May 10, 2024
Following criticism from scientists around the world, a virology journal has retracted a paper describing the first test in humans of an Iranmade vaccine against COVID19. The Islamic Republic licensed the home-grown Noora vaccine for emergency use in 2022 and has reportedly administered many doses to its citizens.
The country’s health authorities say the shot is 94 percent effective. The now-retracted paper, published in 2022 in the Journal of Medical Virology, was the only report on the clinical development of the vaccine to have appeared in an international journal. The article has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In a commentary last year in the same journal, Donald Forthal, chief of infectious diseases at the University of California, Irvine, raised several concerns about the article. Forthal questioned the efficacy of the vaccine and expressed surprise that “a manuscript containing so many serious flaws would have been accepted for publication following peer review, and, given these issues, a retraction may be in order.” The journal’s editor-inchief, Shou-Jiang Gao, said at the time the paper had undergone two rounds of “rigorously [sic] review by experts of the field” before it was published.
The authors had responded to Forthal’s critique, Gao said, and their response had “already undergone 3 rounds of review, each with 2 reviewers.” But the analysis of those reviewers was never published. Meanwhile, in January, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist in Australia, flagged \l “3”additional problems in the paper on PubPeer, including several “impossible” and “contradictory” numbers.
On March 2, the journal announced the paper had been retracted, stating: “The retraction has been agreed due to concerns raised by third parties regarding issues with the data presented in the article. Several inconsistencies concerning the information provided about the analyzed subjects were additionally identified.
Furthermore, the authors failed to disclose the presence of potential conflicts of interest that may have affected the interpretation of the results presented. Accordingly, the editors consider the conclusions of this manuscript to be invalid. The authors have been informed of the decision to retract but did not agree with it.” Author Hassan Abolghasemi of Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences, in Tehran, told the publication Retraction Watch by email: “Retraction of our article was a political decision not a scientific decision because there was a pressure on journal based on [apartheid] scientific issue. Our response to the comment never accepted by [PubPeer] and journal to be published.”
