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May 24, 2021 14 tweets 6 min read Read on X
1/n Some more movement on this study from earlier in the year by Drs Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, Oh, and Bendavid

Along with @lonnibesancon, @FLAHAULT, and others, we've published a series of responses and ongoing critiques of the piece
2/n The newest response is here, and you can have a look at the previous discussion as well:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ec…
3/n For reference, if you've forgotten, the original article basically argued that "more" restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (mrNPIs) such as lockdowns didn't work to prevent COVID-19 cases

It is MASSIVELY popular, with an Altmetric of 19k and dozens of citations
4/n Our basic arguments are pretty simple:

1. Sample size - this study uses a very small sample. That's not really debated by the authors, and it's a limitation
5/n (Weirdly, they have also contradicted their original paper in the replies to the piece - where before they said that their paper had data for every country available, they're now saying they applied a strange exclusion)
6/n 2. The classification of countries as "high" or "low" restriction is arbitrary. In their reply, the authors literally just contradicted us, so we've now got quite a bit of text demonstrating why this is an issue
7/n This is pretty simple - if you don't explain why (say) South Korea is a "low" restriction country, how can we compare it to "high" restriction ones? The categorization is fundamental to the entire paper
8/n 3. Issues with the model. In particular, the policy variable
9/n 4. Issues with the use of time lags, and the time period studied

In particular, the authors say that they analyzed the data up until the "elimination of rapid growth in the first wave"
10/n This is a problem because it means that the analysis is entirely limited to the 'upwards' part of the epidemic curve

If mrNPIs have an effect that is mostly seen on the decline, this would by definition be missed
11/n 5. While we also had some quibbles about language, the final major argument is to do with the model again
12/n Ultimately, we still have the same overall gripe. It is pretty much impossible from the evidence presented in the original research to conclude that mrNPIs work or do not
13/n Indeed, as we point out, unless the authors spend some time delineating exactly what a "more" or "less" restrictive response to COVID-19 actually is, there isn't much you can take home from the analysis anyway
14/n My personal position remains mostly the same on these interventions, that more restrictive ones probably weren't that beneficial in the early days of the pandemic, but that it's really, really hard to know either way

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More from @GidMK

Mar 4
The final large published trial on ivermectin for COVID-19, PRINCIPLE, is now out. Main findings:

1. Clinically unimportant (~1-2day reduction) in time to resolution of symptoms.
2. No benefit for hospitalization/death. Image
Now, you may be asking "why does anyone care at all any more about ivermectin for COVID?" to which I would respond "yes"

We already knew pretty much everything this study shows. That being said, always good to have more data!
The study is here:

For me, the main finding is pretty simple - ivermectin didn't impact the likelihood of people going to hospital or dying from COVID-19. This has now been shown in every high-quality study out there.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38431155/
Read 8 tweets
Feb 20
Fascinating study.

What's particularly interesting is a finding that the authors don't really discuss in their conclusion. These results appear to show that gender affirming care is associated with a reduction in suicide risk 1/n
2/n The paper is a retrospective cohort study that compares young adults and some teens who were referred for gender related services in Finland with a cohort that was matched using age and sex. The median age in the study was 19, so the majority of the population are adults. Image
3/n The study is very limited. The authors had access to the Finnish registries which include a wide range of data, but chose to only correct their cohorts for age, sex, and number of psychiatric appointments prior to their inclusion in the cohort.
Read 11 tweets
Oct 26, 2023
These headlines have to be some of the most ridiculous I've seen in a while

The study tested 18 different PFAS in a tiny sample of 176 people. Of those, one had a barely significant association with thyroid cancer

This is genuinely just not news at all Image
Here's the study. I'm somewhat surprised it even got published if I'm honest. A tiny case-control study, they looked at 88 people with thyroid cancer and 88 controls thelancet.com/journals/ebiom…
Here are the main results. There was a single measured PFAS which had a 'significant' association with the cancer, the others just look a bit like noise to me Image
Read 7 tweets
Oct 11, 2023
A new study has gone viral for purportedly showing that running therapy had similar efficacy to medication for depression

Which is weird, because a) it's not a very good study and b) seems not to show that at all 1/n
Image
Image
2/n The study is here. The authors describe it as a "partially randomized patient preference design", which is a wildly misleading term. In practice, this is simply a cohort study, where ~90% of the patients self-selected into their preferred treatment sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
3/n This is a big problem, because it means that there are likely confounding factors between the two groups (i.e. who is likely to choose running therapy over meds?). Instead of a useful, randomized trial, this is a very small (n=141) non-randomized paper
Read 15 tweets
Oct 6, 2023
This is SO MISLEADING

The study showed that COVID-19 had, if anything, very few long-term issues for children! As a new father, I find this data very reassuring regarding #LongCovid in kids 1/n Image
2/n The study is here, it's a retrospective cohort comparing children aged 0-14 who had COVID-19 to a matched control using a database of primary care visits in Italy
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ap…
3/ The authors found that there was an increased risk of a range of diagnoses for the kids with COVID-19 after their acute disease, including things like runny noses, anxiety/depression, diarrhoea, etc Image
Read 13 tweets
Sep 20, 2023
This study has recently gone viral, with people saying that it shows that nearly 20% of highly vaccinated people get Long COVID

I don't think it's reasonable to draw these conclusions based on this research. Let's talk about bias 1/n Image
2/n The study is here. It is a survey of people who tested positive to COVID-19 in Western Australia from July-Aug 2022 medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
3/n This immediately gives us our first source of bias

We KNOW that most cases of COVID-19 were missed at this point in the pandemic, so we're only getting the sample of those people who were sick enough to go and get tested
Read 12 tweets

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