June 4, 2020 / By Joshua Berlinger, Brett McKeehan, Laura Smith-Spark and Peter Wilkinson, CNN
Second medical journal retracts coronavirus paper over questions about data source – From CNN’s Maggie Fox
The New England Journal of Medicine retracted a coronavirus study on Thursday, saying it could not guarantee the validity of the data used in the study.
It was the second journal to retract a coronavirus study that had been conducted using data provided by Surgisphere, which aggregated global health information for the research. Earlier Thursday, The Lancet also retracted a coronavirus study.
Both journals had signaled their worries in “expression of concern” earlier this week.
“Because all the authors were not granted access to the raw data and the raw data could not be made available to a third-party auditor, we are unable to validate the primary data sources underlying our article, ‘Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in Covid-19.’ We therefore request that the article be retracted. We apologize to the editors and to readers of the Journalforthe difficulties that this has caused,” Dr. Mandeep Mehra of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center in Boston, Surgisphere founder Dr. Sapan Desai and colleagues wrote in the retraction letter.
The study had found that certain heart disease drugs, including ACE inhibitors, didn’t worsen the risk of death for coronavirus patients.
