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The editor of the Lancet medical journal has admitted that Peter Daszak – a leading signatory of a letter published by the journal discrediting man-made origins of COVID-19 – had “significant” conflict of interests and did not declare them at the beginning of the pandemic. The admission from Dr. Richard Horton came during a grilling from British Members of Parliament on the Science and Technology Select Committee. The stark revelation confirms a lot of early-National Pulse reportage on Daszak, the Wuhan lab, and the interconnected nature of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Horton’s public acknowledgment of Daszak’s conflicts of interest discredits...

Dr. Malik Peiris, who previously served on the Lancet medical journal’s COVID-19 origins investigation committee, received China’s “Nobel Prize” for research concluding that COVID-19 developed naturally.Peiris, a Sri Lankan virologist working in Hong Kong, was one of 12 scientists leading the now-defunct Lancet probe into the origins of COVID-19.While the task force is no longer listed on the medical journal’s website, as it was forced to disband due to extensive conflicts of interests with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, archived web pages reveal Peiris’s participation in the effort.Following Peiris’s stint on the task force, the Chinese Communist Party awarded him...

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. 'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. 'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised...

The Lancet medical journal has bowed to pressure over its heavily-criticised coverage of the disputed origins of the Covid pandemic by publishing an 'alternative view' from 16 scientists – calling for an 'objective, open and transparent debate' about whether the virus leaked from a Chinese laboratory. It was revealed earlier this year that Peter Daszak – a British scientist with long-standing links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – had secretly orchestrated a landmark statement in The Lancet in February 2020 which attacked 'conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin'. The now-infamous letter, signed by 27...

London — A study conducted in the U.K. offers some of the first large-scale, real-world data on how well vaccination protects people against catching a "breakthrough" COVID-19 infection, and how well it protects breakthrough patients from becoming seriously ill. The results are encouraging. The peer-reviewed study published Wednesday in The Lancet medical journal will help policy makers and epidemiologists fill in a significant gap in the understanding of the true efficacy of three of the major vaccines being used worldwide.... The data, gathered from December 8, 2020, through July 4, 2021, show that of more than 1.2 million adults who...

A report in Vanity Fair details actions by some members of the U.S. State Department to block efforts to investigate the origins of the coronavirus because the inquiry could open “a can of worms.” An internal memo sent to department heads by Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, warned “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” The “can of worms” in question was the extensive funding by the U.S. government into the Wuhan Virology Lab’s “gain-of-function” virus research. It’s unclear whether DiNanno was concerned that an...

In an unprecedented move, a number of high profile scientific and medical journals have declared their opposition to President Donald Trump in the upcoming 2020 election. In this article, we take a look at their reasoning. a look at their reasoning. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Image credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. As of this week, The Lancet Oncology, Science, Nature, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) have all publicly announced their opposition to President Trump. Historically, journals of this ilk rarely dip their toes into the political world, but, in this most unusual year, they have made an...

There will be “intergenerational consequences for child growth and development.” ... lockdowns and school closures are doing more harm to children than the coronavirus itself, with many more deaths expected to come from the reaction to the outbreak, rather than the pandemic itself. ... UNICEF director Henrietta H Fore said Monday, “The repercussions of the pandemic are causing more harm to children than the disease itself.” UNICEF nutrition program chief Victor Aguayo noted that the most harm is being done “by having schools closed, by having primary health care services disrupted, by having nutritional programs dysfunctional.” The officials pointed to...

In early June, as controversy swirled over a high-profile study of hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19, Christian Funck-Brentano started receiving aggressive emails, texts and tweets. Funck-Brentano, professor of medicine and clinical pharmacology at Sorbonne Université and Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, and a colleague had published an editorial in The Lancet alongside the study — purportedly based on data from a company called Surgisphere — citing the results and sounding an alarm about the cardiac risks of hydroxychloroquine. Within days, that paper was retracted, along with a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine about different medications also allegedly based on...

We’ve been tracking retractions of papers about COVID-19 as part of our database. Here’s a running list, which will be updated as needed. “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag,” bioRxiv preprint published January 31, 2020 and withdrawn February 2, 2020. More context here. “Epidemiological and clinical features of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak in China,” medRxiv preprint published February 11, 2020 and withdrawn February 21, 2020. More context here. “Chinese medical staff request international medical assistance in fighting against COVID-19,” letter in The Lancet published February 24, 2020 and retracted February...

