Hydroxychloroquine study retraction shows the problems of speedy science

A recent large study on the controversial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine was just retracted by The Lancet, the scientific journal that published it. The study had found that the drugs weren’t able to effectively treat COVID-19, but the authors say that they weren’t able to independently analyze the data used to reach that conclusion. The study is no longer considered reliable.

Soon after the research was published in The Lancet, scientists started to point out problems with the dataset used in the study — it claimed to have data that would have been almost impossible to gather during that time frame, for example. The data came from a company called Surgisphere, whose founder and CEO was a coauthor on the study. In the...

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