A research director from Texas was recently exposed for fabricating published research data to obtain NIH grants. Deepak Kaushal, director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute, recently admitted to falsifying the number of treated and untreated primates in a 2020 study. However, he remained the director of Texas Biomed and ultimately oversaw the testing site that helped get Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccines past the animal testing phase.

Research director confesses to multiple counts of research fraud

The incident at Texas Biomedical was not Kaushal's first infraction. He also manipulated specific details in a tuberculosis treatment study published by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. The publisher had to retract the study because Kaushal manipulated the number of weekly doses that were administered as treatment for mycobacterium tuberculosis. In the retraction, the publishers said Kaushal "did not conform to a national protocol" but the publisher went with his conclusions anyway, stating, "the article's conclusions may [still] be correct." The research misconduct was originally exposed by an anonymous complaint sent to the publishers.