A preprint promoted by a member of the UK Parliament for claiming to show that vitamin D led to an “80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths” has been removed from a server used by The Lancet family of journals.
The preprint, “Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes,” was posted to Preprints with The Lancet on January 22. On February 13, David Davis, a Conservative member of UK’s Parliament, tweeted:
The tweet has been retweeted and liked tens of thousands of times. Almost immediately, the paper began attracting criticism, particularly about its claims to have been a randomized study. Here’s one comment on the preprint site:
Although the paper claims it is a randomised study, it also says that all patients treated in 5 wards received calcifediol treatment, while all three of the other wards received no calcifediol. How this study can be considered randomised is therefore questionable (maybe the wards were randomised but that is a very poor level of randomisation). It is also presumably open label, meaning that the attending physicians and decision makers would have been well aware whether the patients were receiving calcifediol or not. Its concerning to me that that in the calcifediol group more patients apparently died than were referred to the ICU. In the control group approx. 50% of the patients referred to the ICU died (assuming all those who died were ICU patients). This raises some troubling questions about the decision making process in the calcifediol group, were patients not referred to ICU who should have been?
Others, including Aurora Baluja, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor in Spain, raised concerns on Twitter. And on February 15, The Lancet Infectious Diseases asked Baluja for an “urgent” review of the paper.
In that review, which Baluja has posted to Github, she raises questions about the alleged randomization, and also whether the trial was properly registered — a requirement for publication by most medical journals. Baluja also asked for the preprint to be taken down from The Lancet’s servers and posted instead to medRxiv, “to allow for continuous improvements and extensive prepublication review.”
Today, The Lancet Infectious Diseases removed the preprint, replacing it with:
We have removed this preprint due to concerns about the description of the research in this paper. This has led us to initiate an investigation into this study.
The comments that have been posted on this preprint will remain available on this page. Please note that this comment thread is now closed to further posts.
This is the 85th paper about COVID-19 that has been retracted or withdrawn, according to our records.
Nick Brown, who brought the preprint to Baluja’s attention, tweeted:
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