Hospital to seek damages, clarification over Lancet letter

Taipei, May 12 (CNA) Taiwan's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital will seek reputational damages from two medical workers for misusing COVID-19 data in a letter published in the Lancet last month, as well as swift clarification from the medical journal, it said in a statement Monday.

Chang Gung Memorial has asked legal counsel to pursue damage to its reputation and that of the research team led by Respiratory Thoracic Department head Lin Shu-min (林恕民) at its Linkou branch from Li Jing-xing (李景行) and Hsu Shu-bai (許漱白) for their letter "Taiwan's national health care on the brink of systemic collapse" published on April 26, it said.

Lin and Hsu referenced a 2025 study by Lin and his colleagues without consulting with the specialist in respiratory and critical care medicine, inaccurately stating that Taiwan's COVID-19 hospitalization fatality rate was 58.2 percent, Chang Gung Memorial said.

However, what Lin and his colleagues actually found in their study published in Infection and Drug Resistance in January was that 58.2 percent of critically ill COVID-19 patients requiring intubation were infected with the omicron variant.

The hospital which operates branches across Taiwan said it plans to seek nominal compensation of NT$1 (US$0.03) from the two medical workers at China Medical University Hospital based in Taichung, central Taiwan.

Chang Gung Memorial also plans to send a letter to the agent representing the Lancet in Taiwan, demanding swift clarification and correction to address the misunderstandings that arose from the letter, it said.

Although China Medical University Hospital has already formally requested that the Lancet publish a correction, according to a statement on April 27, the letter, which contains multiple mistakes was still available to read and download on the Lancet's website as of 6:35 p.m. Monday.

The Lancet publishes retractions in a standalone page on its website and links the page to the corrected article, marked with "Corrected" or "Correction" displayed in red ahead of the original text.