I will weigh in on the retracted studies. I read both of them when they were published and the senior author, Mandeep Mehra, is a head of medicine in a Harvard University teaching hospital. He was not the one at fault here but it was the person who "claimed" to have this large database of patient information which was likely untrue. When the first murmurings came out that something looked wrong with the study, Dr. Mehra contacted the database owner and requested a third party audit of the data file. This is the point where things broke down, there is no alleged conspiracy here but a lack of due diligence on the part of the Harvard investigators, who went into the study "....We all entered this collaboration to contribute in good faith and at a time of great need during the COVID-19 pandemic. We deeply apologise to you, the editors, and the journal readership for any embarrassment or inconvenience that this may have caused..."
Observational studies can be done quite well. When I was working at PhRMA, I was the project manager on a very large project designed to do just that. I presented this to the PhRMA Board (CEOs of major pharmaceutical companies) and got the first $20 million to get it started. I was on the Board of the project for my final two years at PhRMA prior to retiring. This project has morphed into a huge international effort involving researchers from many countries under the auspices of
The Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics. They are setting up a large study on ALL therapeutics that have been used to date in the treatment of COVID-19 and have access to many more data sets than were in the retracted paper. I don't know what the timing of this will be but once it is up and running data can be acquired and analyzed very quickly as the group has many newly developed tools at their disposal.
One of the difficulties we face right now is that there are many substandard preprints of papers that are being posted. I review probably 200 papers a day and read maybe 10-20% depending on my tolerance. Some of them are very good but my assessment is that 70-80% will never be published. Look at what happened with the first HCQ paper that came out from the Marseilles group two months ago. It was junk and the only reason it was published was the senior author is the editor of the journal it was published in. Nobody really believed that study was correct. I am fond of my newly coined acronym which my newsletter readers are well acquainted with, "TIWWDCT", This Is Why We Do Clinical Trials.
Everyone is hungry for information about vaccine and pharmaceutical development. One should not put much faith in a reported trial of 20-40 patients which is not controlled. The treatment of COVID-19 is proceeding faster than I imagined as clinicians are quickly learning what does and does not work. If one is hospitalized today (and I don't wish this on anybody!), the chances of recovery are much better than two months ago.
I don't want to get into a fight with anyone about the utility of any drug or herbal treatment for COVID-19. I do a daily newsletter that goes into this stuff in great detail. If you wish to get the newsletter send me a PM and I will add you to the list. If you just want to see what type of information I am distilling, all the newsletters are archived
HERE If you do visit you can find two good cookie recipes to help get you through the pandemic.
I'm happy to respond to individual questions either openly here or via PM.
