This may be fallacious, but I am automatically dismissive when a drug from one area of medicine is recruited as a treatment for a completely disjoint disorder. I need a somewhat plausible sounding mechanism of action, even if it's hypothetical. Because it fits a pattern I've observed where a drug is discovered, and it's on the cover of every magazine as a panacea[0], and then it doesn't pan out and it fades back into the small niche where it actually works.
So I dismissed HCQ and Ivermectin out of hand.
[0]: Interferon was on the cover of TIME in ~1980 as a cancer cure.
(EDIT: but I'm not an MD, just a crazy person who likes reading pubmed, so my views are pure superstition)
IIRC HCQ was flagged in computational models as promising, but the concentrations required to have an actual effect are a large multiple of the lethal doses.
There is a ton of politically driven disinformation around. Brazilian president Bolsonaro pushed both as treatments while, we now know, government representatives were stalling direct purchases from labs while negotiating vaccines with intermediaries in order to profit from sales to the government.
>...but the conentrations required to have an actual effect are a large multiple of the lethal doses..."
Which was the excuse they gave when they designed actual drug trials that gave patients lethal doses and ignored the testimony of doctors who found it useful at sub-lethal doses. And therefore a drug used by tens of millions of people a year(if not more) for the past five decades was declared too dangerous to use.
Addendum: I wound up arguing with someone that thus-and-such a trial was actually using what was considered an overdose in 2017 and they would not look at the entry in the PDR.
But viagra has a plausible-sounding (to me, I am not an MD) mechanism of action. Whereas in the first paper[0] about chloroquine for COVID, the claim is:
>This drug has multiple activities, one of which is to alkalise the phagolysosome, which hampers the low-pH-dependent steps of viral replication, including fusion and uncoating. Other mechanisms of antiviral activity are poorly explained.
> Other mechanisms of antiviral activity are poorly explained.
You would be surprised how many drugs have an unclear mechanism of action. If you think we know everything in Biology you might want to revise your judgment.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I really want to be able to mostly correctly presume that the average HN user over the age of like... 20(?) probably has vague knowledge of the fact we don't understand the mechanism of things like acetaminophen (Tylenol) and most anesthetics...
Furthermore, most chemical engineering/pharmacy students learn that with today's regulations, acetaminophen would've never been approved. Do we think that's a good thing? I don't.
That said, I still very much agree with the parent poster's view.
Anyone that has ever taken a class in molecular biology or biophysics knows that it's ridiculously complex. Many drugs that look promising in vivo or in animals fail to perform in humans. Empirical evidence is what counts. Even targeted enzyme inhibitors are made by a shotgun approach. Synthesize 1000s of candidates and try them all to see which ones work best in vivo and then try those in animals and then try those winners in humans.
That's pretty much how small-molecule drug development works. They have huge high-throughput screening machines to churn through libraries of millions of chemicals, running assays to see whether they produce the desired results in vitro. Throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Once they get hits, they run more big assays, winnowing down likely tox issues or off-target effects, then try them in animal models, then eventually get to Phase I.
That's pretty much how drug development is done, especially at scale. You have robots running tests on hundreds/thousands of molecules in mini-tubes to check if anything has any kind of effect.
Isn't there a huge difference between in vivo and in vitro, though? If it's in vitro, you can actually physically check that it's working, and then rerun it to confirm. If it's in vivo and you're doing an RCT it's much more prone to statistical noise and the other issues, which is why it's bad to try things out randomly and see what sticks. At a test power of 0.05, one in twenty studies will stick due to chance.
This article explains the suspected mechanism of action. I'm not claiming that ivermectin is actually effective, but the biochemistry is at least plausible.
Good point. As I said, it may be fallacious reasoning on my part :)
I suppose what this underscores is: biology is immensely complex and first-principles thinking can only get you so far. Eventually, you need to test things with a big RCT to know what's going on.
A plausible mechanism of action is no where near good enough. Molecular biology is crazy complicated and lots of things that sound plausible don't work (and maybe do the opposite). I'll take "it works, but we don't know why" over "this is why we think it might work" every time.
There are actually a number of drugs where they specifically state the actual mechanism of action is unknown, but they do know from proper and continued clinical trials that the drug does indeed work. A lot of pain killers are in that category.
