For the past few days, some researchers have not hesitated to accuse The Lancet , a prestigious medical journal, of having wanted to "make a buzz" with this study on the possible dangerousness of the hydroxychloroquine used against the new coronavirus. The review had to issue a "warning" after this publication which led to worldwide freezing of prescriptions and clinical trials around this drug.
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Errors, even retractions of articles, are frequent in the opinion of many scientists, including in The Lancet , 32nd of the 50 most influential scientific journals in the world, behind Nature but before Science. But a "warning" from the management of the journal itself is more rare.
Profusion of publications around the Covid-19
This is partly linked to the context of the pandemic: usually a publication takes six months to a year, this period has been greatly shortened, according to Professor Martin Blachier, epidemiologist and specialist in public health. "Doctors are responsible for reviewing the papers. Right now, there are 200 to 300 that go out every day on the Covid-19. They are told to go very fast. It is probably this eagerness that makes the review is of poorer quality and lets mistakes go by. "
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Another element: it is rarely on this type of exploratory study that important decisions like those of the WHO or the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, are made to suspend clinical trials and prescriptions for the drug.
But this bug is not quite a first for the review The Lancet . In the 1990s, she published a fraudulent article which suggested that vaccination could be the cause of autism in children. The article had been withdrawn… 12 years later.