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14 Sep, 5 tweets, 2 min read
My favourite wildly silly headline of the week (maybe the month)

No, Botox probably isn't protecting people from COVID-19
The study is here, and it's literally just a retrospective analysis of about 200 people who got Botox for a variety of things and were then asked if they had symptoms consistent with COVID-19 ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
I mean...literally. That's the whole study
There are INNUMERABLE confounders that might get in the way of the relationship between Botox and catching COVID (SES anyone?) so...no, this doesn't mean very much
To be fair to the authors, they didn't say it mean very much, and didn't even propose using this as a treatment, so I'd put the blame squarely on the Mail for this shocker

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
13 Sep
It's amazing how stuff like this gets created and spread. This is absolute nonsense, but unless you know quite a bit it's hard to understand why
The designation of "ivermectin" vs "non-ivermectin" countries is based on Mass Drug Administration campaigns (MDAs), which are used in Africa to combat endemic parasitic diseases
Those MDAs are aimed at eliminating river blindness, and are amazingly effective. They use (among other things) 1/2/4-yearly doses of ivermectin which are given to a large % of the countries in question
Read 9 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
13 Sep
This preprint looking at the risk of vaccine-related side-effects vs COVID-19 infections for children has received a lot of attention, and people have been asking my opinions on it. So, a few thoughts 1/n
2/n The preprint itself is pretty simple - comparing the calculated risk per million vaccines of having a VAERS report consistent with myo/pericarditis (CAE) with the number of COVID hospitalizations per 100,000 children aged 12-17
3/n The authors found that the rate of VAERS reports consistent with myocarditis was higher than the average rate of COVID hospitalizations per 100,000 children in a population where there was a reasonably high current prevalence of COVID-19
Read 19 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
12 Sep
Can't wait until the pandemic is over and I have to fly 24 hours across the world to pin up a poster and sleep my way through 3 days of presentations again
I kid, conferences are of course immensely important networking opportunities without which I would never have gotten drunk at 2am while eating tteokbokki in Seoul, or gone whiskey-tasting in Dublin
I still have notes from both of those conferences, and while unintelligible they are a great reminder of some wonderful collegiate hangovers with my peers
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
10 Sep
This graphic has been passed around a lot by the ivermectin crowd, so I thought I'd very briefly explain why it's quite clearly incorrect 1/10
2/10 The graphic is based on this preprint on medrxiv, which appears to make several mistakes that lead to a lack of much meaning in the final outcomes of the analysis
3/10 The basic idea of the paper is to split countries up by their use of ivermectin to treat river blindness, and then compare them based on COVID-19 deaths

There are two main issues with this
Read 13 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Sep
Today I've been sent what looks like real data collected by real doctors, and I say that because it looks very much like a keyboard-happy 4 year old has gone wild at a paper spreadsheet with his crayons and glue and someone uploaded that onto Excel
If you don't have to spend at least 30 minutes cleaning data before you can use it, was it really collected at all?
Note: I absolutely love doctors, and this is not at all a dig. The key is to make sure you've got a data management person on the team so that they can audit this stuff BEFORE it gets to the analysis stage!
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Sep
This letter has been published in the AJT, claiming that

a) The Elgazzar study is not withdrawn
b) Even if it is, this makes no difference to meta-analyses of ivermectin

Some thoughts about why this is very misleading and/or simply wrong 1/n
2/n For the first claim, it is rather fascinating to see the defense that the authors have chosen. As a reminder, most of this study was plagiarized, and the dataset the authors UPLOADED THEMSELVES was fake gidmk.medium.com/is-ivermectin-…
3/n Even if you dislike me personally for whatever reason, several independent experts on fraud confirmed that this data cannot possibly have come from a real RCT i.e. steamtraen.blogspot.com/2021/07/Some-p…
Read 15 tweets

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