Here is a list of 68 drugs that are known to work, but apparently we don't know how or why:
> This may be fallacious, but I am automatically dismissive when a drug from one area of medicine is recruited as a treatment for a completely disjoint disorder.
I mean, it sometimes works, and obviously it's a very attractive idea (no need to wait on slow trials; drug is already assessed for safety) but precisely because it's such an attractive idea people seem to be overly credulous about it.
(A) not published
(B) not peer reviewed
(C) not science (see a and b)
(D) not actually studying the treatment protocols recommended by the flccc
This is not so much a study as it is tracking the outcomes of someone taking their pets' heartworm medicine without any advice from their doctor. It's farcical.
Your (A and (B) mean the same thing or, alternatively, (A) is wrong. (C) makes no sense, because every peer-reviewed study is, at some point, not peer-reviewed. As to (D): this outfit is recommending Ivermectin without any proof that it works, and therefore not a science-based institution from the start.
However:
> The trial originally tested the results from a single Ivermectin dose in January this year, but was later changed to involve one daily dose for three days of 400 micrograms of the drug for every kilogram
So the dose was actually within the range your FLCCWTF recommends, which is “0.4–0.6 mg/kg”. Only it was given for three days instead of five, with the difference easily explained by one group choosing the regular dose that Ivermectin has been proven mostly safe at.
If it has no effect when taken for three days, it isn’t going to do wonders when taken for five.
The flccc unequivocally states that ivermectin given alone is not known to be effective. That's why their protocols are not "give ivermectin alone", in any dose. Even the protocols they recommend that people can follow at home are not "take ivermectin".
Moreover, as to the claim that the flccc is recommending ivermectin with no proof it works; they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works, a couple un-reviewed studies by avowed skeptics which show that it does nothing, and zero studies ever in the history of the drug showing it to be harmful. That is better than can be said for any other purported treatment for COVID.
> The flccc unequivocally states that ivermectin given alone is not known to be effective
Without a randomized controlled trial, they have nothing but speculation as to what is effective or not.
> Moreover, as to the claim that the flccc is recommending ivermectin with no proof it works; they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works
I hope you didn't bury those goalposts too deep as you'll need to move them again.
Meanwhile the meta-review you cite is the one that managed to "find" only 18 trials and those somehow just happened to be the ones showing neutral results; no one has yet figured out how they somehow accidentally missed all the studies with positive findings cited by the FLCCC. Maybe in a few years there will be a peer-reviewed RCT explaining this apparent selective blindness, which is the most alarming epidemic happening right now.
Look, I don't know what to make of all the conflicting evidence. But I sure as hell know what to make of all the people lying about the evidence.
Oh, so now preprints that haven’t passed peer-review are good enough? You can’t even keep your criteria straight two comments in row…
Quote; “ This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.”
Did you read the top comment on your link? “There are a number of concerns with the methodology and consistency in this study: [. . .] might be true that Ivermectin does reduce viral shedding time in mild to moderate COVID-19. However this study is not rigorous enough, includes amendments which could have introduced bias, and has methodological issues. In my opinion it should not be accepted as good evidence that ivermectin reduces viral loads and could reduce isolation time in patients with COVID-19.“
> hope you didn't bury those goalposts too deep as you'll need to move them again.
My point is FLCCC assertion is meaningless. Why cite to them and not direct to trials or meta analysis of trials?
> Meanwhile the meta-review you cite is the one that managed to "find" only 18 trials
Notice how in your own two posts you’ve switched the number dramatically? ‘they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works’ vs now ‘find one of the 21 others FLCCC cites (excluding Elgazzar's).’ This is a good demonstration of how easily the number can be changed when you use a different search method and less or more filtering.
I seriously don’t get what peoples’ brains are infected with to get invested in some random drug to the point where they start making a fool of themselves spouting such non-sense and just making it up as they go along…?
Example: “… zero studies ever in the history of the drug showing it to be harmful”
Note that this list is as old as the drug, and nobody serious is disputing it. Not even your FLCWHATEVER, or they wouldn’t have a reason to specify an upper limit for their recommended dose. Nor the manufacturers.
And yes, “side effect” is the same as “being (potentially) harmful”.
It says: “In a study that combined results from trials including more than 50,000 patients, serious events occurred in less than 1%”
1% of “serious events” sounds pretty bad? It’s somewhere on the order of COVID’s CFR?
