A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published.
… Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille’s Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired.
“Why it took more than four-and-a-half years after the study was initially published for the journal to come to this conclusion is not clear. It is also somewhat surprising that most of the paper’s authors still stand by study’s findings and conclusions despite its obvious inconsistencies, methodological flaws and potential ethical issues as outlined in the retraction note,” says Søgaard.
The paper (now marked as retracted): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijantimicag.2020.105949
I still don’t get why the higher ups pushed this and Ivermectin so hard. Like, they clearly aren’t anti big pharma, so it must be someone getting their beak wet. But who?
They wanted you to go back to work, not in X months if and when a vaccine was available, but tomorrow, taking some bullshit drug if you needed reassurance. While they were happy working from home, triple vaxxed and double masked.
I don’t know what the intent was, only what it achieved. It is now political suicide to enforce public health mandates, so when the next pandemic hits, your boss will be able to force you to go to work in unsafe sanitary conditions and a lot of people will be cheering for it.
Hanlon’s razor
If you remember the time, Trump was pushing for any narrative that could let him say COVID wasn’t a big deal and would just disappear. He was looking for easy answers.
You want a conspiracy theory?
It was designed to make any criticism of big pharma look crazy.
Which it also didn’t do. Nobody “trusts” “big Pharma”. They trust doctors, scientists, and the regulatory bodies that oversee them.