An interesting new study - systematic review and meta-analysis for ivermectin. Found:

- no benefit for all-cause mortality
- no benefit for length of stay

Both very low-quality evidence
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
I haven't had time to read it in extreme detail yet, but a quick skim seems to show that it is a fairly good piece of research that the authors have already improved in the 24 hours since it went online
Arguably the most important point of the study - the vast majority of evidence on ivermectin for COVID-19 appears to be of extremely poor quality even when you limit the results only to the best studies
I should say - it is yet another enormous, hideous black mark against our scientific nous during this pandemic that the evidence we have about a treatment that has been given to 100s of millions of people is "very low" quality

Shameful, really
Even if ivermectin is useless, we should have more than a handful of awful trials about it

And we don't

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More from @GidMK

27 May
This is a bizarre take. The evidence has stayed precisely the same - natural origin very likely, lab leak thus far entirely unproven and a very low chance

The rest is mostly misconceptions caused by reading only sensationalist headlines
There is an excellent and comprehensive thread on the issue here, but the basic point is that experts pretty much universally agree that a natural origin is by far the most likely explanation
It is POSSIBLE that there was a lab leak and THIS SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED, but it is also only a very SMALL possibility and certainly not more likely than a natural explanation
Read 7 tweets
26 May
People* who are short-sighted sleep WORSE** than those with normal vision***, study finds****

*University students
**Have slightly different markers of melatonin
***p=0.04
****n=32

🙄🙄🙄🙄
The study is here, and I mean...sure? Look at a few uni students, see if the melatonin is different between them

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33030546/
It's just not really much of a finding, and it's definitely not enough to even demonstrate that there is a solid difference between people with and without myopia
Read 4 tweets
24 May
Stumbled on this paper about a retracted vitamin D study last year, and it is a WILD RIDE

This paper got 100,000s of downloads on SSRN, and changed worldwide policy

It also might have been...entirely fraudulent?

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
You might not remember the paper, but it was a HUGE DEAL back in mid-2020

It claimed that survival of patients in Indonesia was essentially entirely dependent on vitamin D levels
It was also removed (without any notes) from SSRN sometime in June 2020. Disappeared without a trace

Read 8 tweets
24 May
So, this is still ongoing, but I think there's an important lesson here in how wildly problematic academic debate is as a forum during a pandemic
The bottom line is pretty depressing - we've spent months arguing back and forth, meanwhile this paper has had a HUGE impact and probably impacted policy decisions across the world
Thing is, our debate about this article has been FAST by academic standards

Three letters/responses for a single article published in 6 months? Snappy by many standards
Read 10 tweets
24 May
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
Read 14 tweets
22 May
There is now some reasonably strong evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 ("lockdowns") were associated with decreased short-term suicides in several locations in the world
In a number of other places, while not associated with a decrease, they were also not associated with an increase either. In fact, best evidence suggests no link between lockdowns and an increased short-term suicide rate
One of the most bizarre things is that whenever you point out the fact that suicide rates have not generally increased during lockdowns or indeed the pandemic, people get very angry at you

Personally, I think it's quite a good thing that there have been fewer suicides
Read 5 tweets

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