I guess getting so invested into some deworming drug is arbitrary enough to be less harmful than tying your identity to hating women or democracy or whatever the alternative is. But it’s that pointlessness that somehow makes it infuriating in its own way.
We had Chloroquine and Ivermectin. What’s next? Kool-Aid would be my favorite. At least it’s easier to spell.
When you're strongly against something, one may become vulnerable to the same kind of misinformation and biases. Important to research all sides, and weigh experts and professionals more. Considering them as fools, is most likely sign of Dunning-Kruger.
>1% of “serious events” sounds pretty bad? It’s somewhere on the order of COVID’s CFR?
I'm not a doctor or a statistician, but at the risk of stating what might be obvious - 1% chance of serious harm is much more tolerable with a medicine given to the sick as opposed to a vaccine given to everybody.
The CFR is the number of people who die of covid vs the number of people who get covid, so in a hypothetical where everyone who got covid was given ivermectin, yes, it's very relevant.
> Nobody's suggesting that...are they?
Some ivermectin enthusiasts do indeed suggest using it as a prophylactic drug.
> This is not so much a study as it is tracking the outcomes of someone taking their pets' heartworm medicine without any advice from their doctor. It's farcical.
For those interested in diving deeper into the research this site has a fairly complete index of all the other studies on ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment or prophylactic. Most do seem to show some benefit, however they generally have weak methodology such as small subject populations or lack of proper controls.
I don't have a dog in this race personally, but I am interested in science, so I read your link. From it:
> But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns". Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
Emphasis mine.
It then goes on to quote a man claiming all sorts of fraudulent accusations with no actual sources for anything demonstrating the validity of the accusations. I'm not saying the paper is not fraudulent, it could be, I'm saying I'd like to see more than some guy saying it is and a journal not releasing a similar statement.
That's a far cry from "proven to be a fraud" as you say.
I want to actually know if this treatment works, not emotionally decide beforehand one way or another based on my attitude towards the vaccines. It seems I'm in the minority here. If only you knew how frustrating it is. So I'll read your links, I'll read studies and stories saying it doesn't work, I'll read the FLCCWHYTHEFUCKCANTYOUJUSTTYPEFLCCC and I'll look at methodologies of all of it and figure it out for myself.
If you're going to claim fraud, a strong claim, make sure your source doesn't explicitly state that it is not known whether it is fraud or not. From where I sit, both you and the person you're arguing with have picked your horses and are no longer concerned with the truth. I will say though, at least they're arguing use of a mostly harmless, not experimental medicine that has other positive effects whether it works for covid or not.
Your language suggests that you’ve already decided how you would like to believe, and your rebuttal to the OP fails to move past the first couple paragraphs of the guardian article or appreciate the other sources that are linked in the article, which elaborate on the concerns with the paper’s methodology and data.
This additional analysis on the data [0] to me appears to be of significant concern to the validity of the study and suggests fraud on the behalf of the investigators, or at the very least significant methodological failures with study design and data capture which trickled down into ultimately a flawed the study which at the very least is highly suspect to largely useless in adding knowledge to the question of whether ivermectin is a beneficial treatment for the COVID Arsenal. In an era where the politicisation of COVID and it’s treatments is at such a high level, and the thirst for polluting the discourse so high from bad actors, all players in this space need to be attempting to uphold the highest levels of scientific rigour and unfortunately it appears that standard is not being delivered upon here.
There are many other sources that you can follow from there from investigators (using the term in the academic/scientific sense) reviewing the data and paper that your keen interest in following and reviewing the evidence yourself will lead you to should you so desire
This epidemiologist points out several major flaws with that website. For example, the website selectively picks the best results from each paper, which results in a bunch of unrelated clinical endpoints (outcomes/measurements), including endpoints that were not even each paper's main endpoint. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1422044335076306947
The most telling part of that site, or group of sites, is that long list across the top and down the left side. There are more than a dozen treatments that all seem to be as effective as ivermectin according to them. For such a mysterious, novel virus, that doctors have been stumped on how to treat, it seems like just about anything will work to treat it. From ibuprofen to hydroxy chloroquine, to ivermectin, etc...
Symptomatic of crap science. Small N studies with weak methods being aggregated in meta-analysis. It's gotten to the point where I only believe large canonical studies that have been preregistered, and it's a shame that only a minority of all funding is dedicated to those kinds of studies.
