[1] After graduating in medicine from the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences in 1993,[2] he pursued further studies in the United States with the ambition to qualify in cardiac catheterization.
[1] Narrowing of the coronary arteries, or cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV), after a heart transplant has been noted as a significant problem in terms of long-term survival.
[4] On May 1, 2020, Mehra was the lead author of a small group who published results of an analysis[5] of data from 169 hospitals collected via a database funded by Surgisphere to assess the risk of in-hospital death among patients with cardiovascular disease infected with SARS-CoV2 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The latter paper resulted in the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announcing the temporary halt of hydroxychloroquine arm of its Solidarity Trial of therapies for COVID-19.
[7] The provenance and validity of the data and database on which both papers rely was questioned,[8] and an expression of concern was published in The Lancet[9] and in the NEJM.
[10] Mehra, Ruschitzka, and Patel quickly hired an independent company to conduct an audit of the Surgisphere data.
[11] On June 4, Mehra and two of his co-authors retracted The Lancet paper that had raised caution about the safety of hydroxychloroquine, due to inability to gain access to the data in the audit.