COVID-19 and the need for stringent rules on data sharing

摘要

Recently, two top medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine (1) and The Lancet (2), retracted two COVID-19 papers for not providing raw data (3). The papers were retracted when a US healthcare analytics company, Surgisphere, involved in conducting the said studies refused to provide the raw data for validation purposes. The data validation was important as the authors had claimed to have conducted a cutting edge research on the antimalarial and antihypertensive drugs for COVID-19 patients which caused the WHO and other international healthcare agencies to revise their COVID-19 treatment policies. COVID-19 outbreak has already seen multiple similar retractions and flip-flops on various relevant issues (4). A mandatory requirement of data sharing or even a request for the primary data used in these studies prior to publication for validation could possibly have prevented the publication of the questioned papers, and would not have influenced the policy makers.