I am not a professional, but this looks like a very good study and I trust its results. I think I am pretty convinced that Ivermectin alone is not effective at treating Covid. I still have hope that it is effective in preventing it. We need more studies on that.
But, but, but this guy I ran into at the park would not shut up about it so it must work. Plus I just like to take neurotoxins. Why would I want to take some fancy new tech mRNA vaccine that would allow me to travel internationally when I can just take some of my dog's heartguard?
Dismissing it just because it’s the active ingredient in heartguard is IMO a bit misguided; after all it is a known antiviral compound and there’s a plausible mechanism of action.
It’s more to the point and less inflammatory to focus on the mounting evidence that it’s just not an effective COVID-19 therapeutic.
Derek Lowe wrote an informative post discussing the lackluster nature of the current body of evidence after the big Egyptian study was retracted for fraudulent data the other week.
There are other studies that suggest Ivermectin being effective. For example, this reference [1], lists meta analysis that seems to suggest effectiveness. Given the amount of money that flows into the pharmaceutical companies, I am very cautious in trusting studies that invalidate their inexpensive competitors.
And most of the major meta-analysis papers have been checked and found to be wanting. Specifically, the ones that show any effectiveness all seem to apply a heavy weight to some of the least reliable or trustworthy studies.
This site appears to be related to another site linked in a different thread that has been criticized for cherry-picking results and including studies with dubious methodology or statistical power.
Plus it still includes the large Egyptian study by Els-Alam et al that was retracted last month.
It looks like the study did adjust the dosage level to a value recommended by advocates of Ivermectin like the FLCCC, .04mg per kilogram. However Ivermectin proponents have been vocal that many of the negative studies only administer Ivermectin well past initial onset of covid symptoms. I would like to find the data on how long after initial onset of symptoms, or a covid positive test, Ivermectin was given. I do not see any links to the current study in question all I see from the MSM links are PowerPoint slides and a symposium presentation. The study groups website only has links to a previous off label treatment study that included other potential therapeutics but not Ivermectin. If anyone knows where you can read the preprint I would love to take a look.
Page 10 of the slides had the study inclusion information I was looking for, participants of the study were only included if they had "acute" onset of covid symptoms within 7 days. Proponents of Ivermectin will push back on this study since advocates have been clear that it is only an effective treatment if used as preventative prophylactic or within the first few days of symptomatic response to infection.
I’m trying to imagine how this would work in the real world. Are we supposed to have the entire population taking it daily on the off chance they might get Covid, or are we supposed to start taking it every time we come down with a sniffle?
But... If the vaccine hasa lower risk of side effects than this does, which it appears to, and only takes two doses, instead of having to take it daily forever, why wouldn't we just get the vaccine instead? I suppose the use case is countries that are too poor to afford the vaccine?
He thinks it has a higher risk of long term side effects. It's nearing anti-vax territory although he does admit the efficacy of vaccines and doesn't overplay the current knowledge on side effects. It's the boogeyman of possible future side effects associated with spike proteins that he's playing into. He thinks continued use of ivermectin is safer than vax plus boosters. And he thinks they're of similar efficacy so he's choosing ivermectin.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadSo I dismissed HCQ and Ivermectin out of hand.
[0]: Interferon was on the cover of TIME in ~1980 as a cancer cure.
(EDIT: but I'm not an MD, just a crazy person who likes reading pubmed, so my views are pure superstition)
[0] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-gene...
There is a ton of politically driven disinformation around. Brazilian president Bolsonaro pushed both as treatments while, we now know, government representatives were stalling direct purchases from labs while negotiating vaccines with intermediaries in order to profit from sales to the government.
Which was the excuse they gave when they designed actual drug trials that gave patients lethal doses and ignored the testimony of doctors who found it useful at sub-lethal doses. And therefore a drug used by tens of millions of people a year(if not more) for the past five decades was declared too dangerous to use.
Addendum: I wound up arguing with someone that thus-and-such a trial was actually using what was considered an overdose in 2017 and they would not look at the entry in the PDR.
I guess you have never heard of Viagra.
>This drug has multiple activities, one of which is to alkalise the phagolysosome, which hampers the low-pH-dependent steps of viral replication, including fusion and uncoating. Other mechanisms of antiviral activity are poorly explained.
