Publication Bias Versus Deficient Peer Review: Chloroquine Data Lessons            
[Thursday, June 11, 2020]

A much-publicized data on the risk of chloroquine therapy in COVID had to be retracted due to questions about the underlying data creating much more than an embarrassment for the authors and the publishers. It once again highlighted how in the race to publish first; journals cut corners in the peer-review. There were several obvious red flags that, in hindsight, should have been caught during the peer review but did not.  All the data came from one source. The supplier of the data did not share the full data with the authors, or rather seems like the authors never asked for it before publishing the article. The data had several flaws; it had unrealistic number of data points that could not possibly have been collected in a short time, it had names of institutions that have strict policies about sharing patient data with outside parties and should have been verified, and it came from regions where electronic data is uncommon making it hard to build databases in the time, the data was made available to the authors. Within days of publication, numerous readers pointed out the flaws in the data making it necessary for the authors to revisit the data at which point the supplier of the data refused to share the raw data leading to the retractions. A valid question should be how the authors not see these flaws. The authors apologized publicly but these things happen too often to expect that this is an isolated event or that it would not happen again. The best outcome could be that next time an article like this is published, there is a robust independent and public critique of it before it is used for any policy decisions. A subtext of the news is that other independent clinical studies have since confirmed the negative effects of chloroquine treatment in COVID patients thereby practically confirming the original reports. But the damage has been already done. The subsequent studies did not as much publicity as the discredited data and its associated story. With extreme competition for “eyeballs” the business of publishing has become like the business of news; highly subjective and driven by opinions of influential individuals. Unfortunately, this is not the last time we have heard this.