Two studies of drug therapy and COVID-19 have been retracted from two different journals, a day after each issued an expression of concern about the quality of the data. Both studies used data from an international database held by Surgisphere Corporation which included electronic health records from 169 hospitals on three continents.

The Lancet has retracted the paper titled Hydroxychloroquine or Chloroquine With or Without a Macrolide for Treatment of COVID-19: A Multinational Registry Analysis. Read more here.

The New England Journal of Medicine has retracted the paper titled Cardiovascular Disease, Drug Therapy, and Mortality in COVID-19. The study examined the effect of preexisting treatment with angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs) on COVID-19. Read more here.

In their retraction letter to The Lancet, the authors noted an independent review of the data was not possible because Surgisphere Corporation, which holds the database, "would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements ... Based on this development, we can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources."

In their retraction letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, the authors wrote: "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."

Keywords: COVID-19, Coronavirus, Coronavirus Infections, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

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