Which sounds like limited evidence.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7134866/
You would be surprised how many drugs have an unclear mechanism of action. If you think we know everything in Biology you might want to revise your judgment.
Furthermore, most chemical engineering/pharmacy students learn that with today's regulations, acetaminophen would've never been approved. Do we think that's a good thing? I don't.
That said, I still very much agree with the parent poster's view.
Once they get hits, they run more big assays, winnowing down likely tox issues or off-target effects, then try them in animal models, then eventually get to Phase I.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
In general small molecule drugs often hit multiple different pathways. It's not reasonable to put them into neat little buckets.
I suppose what this underscores is: biology is immensely complex and first-principles thinking can only get you so far. Eventually, you need to test things with a big RCT to know what's going on.
Here is a list of 68 drugs that are known to work, but apparently we don't know how or why:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Drugs_with_unknown_me...
I mean, it sometimes works, and obviously it's a very attractive idea (no need to wait on slow trials; drug is already assessed for safety) but precisely because it's such an attractive idea people seem to be overly credulous about it.
(A) not published (B) not peer reviewed (C) not science (see a and b) (D) not actually studying the treatment protocols recommended by the flccc
This is not so much a study as it is tracking the outcomes of someone taking their pets' heartworm medicine without any advice from their doctor. It's farcical.
However:
> The trial originally tested the results from a single Ivermectin dose in January this year, but was later changed to involve one daily dose for three days of 400 micrograms of the drug for every kilogram
So the dose was actually within the range your FLCCWTF recommends, which is “0.4–0.6 mg/kg”. Only it was given for three days instead of five, with the difference easily explained by one group choosing the regular dose that Ivermectin has been proven mostly safe at.
If it has no effect when taken for three days, it isn’t going to do wonders when taken for five.
Moreover, as to the claim that the flccc is recommending ivermectin with no proof it works; they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works, a couple un-reviewed studies by avowed skeptics which show that it does nothing, and zero studies ever in the history of the drug showing it to be harmful. That is better than can be said for any other purported treatment for COVID.
Without a randomized controlled trial, they have nothing but speculation as to what is effective or not.
> Moreover, as to the claim that the flccc is recommending ivermectin with no proof it works; they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works
Note that meta-analysis of those published studies shows zero knowable effect for Ivermectin. https://www.cochrane.org/CD015017/INFECTN_ivermectin-prevent...
Like this one? https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.31.21258081v... Or you can go find one of the 21 others FLCCC cites (excluding Elgazzar's).
I hope you didn't bury those goalposts too deep as you'll need to move them again.
Meanwhile the meta-review you cite is the one that managed to "find" only 18 trials and those somehow just happened to be the ones showing neutral results; no one has yet figured out how they somehow accidentally missed all the studies with positive findings cited by the FLCCC. Maybe in a few years there will be a peer-reviewed RCT explaining this apparent selective blindness, which is the most alarming epidemic happening right now.
Look, I don't know what to make of all the conflicting evidence. But I sure as hell know what to make of all the people lying about the evidence.
Quote; “ This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.”
Did you read the top comment on your link? “There are a number of concerns with the methodology and consistency in this study: [. . .] might be true that Ivermectin does reduce viral shedding time in mild to moderate COVID-19. However this study is not rigorous enough, includes amendments which could have introduced bias, and has methodological issues. In my opinion it should not be accepted as good evidence that ivermectin reduces viral loads and could reduce isolation time in patients with COVID-19.“
> hope you didn't bury those goalposts too deep as you'll need to move them again.
My point is FLCCC assertion is meaningless. Why cite to them and not direct to trials or meta analysis of trials?
> Meanwhile the meta-review you cite is the one that managed to "find" only 18 trials
As with any high quality meta analysis it describes their search strategy for finding and selecting studies for inclusion: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Notice how in your own two posts you’ve switched the number dramatically? ‘they have 60+ peer-reviewed studies showing that it works’ vs now ‘find one of the 21 others FLCCC cites (excluding Elgazzar's).’ This is a good demonstration of how easily the number can be changed when you use a different search method and less or more filtering.
