One of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, has retracted an influential COVID-19 research paper after three of the paper’s authors said the patient data used for the study could not be independently verified.
The paper, published on May 22, sparked worldwide concern that using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 patients may not be safe. “After publication of our Lancet article, several concerns were raised with respect to the veracity of the data and analysis conducted by Surgisphere Corporation and its founder and our co-author, Sapan Desai, in our publication,” authors Mandeep Mehra, Frank Ruschitzka and Amit Patel said in a statement published by The Lancet, Thursday. “Our independent peer