As far back as August 2020, this paper was known to be "fully irresponsible": https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/19/french-hydroxychloroq...
This retraction is better than nothing, but it's about four and a half years too late.
This retraction is better than nothing, but it's about four and a half years too late.
Bad papers usually aren't retracted. More often, they're forgotten. And that usually works out well enough. Retractions are needed only when a paper has enough attention that it isn't sufficiently forgotten.
So it's very common for a retraction to take a long time. It takes a while even to notice that a retraction is needed, and then you make quintuple-certain that the call for retraction is correct.
The biggest way that I think the reputation of the science community is being harmed is that it's not holding true to it's own tenets. The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. Not to call it "irresponsible" or "immoral", label it "disinformation" or "pants-on--fire".
Bad science gets proved wrong, but nobody is interested in reproducing results. As a result our journals are full of accepted papers documenting unreproducible crap. They have been for a long time. When COVID hit and we needed science to be clean and authoritive, it was already in disarray. Unable to tell us what actually worked, we just got a bunch of folklore from all sides some of which got "blessed" by the high priests and some which was "sacrilegious", but very little of it was backed up with any data beyond modelling (which is just predictions).
Nobody should be claiming the high ground w.r.t. COVID IMHO. The science community failed us by acting in response to politics and not science.
The issue with the paper in question is stuff like:
>six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine had been dropped from the study—one of whom had died, and three of whom had transferred to intensive care—which potentially skewed the results in the drug’s favor.
So you can point out their research is crap without actually falsifying the claim that hydroxychloroquine helps with covid. It's hard to prove a negative experimentally but easy to show stuff like the above is iffy.
It should not be possible for people to promote snake oil treatments without bearing any responsibility. Unfortunately, our timeline puts the responsibility onto the general public and the quality of scientific education means that a sizeable proportion simply don't have the tools to understand publications/retractions etc.
Even if it did, it may not be helpful (at least for the general public):