Following the rising suspicion in the medical research scandal involving a health analytics company became huge following the termination of one of the faculty members by two influential peer reviewed journals, one of which included the Lancet on the negative impacts of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).
The Indian-origin author, Amit Patel, was the co-author of both the studies that were retracted by The Lancet and the other one by The New England Journal of Medicine.
Patel has his affiliation with the University of Utah cancelled following the surfacing of the controversy. But the university has refused to comment on the reason why the affiliation was cancelled.
“The terminated position was an unpaid adjunct appointment with the Department of Biomedical Engineering,” a University spokesperson said.
But, with all the confusion around, Patel took to his twitter to clarify that he had already terminated his affiliation with the University a week back, which was then formally done on Friday. He further said that this information is likely going to make rounds on the internet but there is a much bigger story to this which he doesn’t have all the information for at this point.
“And the story is not that I am related to Dr Desai by marriage. That’s old news. Many people from Brigham were at that wedding and the media knew about it. Despite this I still do not have the information of what happened at Surgisphere. But there has to be locals who do,” Patel mentioned in another tweet.
The retracted Lancet study gained a lot of attention globally after World Health Organisation (WHO) decided to pause the clinical trial of HCQ because of the kind of side effects it imposed on the bodies of the people.
As per the study which analysed over 15,000 Covid-19 patients along with 81,000 controlled patients found that the impacts of HCQ in the treatment of the virus was very little and was instead responsible for enhancing the risks of mortality in the patients.
Following the publication of the study, hundreds of researchers came forward questioning the authenticity and integrity of the study and the results from the analysed data.
The remaining co-authors of the study included Mandeep R. Mehra, Frank Ruschitzka and Sapan Desai.
Following the lack of completion of the independent audit from three of the authors of the study, Lancet decided to retract it.
The data was provided by a Chicago-based company called Surgisphere. They didn’t admit any wrongdoing. They are also the same company who provided the data for yet another retracted study that was published on The New England Journal of Medicine.
Additionally, out of the four co-authors of the NEJM study, three were Mandeep R. Mehra, Amit Patel and Sapan Desai who were also the co-authors for the retracted Lancet study.
“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,” mentioned the authors of the study.
The Twitter users who have been keeping up on the progress of the study and the situation in general have been demanding more clarity on the situation.
One of the users charged them asking the they need to confront Dr. Patel and Dr.Mehra whether they even analysed the final data, or they skipped that part and simple wrote a paper and just placed their names on it without any further clarifications. They even charged that a criminal investigation on Surgisphere should be conducted to get a better idea of things.
“Hello Dr.Nevertheless, many people want to know what really happened. Seems really important to understand what the Surgisphere was and how the data were created… please answer to French journalists,” wrote another user.