A new study has found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped patients survive COVID-19 while in the hospital, countering the establishment media’s criticism of President Donald Trump when he suggested the same thing. The study was conducted by a team at Henry Ford Health System in Southeast Michigan and published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases on Thursday. Researchers studied a group of 2,541 hospitalized patients and found mortality rates were substantially reduced when patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine. The study found that 13 percent of patients treated with just hydroxychloroquine died compared with 26.4 percent not treated with...

LAST Thursday the medical journal The Lancet formally retracted a now-notorious paper ‘Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of Covid-19’. Claiming to analyse around 96,000 cases worldwide, it concluded that neither hydroxychloroquine nor its combination with azithromycin (a ‘macrolide’) worked as a cure for Covid-19. Indeed it increased the death rate. This was not any old science paper. It analysed (or said it did) the largest ever cohort of Covid-19 patients, was accompanied by an editorial ‘Commentary’ and BBC Radio 4 was briefed to cover it the same morning, Friday May 22. Today was on top form, clearly announcing...

The Lancet is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. Recently, they published an article on Covid patients receiving hydroxychloroquine with a dire conclusion: the drug increases heartbeat irregularities and decreases hospital survival rates. This result was treated as authoritative, and major drug trials were immediately halted – because why treat anyone with an unsafe drug? Now, that Lancet study has been retracted, withdrawn from the literature entirely, at the request of three of its authors who “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources”. Given the seriousness of the topic...

The authors 'can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources' A major medical magazine has retracted a study it published that claimed to have found increased mortality in coronavirus patients who took the drug hydroxychloroquine. The Lancet issued the retraction Thursday afternoon after successive days of questions regarding the study and the data underpinning it, both of which came from the medical analytics company Surgisphere. That study, published on May 22, determined that hydroxychloroquine – a drug repeatedly touted by President Trump as a possible viable treatment for the coronavirus – was "associated with an increased...

The authors of two major medical studies on coronavirus patients— including one that raised global concerns about the use of the hydroxychloroquine — retracted their papers on Thursday. The journals that published the studies said the authors were unable to get full access to the database behind their work to verify the raw data. The Lancet retracted an influential paper published in May that claimed to analyze data from nearly 96,000 coronavirus patients in six continents.

Three authors have retracted a study on the risks of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the COVID-19 virus that had been highly influential. The article, published in the journal Lancet, had found that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug, increased mortality and heart problems in patients suffering from the coronavirus. It had been cited in criticizing President Trump's promotion of the drug as a remedy for the disease. ...

Paris (AFP) - Dozens of scientists have raised concerns over a large-scale study of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine published in the Lancet that led to the World Health Organization suspending clinical trials of the anti-viral drugs as a potential treatment for COVID-19. Hydroxychloroquine, normally used to treat arthritis, has become one of the most high profile drugs being tested for use against the new coronavirus. This is partly because of comments by public figures including US President Donald Trump, who announced this month he was taking the drug as a preventative measure. In research published in the Lancet on May 22,...

The Spanish health watchdog has said it sees no reason to stop the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the potentially dangerous medicine touted as a Covid-19 treatment by the US president. Several European nations, including France, Italy and Belgium, have decided to suspend prescription of the anti-malaria drug, which came to international prominence after US President Donald Trump said the medicine could be used to tackle Covid-19 and that he himself was taking it. The Spanish health watchdog, AEMPS, said the paper published by the magazine Lancet, which warned about health risks associated with HCQ, was not conclusive enough to stop...

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine offer no clinical benefit for people with COVID-19 and might cause serious heart-related side effects, according to a study published Friday in The Lancet. People with severe illness caused by the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, treated with either drug -- either alone or with an antiviral medication -- were up to twice as likely to die than those in the control group, which received standard, supportive care, the researchers found. Those who died did so either as a result of COVID-19 or from side effects from treatment, the authors said. "This is the first large-scale study to find...

The paper,(Lancet ) written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions, offers details about the first 41 hospitalized patients who had confirmed infections with what has been dubbed 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). In the earliest case, the patient became ill on 1 December 2019 and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state. Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41 cases had no link to the marketplace. “That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” says...