Trump critics used major study on hydroxychloroquine to attack him — the authors just retracted it

An influential study in the Lancet used to attack the president for recommending the use of hydroxychloroquine against the coronavirus has been retracted after overwhelming criticism.

The editors of the publication explained on Thursday that the authors of the study could not obtain the dataset in the study in order for third-party reviewers to confirm the results.

The original study was published in the Lancet on March 22.

"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," the authors said in the retraction.

"As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct and independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process," they added.

The study was used by many critics to claim that the recommendation from the president would lead to reckless deaths from the ingestion of hydroxychloroquine.

One such critic was Neil Cavuto of Fox News.

"If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario you are dealing with the virus, and you are in this vulnerable population, this will kill you," Cavuto said in May.

"I cannot stress enough, this will kill you!" he added dramatically.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organization said that it would resume international trial testing on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine after experts began publicly questioning the Lancet study.

Here's more about the coronavirus development:

Covid-19 pandemic: WHO restart hydroxychloroquine tests after study doubtswww.youtube.com