This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Back in early 2020, I talked a bit about the emerging COVID-19 pandemic and I made a point of saying that there were some things we wouldn’t know for sure for years, as researchers combed through data and separated fact from fiction. I was specifically referring to things like how deadly COVID-19 is, and how many people might die due to hospitals being overwhelmed, and the origins of the virus.
I was not referring to things like effective treatments for the disease, because that’s something that researchers could see results for relatively quickly. For instance, ivermectin, the dewormer that my dog takes to stop him from getting ticks and fleas. As I noted in my excellent and entertaining rundown back in August of 2021, the timeline went like this: in June of 2020, researchers had pulled together a systematic review of ivermectin’s effects on viruses and recommended more research. Later that month, other researchers tried it in a petri dish and recommend more research in animals. Dozens of studies were done in animals and the results were negative, in that no benefit was found in treating COVID-19 with ivermectin. One preprint showed positive results but it was so obviously fraudulent that it never even got published, but that was enough for a bunch of lunatics to clear the shelves of pharmacies and vet’s offices to get their fill of delicious dewormer paste.
And then there was the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ. That was also identified early on as a potential COVID-19 treatment, and so all the way back in March of 2020 microbiologist Jean-Marc Rolain along with several co-authors posted a preprint of a paper claiming to find the drug successfully reduced viral load in 20 human patients.
Researchers were immediately skeptical. Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik pointed out that the study’s timeline made no sense unless the researchers began before they got ethics approval. She also noted that the control and treatment groups were completely different with multiple possible confounding factors, and six patients in the HCQ group went missing before the end of the study, with at least one of them having died. It’s incredible how effective a medication can seem if you just ignore the people who die from it. Did you know that bullets cure cancer? Just give me 40 patients, a gun, and my own science journal and I’ll prove it!
I won’t go into all the ways this paper was torn to shreds within moments of its publishing, so if you’re interested, feel free to click through and read Bik’s post in full, where at the end she links to eight other experts who pointed to major flaws. As always, links to everything I talk about in every video are found in the video transcript, located at patreon.com/rebecca and skepchick.org and directly linked in the doobly doo.
Anyway, despite being torn apart by everyone, Rolain had submitted the paper to the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, where it apparently went through peer review and was approved in less than 24 hours. Wow! It’s probably just a coincidence that the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents was Jean-Marc Rolain. Probably a different Jean-Marc Rolain. Just a weird coincidence.
One month later in April of 2020, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), which is co-owner of the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents announced that the paper didn’t meet its standards, but instead of retracting it, they instead published critical responses to it several months later. Cool, I bet that won’t have any downsides! Several of the paper’s co-authors asked for the removal of their names from the study, but still it remained published.
The critics continued to ask for a retraction, but all that happened was that one of the remaining co-authors of the paper, Didier Raoult, tried to sue Elisabeth Blik for being mean.
Better research was done and found no benefit from the use of HCQ to treat COVID-19, but still the paper remained, constantly held up as proof that Big Pharma, or the government, or China, or someone nefarious was trying to prevent people from accessing a cheap and effective medication. So people kept buying it, and hoarding it, leading to patients who actually needed it to live a somewhat normal life to suffer. While HCQ does not do anything for COVID-19, it does treat lupus and a litany of dermatological conditions, leaving those patients “terrified” of losing their medication.
I bring this all up now because four and a half years after that paper was published, doing irreparable damage to both people who needed HCQ and those who needed an effective COVID-19 treatment, the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has finally retracted it due to the fact that “Concerns have been raised regarding this article, the substance of which relate to the articles’ adherence to Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies and the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants, as well as concerns raised by three of the authors themselves regarding the article’s methodology and conclusions.”
FOUR AND A HALF YEARS, it took them to write that. In that time, not only did several high quality studies find no benefit to HCQ, but one meta-analysis published in Nature in April of 2021 found that “treatment with hydroxychloroquine is associated with increased mortality in COVID-19 patients.”
By the way, earlier this year another Elsevier journal published a paper claiming that the administration of HCQ during the pandemic caused nearly 17,000 excess deaths due to the drug’s effect on the heart, but they retracted it immediately over the authors’ objections when people complained about irregularities in the data. Good to know they’re on top of things sometimes.
The entire thing reminds me of the Lancet taking a stunning TWELVE years to retract Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study, which Wakefield himself made up in an attempt to get his own vaccine to replace the standard MMR vaccine, but which ended up kicking off decades of fear-mongering about all vaccines causing autism. Which they don’t. Wakefield is a fraud.
It’s great that they FINALLY retracted it, but when a bad paper is held up by conspiracy theorists as proof of their beliefs, a retraction only feeds right back into conspiratorial thinking: “aha!” They say. “Big Science is scared, and now they’re trying to censor the truth!”
These journals have caused extreme damage from a simple lack of decent peer review. Sure, loonies will still cling to pre-prints they find online, but despite their “anti-Big Science” perspective, they’re much more likely to notice and trust a study published in a supposed peer-reviewed journal. Honestly, these journals should be punished. They should be delisted if they have a history of this, like that journal Chemosphere was after they published the faulty “black plastic utensil” study I talked about a few videos ago. And even if this is a first offense, they should be fined and forced to publicize the retraction to make sure that as many people see it as possible. And I’m far from the biggest fan of litigation, but the people who suffer serious harm from these fraudulent papers should sue the ever loving shit out of them.
