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10 Mar, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Massive news. We knew recruitment had halted, but this is the first published work showing that convalescent plasma probably doesn't work for COVID-19
I think convalescent plasma will end up being a chilling message for future pandemics about the importance of research. At this point, it's been given to 100,000s+ of patients, but we only just discovered that it's probably not beneficial
Unlike hydroxychloroquine, which was always more political than scientific, CP was a good bet that people used because it was hopefully better than nothing
That being said, in the US ~alone~ it was given to 10,000s of people before a randomized trial was even started!

This is a HUGE issue imo
RECOVERY is a shining gem of research brilliance, but the capacity to do a similar study exists in dozens of places. Why do we only have one? Why did we have to wait a year for CP results?

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
13 Mar
According to Prof John Ioannidis, the cause of 2.6 million* COVID-19 deaths was...pretty much everything except the disease

*likely a substantial undercount Image
He then clarifies that these were not the only cause of death, but of course without these issues COVID-19 would've been a nothing of a problem
I had hoped that this was fake, because this argument is just shockingly bad, but nope this is a real slide the professor actually presented
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
11 Mar
Interesting update on this paper published that purported to show that staying at home doesn't reduce COVID-19 deaths: less than a week after publication it already has a warning from the editors Image
Also, the authors appear to have responded to my twitter thread that was automatically uploaded to Pubpeer, which is pretty fantastic. Not sure this helps their case tho Image
"This is the best data available" is not really a defense about using inadequate data. If you don't have the data to answer a question, then it's not a surprise that your study fails to find an effect I think
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
10 Mar
This should not be the default position. There is likely only a modest marginal benefit for rich countries from vaccinating young people, while developing nations would benefit enormously from these doses
Don't misunderstand - I think eventually most people should be vaccinated (including youths), but the benefit to the US of vaccinating 100% of its citizenry right now pales in comparison to the benefit of sharing those vaccines with other nations
People are missing the point. I'm not saying that the US should not vaccinate people, but the benefit to the US (and other rich countries) of vaccinating everyone before sharing *at all* is tiny compared to the benefit that those doses could have
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Mar
@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom My favorite part of this is that we can actually do a fairly basic empirical test of whether the idea that twitter royalty is required to be a FB fact-checker is true, or whether it's simply a correlation due to pandemic expertise by looking at pre-pandemic follower counts
@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom Of the people quoted for the healthfeedback piece, the median number of twitter followers was 4,514, with two people having well below 1,000 prior to COVID-19. The mean is skewed up to 35k by Topol
@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom The mean/median increase in followers for these 6 accounts is 3,100/1,500%, with @angie_rasmussen and @BillHanage both having a >50x increase in their follower counts since 2019 according to wayback.org
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Mar
Recently this paper was published purporting to show that staying at home does not prevent COVID-19 deaths

I don't think the evidence provided supports that at all!

Some peer-review on twitter 1/n
2/n Paper is here, it's a pretty simple ecological study comparing countries on their deaths/million from COVID-19 and Google mobility data nature.com/articles/s4159…
3/n The authors modelled the impact of time spent in "residential" areas as shown by Google against number of COVID-19 deaths in different areas, and in most cases found that there was no significant explanatory power for this model
Read 22 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
8 Mar
It was always predictable that COVID-19 denialism would morph into anti-vaccine advocacy because it was never about public health, it was always about attacking government measures
The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by an organisation that promotes tobacco smoking, denies global warming, and lies about asbestos. There's a reason no serious public health scientists signed it!
If your entire philosophy is predicated on reactionary outrage over any government intervention it's pretty much a given that you'd move on to being anti-vaccine when safe+effective vaccines came out for COVID
Read 4 tweets

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