The journal PLOS ONE announced the retraction of a September 2020 article that recommended increasing vitamin D intake as a way of reducing the severity of COVID-19. The study stated that people infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus who had good vitamin D levels suffered less severe symptoms of the disease than others with Vitamin D deficiency. The article was written by Michael F. Holick of Boston University, USA, an advocate of the use of vitamin D, in collaboration with scientists from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran.
The article spread quickly on social media, but flaws and shortcomings in the study were soon pointed out, such as the small sample size and the lack of detailed information about the patients evaluated. A month after it was published, PLOS ONE issued an “expression of concern,” warning that the data was being reviewed due to claims of a lack of statistical evidence to suggest a causal relationship between vitamin D consumption and the clinical outcome of COVID-19 infections. Four years later, the article has been retracted. The journal’s editors stated that the study design was not robust enough, including the data inclusion criteria and statistical analysis methods. They also noted that the methodology used by the researchers was not described in detail, making it impossible to reproduce the experiment to verify its results.
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