The original headline is always more impactful than the retraction. Which is sometimes why the headline is pushed before it’s known to be true… and sometimes when it’s known to be false (“Russiagate,” anyone?). Because even when the story is retracted with an “Oooopsie, turn out we were wrong,” the only bit that most people will remember is the original claim. Behold:

Retraction: “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis”

Every damn body has been too fast to claim that hydroxychloroquine is either good for Kung Flu, or worse than useless. Formerly respected medical journal The Lancet (remember, the Lancet is where Andrew Wakefield published in 1998 his “paper” that claimed a link between vaccines and autism; it was only retracted in 2010, and the damage had long since been done and of course continues) published a paper that claimed that hydroxychloroquine was useless in fighting off the Commie Cough and actually made the patients health worse. And now they’ve retracted it because the original authors were not transparent with their data:

Our independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process.

Which sure reads like “we published *without* doing an actual peer review.” Because shouldn’t they have asked for this data *before* publication?