Friday, July 16, 2021

Study promoting Ivermectin as a cure for Covid19 retracted due to ethical concerns

Guardian:

The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt

...

A medical student in London...was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the ... preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.

It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion” ....

The data also looked suspicious