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13 Dec, 11 tweets, 4 min read
People have asked about these, so here's a non-exhaustive list of pretty obviously flawed papers published in these leading journals this year
Kicking off, a research letter in JAMA that was pretty useless as evidence (including not even running a hypothesis test)

Next, JAMA opthalmology with "glasses protect against COVID-19" except the evidence was literally nonexistent

NEJM with the original 60-patient remdesivir retrospective trial, that nevertheless went enormously viral and may in part be why the medication is a first-line treatment for COVID-19 today

BMJ EBM covering themselves in...something with this editorial claiming that diet can protect from COVID-19...

...And this SR/MA on honey for colds that was literally filled with errors

BMJ again, this time a 2017 paper that was much less awful than most of the others on this list

The Lancet/NEJM for the whole Surgisphere debacle

At least this one was retracted!

Obese people are dishonest (except they aren't even according to the numbers in the study) in Nature Scientific Reports

JAMA Open, with their schools/YLL paper, that we've not actually written a published critique about

osf.io/9yqxw/

PNAS, with their now-infamous mask study

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
14 Dec
So, I have had a proper read of this document, and I thought it might be worthwhile to actually go through and carefully analyze the document

Let's do some peer-review on twitter 1/n
2/n The document is a brief essay by the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which I've screenshotted here for later reference, because it comes up in the essay: ImageImage
3/n The essay discusses what the authors call "focused protection", so I think it's worth noting at the outset that the GBD explicitly argues against closures/restrictions of any kind, so that we can build up herd immunity Image
Read 28 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
14 Dec
Would be interesting to see the child's perspective here, because of nothing else there are many signs that the author is not a very reliable narrator
For example, the author says they are totally accepting but look at the language here

Both a bit offensive and some definite red flags
The author claims to want to support their child in making the right decision for themselves, but given that the child apparently identifies as a trans boy, but they've consistently identified them as a cis girl, it seems clear what decision the author considers the best choice
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Dec
Lockdowns have mostly not been associated with a large increase in suicide rates: a thread of evidence (CW: suicide, mental health) 🧵
Since this has been a major talking point throughout the pandemic, I thought I'd collate the now quite large evidence-base showing that suicide rates have mostly remained steady during lockdowns/COVID times
1. Queensland, Australia

Slight decrease in suicide rates after emergency announced, no statistical change over lockdown vs previous years thelancet.com/journals/lanps…
Read 13 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
8 Dec
Big news! Our systematic review and meta-analysis of the age stratified IFR of COVID-19 with @BillHanage, Andy Levin, and others has now been published in the European Journal of Epidemiology

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
The key figure from the paper - your risk of death from COVID-19 goes up exponentially by age:

1 in 50,000 at age 20
1 in 1,500 at age 40
1 in 130 at age 60
1 in 12 at age 80 Image
The other big thing we found was that the age breakdown of places almost entirely explained (~90%) the observed variance in population IFR Image
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
7 Dec
Despite this story going massively viral (because it is about penises) I reckon it's worth pointing out that the evidence or this statement seems to be mostly theoretical
The only scientific paper referenced that I can find anywhere is this piece from July that basically says that there are plausible pathways for COVID-19 to cause ED so we should watch out for it

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32661947/
I mean, sure, the pathways seem plausible, but imo the time to be really worried about something is when we've got evidence that it is a problem
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
6 Dec
For those who are interested, the largest clinical trial to date has thus far not shown a benefit for vitamin D supplementation to treat severe COVID-19

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
That being said, the numbers are still pretty small and I don't think we can make any definite statements either way at this point
That being said, the study looks impressively solid, and this is some truly beautiful honesty wrt sample size
Read 5 tweets

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