lancet’s editor, should resign.
The medical journal has been a bit too hand in glove with big pharma for a while now, (opinion of family members in the medical profession who read this stuff).
He should have gone after the MMR scandal, people have been shown the door for a lot, lot less.
To add insult to injury, and before any of the dust has settled on this epidemic, he has the impudence to cash in by writing a book berating everybody involved.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been social distancing for awhile now, but I can’t think of a better use of the FBI’s time and resources than a ruthless, thorough investigation of all parties including Surgisphere and Lancet.
Maybe CNN and other media which carried the story should retract it as well. There is no law to force them to do so, so even the FBI would be helpless.
I think the FBI is pretty busy right now trying to find out who is funding and orchestrating the Extremists among us. They want to know who is paying the rioters to riot.
Soros would probably be a good place to start, along with all the other leftwing billionaires. I’ll bet a connection can be found.
And the FBI should probably indict just about all American Universities for teaching sedition to our young people for all these years. People who didn’t put a stop to this should also be (socially) indicted.
And then there’s the Leftwing Media constantly lying and promoting leftist criminality.
The FBI has a lot on its plate. Fraud over HCQ may have to wait.
Come on – the FBI will claim it’s the Russians, if Barr’s investigation does not clean shop.
How about $60 million from Soros “charities” and $100 million from the Ford Foundation to start?
I browse Twitter a lot. I read a lot of Chris Hayes like leftist BS. Many times these are from verified users who described themselves as “former X”, X =
– Watergate prosecutor
– DOJ something
– FBI special agent
– JAG
I believe most of these really are
If I was in this field, I would be as furious with them as I would be I if I was a police officer at the knuckle head in Minn. All of them are tools to disparage a profession. Until those in those professions speak up and remove them the rest will suffer a credibility problem.
So, all of these guys were biased from a surgery perspective and high on themselves. Anything more?
If conservatives had done something like this to discredit the previous administration the cancel mob would have been setting up guillotines the next day. While what the Lancet did was unarguable murder the real problem is the fact we have now achieved two justice systems, Conservative (Guilty) and Marxist (No crime here) and this could not exist without the support of the MSM or should I say the lack (complete absence) of journalism integrity.
What needs to be done is hold those that caused people to die accountable, ordering sick people into rest homes, denying medication based on politics, making up facts to cover an agenda (MSM), they all need to stand trial.
How do you do a massive statistical study without a competent statistician on board?
I am not such a statistician, but still the most devastating critique I read was one that dug into the odds of finding, out of 93,000 control group prospects, a group of 3,000+ to almost perfectly match the HCQ group of 3,000+ patients across TWENTY THREE different characteristics. The person writing the critique claimed this to be nigh onto impossible, plus the matches across all variables was exceptionally close besides.
I suspect that a statistician working with them would have called a halt to the entire project on first glance at the numbers, which brings up the question, are there no statisticians involved in peer review of studies based purely on statistical analysis of data? That would seem odd.
Again, I’m not a statistician, so perhaps I’ve misinterpreted what I read.
You are correct, they should have let a statistician do a check.
That is common practice for FDA or EMA, when they check & control actual studies for drug approvals. And the statisticians often find issues which are much less obvious, but quite valid.
But this wasn’t a drug approval study. Not even close.
The Lancet should have asked a (bio)statistician to review this study before they published it. Other reviewers are less useful IMHO.
Yet they didn’t. Despite the fact that the study claimed remarkable findings based on an undisclosed proprietary database, meaning that the actual underlying data couldn’t be verified.
Claiming that they made this mistake just because they ‘wanted to believe’ will not cut it. Apart from the fact that that’s hardly an acceptable attitude for a scientific journal, the unverifiability of the claimed underlying dataset should at least have prompted some follow-up review into that + a check by a statistician. These kind of journals often do that in similar cases. So why didn’t they do so now?
Also the “Science is an honor system” mindset most go. I doesn’t work now, didn’t work before, it was always an elitist hoax. It can’t work because the desire to become famous and the perverse incentives are too high, also the punishment is almost always avoided. You can say that you lost the data.
Also, an experiment that was correctly and honestly done can still fail to be replicated for a bunch of reasons.
The paper was an obvious fraudulent. The numbers in the tables was too similar across continents. Treatments were too different from what was used in the real life.
https://defyccc.com/anti-hcq-paper-in-the-lancet-uses-fabricated-data/
Science Magazine deserves no congratulations. It came after the paper have been exposed (the next day after the publication) and retracted.
BTW, Fake News Media already dissembles. Look at this headline in The Economist: “Hydroxychloroquine is embroiled in yet more controversy” https://archive.is/rndnu
The data underlying the “study” does not exist and have never existed. Surgisphere is a medical fraud. It used to shop around its fake COVID-19 diagnostics support tools.
https://defyccc.com/surgisphere-covid-19-tools-are-deadly-fraud/
Nevertheless, the Swamp DOJ ignored it and chose to go after Dr. Zelenko.
I’ve been an avid browser of WUWT for 10 years.
This is my first post, so hello sceptical community!
When I first saw the Science article I reacted the same as the author of this post – ie well done Science for calling out data manipulation and fakery.
I looked into things a little deeper and when I realised the Guardian was part of the detective work I started to question a little more – after all, the Guardian and Science magazine dont have my trust given their reporting and publication of CO2 based catastrophic climate change.
Below is a brief summary of an ‘interesting’ sequence of events in this area:
Science magazine suddenly promotes a view that now (in a complete about turn of apparent scientific ‘consensus’) supports the use of hydroxychloroquine.
A few weeks ago 20 billion dollars exchanged hands between two companies, Regeneron and Sanofi – giving Regeneron skin in the hydroxychloroquine game.
A few weeks prior to that Regeneron negotiated price setting and exclusive supply of hydroxychloroquine in the US, based on a science investment process that was largely funded by the US taxpayer not the company itself.
A few months before that two Regeneron staff were elected to Fellows of the AAAS that publishes Science magazine.
Thoughts?
Welcome to the comment section! 🙂
I would like to know more about the history of the manufacture of HCQ before I could reach any conclusions about what you have reported.
You seem to be saying this company is cornering the market. But is that true? I recall reading where there were very many manufacturers of HCQ in the world. So I would need more details before weighing in.
Earlier this month a link to a 2013 Meeting on “Good Evidence” was posted by M. Piney- https://cliscep.com/2020/06/02/lancetgate/#comment-53510
…: “On Monday 4th February 2013 I went to a seminar entitled “What Counts as Good Evidence?” at the Institute of Physics in London. Richard Horton was one of the principle speakers.” Roger Pielke Jr was a speaker too.
The recording of the event is here- https://soundcloud.com/politicalscience/good-evidence
Many people are saying that attacks on HCQ in the form of bogus anti-HCQ “studies” are the work of Big Pharma.
I just can’t believe that. Big Pharma has Big Bucks and really bright minds. They can make bogus data that looks legit at least for the non experts and at least for weeks. That “study” looked bogus even for non experts in the first 24 or 48 hours. (Anyone who took longer to react to the inconsistencies in the “study” should not comment on any other medical or statistical issue.)