An Australian investigation into COVID-19 research found that among the more than 270,000 papers that have been published since the start of the pandemic, 212 retracted papers were cited 2,697 times, with a median of seven times per paper.
Publishing processes were often compromised with COVID-19, according to the co-author of the investigation and director of Cochrane Australia Steve McDonald.
“We saw this push to get information out quickly, and with many more people doing and rapidly publishing COVID research, there’s been a spike in retractions,” senior research fellow McDonald said.
Eighteen percent of citations from retracted papers were critical and “may have directly impacted patient care,” the authors wrote in their paper (pdf).
Despite the retractions, the damage has already been done as the research has already been cited by other researchers in the field, spawning more citations.
It had also been reported on in the media, changing the direction of policymaking, including social distancing measures, travel restrictions, and infection control measures which introduced a myriad of disruptions.
Retractions safeguard against error and misconduct, stopping research from impacting scientific ideas and clinical practice, and are crucial to preserving scientific integrity.
However, even high-profile medical journals became vulnerable to haste during the COVID-19 pandemic, the report found.
This comes after hundreds of COVID-19 papers have been removed due to compromising ethical standards, such as using fake or suspect patient data, and was either withdrawn by the prominent medical journals that published them or removed altogether.
Alternative Treatment Soup
Evidence of research papers changing the trajectory of governmental decision-making can be found in the case of monoclonal antibodies, which triggered controversy after several scientists said certain brands of the key COVID-19 treatment would not work for the Omicron variant.
A few months after preprints written by those scientists were published, the monoclonal antibody “sotrovimab” lost Emergency Use Authorization, causing policymakers to move on to COVID-19 drugs like remdesivir.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) later expanded remdesivir’s authorization to outpatient treatment and pediatric patients.
Eventually, pandemic response critics put monoclonal antibodies into the alternative treatment group, a place where critics say is automatically stifled or publicly scrutinized as unsafe or ineffective.
Another significant example of governments and the World Health Organization acting on suspected fraudulent and unverifiable data is the hydroxychloroquine case.
By Jessie Zhang
