Indeed, after the publication of the article, several concerns were raised with respect to the veracity of the data and analyses conducted by Surgisphere Corporation and its founder and one of the co-authors, Sapan Desai. The three authors launched an independent third-party peer review of Surgisphere with the consent of Sapan Desai, to evaluate the original database, to confirm the completeness of the data, and to replicate the analyses presented in the paper.
Their independent peer reviewers informed the authors 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, their reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified their withdrawal from the peer-review process. Based on this development, the authors request that the paper be retracted.
View Article: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31324-6/fulltext