Conflicts of interest and physicians’ attitudes towards hydroxychloroquine as a treatment against COVID-19 A replication and extension of Roussel & Raoult (2020)
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Abstract
Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and its use as a treatment against COVID-19 have been at the center of heated debates. Some claim that physicians’ hostility towards HCQ was partly orchestrated by rival pharmaceutical companies seeking to promote their own treatment. In favor of this hypothesis, Roussel and Raoult (2020) have presented the results of a study in which they find a perfect positive correlation (ρ = 1.00) between French physicians’ attitudes towards HCQ and their conflict of interest with Gilead Sciences - the company that has promoted Remdesivir (REM) as a treatment against COVID-19. However, Roussel and Raoult’s study suffers from serious methodological shortcomings, among which is the fact that the statistical methods they employed might tend to artificially inflate correlations. In this study, we use a similar method and sample, but correct for their study’s original shortcomings: we provide a detailed, pre-registered method for collecting and coding data, computer inter-rater agreement and use a wide array of appropriate statistical methods to achieve a more reliable estimate the association between conflicts of interest and physicians’ attitudes towards HCQ. We conclude that Roussel and Raoult’s conclusion was misguided and that financial conflicts of interest were not the main predictors of the attitudes of physicians when compared to other factors, such as academic affiliation. Moreover, compared to other pharmaceutical companies, there was no specific link between attitudes towards HCQ and conflicts of interest with Gilead Sciences.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.18.21265135: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics Field Sample Permit: Data collection for mediators: Researcher’s h-index was collected on Web of Science (webofknowledge.com) by FC. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization Each physician on the CMIT list was randomly assigned to one coder (a few were accidentally attributed to two coders). Blinding Coding was not blind, in the sense that it was impossible to hide the identity of physicians to coders: physicians were clearly identified in the material to be coded (such as interviews). Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources For each physician assigned to them, each coder were asked to go through Google News and Google Scholar to … SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.18.21265135: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics Field Sample Permit: Data collection for mediators: Researcher’s h-index was collected on Web of Science (webofknowledge.com) by FC. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization Each physician on the CMIT list was randomly assigned to one coder (a few were accidentally attributed to two coders). Blinding Coding was not blind, in the sense that it was impossible to hide the identity of physicians to coders: physicians were clearly identified in the material to be coded (such as interviews). Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources For each physician assigned to them, each coder were asked to go through Google News and Google Scholar to collect public interventions (e.g. interviews, petitions) or scientific articles in which the physician expressed an opinion or formulated a judgment about the efficiency of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)1 or Remdesivir (REM) in treating and/or preventing COVID-19. Google Scholarsuggested: (Google Scholar, RRID:SCR_008878)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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