The global pandemic that is a result of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 which causes the illness known as COVID-19 has led to 650,805 confirmed deaths and over 16 million infections. This pandemic has shown that given resources and time the world’s scientific institutions can collaborate, share data, inform health policy, and attempt to share their findings with a public that is hungry for coherence that the federal government is failing, miserably, to provide.
Attempt is the key word with the last one. Scientific articles are written to be published in scientific journals, reviewed by peers, and read by peers. The number of publications found when “COVID-19” is searched in PubMed is 35,659 published in the last year. The idea that every one of these papers has been subject to the scrutiny of a full review process seems unlikely at best.
This is where Dr. Sapan Desai’s misconduct enters but first a little context. Dr. Desai has been getting bad reviews from colleagues for his entire career. Working as a physician he has been described as a giant roadblock ignoring pages from nurses, claiming he had a law degree, business degree, and almost not graduating every stage of residency are just a few of the issues. He had jumped on the train of Big Data and started a health data analytics company, Surgisphere, which claims to have a database with anonymized electronic health records from more than 240 million patient encounters in 45 countries. The existence of such a database has never been verified, and rests on the claim that hospitals could easily input anonymized patient data. Entering data is rarely easy and anonymizing it is, at minimum, labor intensive, so it seems unlikely that this database if it exists at all is that large.
In May of this year, two studies were published based on results from this database. The first, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported that underlying cardiovascular disease is associated with an increased risk of death from COVID-19. The second, published in the Lancet, found that using now well-known malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are associated with decreased in-hospital survival. After publication, both papers quickly drew criticism and on June 4, under a month after publication, were retracted. Dr. Desai had been interviewing but has refused to comment once claims of misconduct continued to grow.
So what happened? How did someone whose entire career has been marred with questions of competency publish two studies based on analysis of data which the existence of cannot be verified? He had co-authors on both papers who later said they had never seen the original data, but it was still the paper that was commented on by a physician on CNN.
Should the co-authors have refused to put their names on the paper? Should the reviewers have caught the dubious data? Maybe the William Harvey Distinguished Chair in Advanced Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital should not have supported the research? How about Jide Olayinka, who works for Surgisphere, and did a statistical review of the manuscript. Should they have noticed something was wrong? Maybe Stanford who was noted on Surgisphere’s website as a collaborator should have caught it. (Stanford claims to have no record of agreeing to or participating in such a collaboration).
The quick skepticism came from people just reading the paper, and presumably anyone mentioned above would have at least that much if not more information. My answer would be all of them, but mostly Dr. Sapan Desai. I’ve been reading articles about him all day and everyone I can find leads with the fact that he graduated college at 19 and took 13 AP classes in high school. Leading with praise for his academic record is a less atrocious example of the framing that allowed Brock Turner to be a swimmer who made a mistake when he is in fact a convicted rapist.
The papers got retracted, Dr. Desai refuses to comment, but what happens now? How are people who do bad science punished? At what point do these actions become crimes? Will we find out if patients died as a result of doctors following advice put forth in these articles?
The federal definition of research misconduct includes falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism and is commonly referred to as “FFP.” Based on the available understanding of the case Dr. Desai was likely committed falsification and fabrication. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that when FFP occurs in federally funded research it is a federal crime punishable by fines, loss of funding, and even imprisonment. This research was not funded by a federal grant.
Im not a lawyer, maybe we can ask Dr. Desai and his unverifiable law degree, but it seems like misleading the public to this degree at any point, but especially during a global pandemic, should be a crime. At minimum, we should lead with ignoring pages from nurses and several standing medical malpractice suits, not AP classes.
As the world, but especially the United States, fails at containing the spread of COVID-19 what is this going to do the public appetite for a scientifically informed COVID-19 response? The study that linked vaccines and autism was retracted and that man lost is medical license, but there is a growing movement of vaccine skepticism. Retracting articles does not reach the same audience that a physician on CNN reaches. How should science as a community and ideal prevent the publication and proliferation of bad science? How do we rebuild public trust in science as an institution? And why should I (or we or you) care about any of this? These are questions I am going to explore on this blog. Thanks for reading.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/science/coronavirus-retracted-studies-data.html
2. https://ori.hhs.gov/rcr-casebook-research-misconduct
3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/surgisphere-sapan-desai-lancet-study-hydroxychloroquine-mass-audit-scientific-papers
4. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/nris-in-news/the-us-based-indian-doctor-behind-the-disputed-covid-19-data/articleshow/77206106.cms
Leave a comment