Example: “… zero studies ever in the history of the drug showing it to be harmful”
Ivermectin, as any drug that does anything, ever, comes with a list of side effects. See https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/ivermectin-oral... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin#Adverse_effects
Note that this list is as old as the drug, and nobody serious is disputing it. Not even your FLCWHATEVER, or they wouldn’t have a reason to specify an upper limit for their recommended dose. Nor the manufacturers.
And yes, “side effect” is the same as “being (potentially) harmful”.
One study linked from your FLACCY site is at https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/... . It really should be retracted because it also relies on the fake data from Egypt, but anyway.
It says: “In a study that combined results from trials including more than 50,000 patients, serious events occurred in less than 1%”
1% of “serious events” sounds pretty bad? It’s somewhere on the order of COVID’s CFR?
I guess getting so invested into some deworming drug is arbitrary enough to be less harmful than tying your identity to hating women or democracy or whatever the alternative is. But it’s that pointlessness that somehow makes it infuriating in its own way.
We had Chloroquine and Ivermectin. What’s next? Kool-Aid would be my favorite. At least it’s easier to spell.
I'm not a doctor or a statistician, but at the risk of stating what might be obvious - 1% chance of serious harm is much more tolerable with a medicine given to the sick as opposed to a vaccine given to everybody.
What the denominator is, is important.
Comparing to the CFR distinctly implies a scenario where Ivermectin is given to 100% of the population. Nobody's suggesting that...are they?
> Nobody's suggesting that...are they?
Some ivermectin enthusiasts do indeed suggest using it as a prophylactic drug.
Farm supply stores are running out of Horse ivermectin due to people going and buying it to try and self-treat their COVID. https://slate.com/technology/2021/08/ivermectin-covid-cure-f...
https://c19ivermectin.com/
A fact that the site above somehow doesn’t consider noteworthy.
> But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns". Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
Emphasis mine.
It then goes on to quote a man claiming all sorts of fraudulent accusations with no actual sources for anything demonstrating the validity of the accusations. I'm not saying the paper is not fraudulent, it could be, I'm saying I'd like to see more than some guy saying it is and a journal not releasing a similar statement.
That's a far cry from "proven to be a fraud" as you say.
I want to actually know if this treatment works, not emotionally decide beforehand one way or another based on my attitude towards the vaccines. It seems I'm in the minority here. If only you knew how frustrating it is. So I'll read your links, I'll read studies and stories saying it doesn't work, I'll read the FLCCWHYTHEFUCKCANTYOUJUSTTYPEFLCCC and I'll look at methodologies of all of it and figure it out for myself.
If you're going to claim fraud, a strong claim, make sure your source doesn't explicitly state that it is not known whether it is fraud or not. From where I sit, both you and the person you're arguing with have picked your horses and are no longer concerned with the truth. I will say though, at least they're arguing use of a mostly harmless, not experimental medicine that has other positive effects whether it works for covid or not.
This additional analysis on the data [0] to me appears to be of significant concern to the validity of the study and suggests fraud on the behalf of the investigators, or at the very least significant methodological failures with study design and data capture which trickled down into ultimately a flawed the study which at the very least is highly suspect to largely useless in adding knowledge to the question of whether ivermectin is a beneficial treatment for the COVID Arsenal. In an era where the politicisation of COVID and it’s treatments is at such a high level, and the thirst for polluting the discourse so high from bad actors, all players in this space need to be attempting to uphold the highest levels of scientific rigour and unfortunately it appears that standard is not being delivered upon here.
There are many other sources that you can follow from there from investigators (using the term in the academic/scientific sense) reviewing the data and paper that your keen interest in following and reviewing the evidence yourself will lead you to should you so desire
[0] https://steamtraen.blogspot.com/2021/07/Some-problems-with-t...
Take a look at these 2 sites
I also wonder what the cost of this study was.
It’s more to the point and less inflammatory to focus on the mounting evidence that it’s just not an effective COVID-19 therapeutic.
Derek Lowe wrote an informative post discussing the lackluster nature of the current body of evidence after the big Egyptian study was retracted for fraudulent data the other week.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/07/iv...
[1] https://ivmmeta.com
Plus it still includes the large Egyptian study by Els-Alam et al that was retracted last month.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28177029
> 7/15: Elgazzar et al. was retracted and has been removed.
https://dcricollab.dcri.duke.edu/sites/NIHKR/KR/GR-Slides-08...
https://trialsitenews.com/bill-and-melinda-gates-fund-global...