Today I decided to look at some of the terrible observational studies on ivermectin that I've mostly ignored, and wow
So far, one with Cohen's d of 2, another with d of 2.9
These are just...gibberish
In one study, every single person in the ivermectin group got better immediately, and every person in the control got much, much worse. In another, 100% of the ivermectin group stayed in hospital for a shorter amount of time than the control
These studies are just so wildly implausible that it's hard to understand why no one has raised these questions before. Either a single ivermectin pill entirely cures COVID or there's something fishy there
We've found definite fraud in the RCTs and larger observational trials, but I think it's worth noting that there is a very high probability that there are many more fraudulent studies in the mix as well. We simply do not have time to check every single one
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
2/10 The claim is pretty simple - Uttar Pradesh uses ivermectin a lot, therefore it's doing well on COVID as opposed to places that don't use ivermectin. Just look at the graphics!
3/10 This is quite transparent nonsense and it's easy to see why. Firstly, Uttar Pradesh officially incorporated ivermectin into treatment protocols and started using it in hospitals in Aug/Sept 2020
"There's enough behind ivermectin for COVID-19 that there must be something there"
This is a point that I find fascinating 🧵
See, thing is, most of the studies that supported the idea that there is a large benefit for ivermectin appear to be either fraudulent or so poorly conducted that they might as well be fake
On the other hand, the only large, well conducted trials seem to find either no benefit or at best quite a modest one
To be clear, this is very uncertain, but even at the lower bound of costs for largely asymptomatic young people, vaccines are cheaper than infections in the US
If 50% of all infections are fully asymptomatic, and most infections are in young people, the median cost of a COVID-19 infection might be as low as $100-$200 USD, which is still many times the cost of a vaccine 🤷♂️
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…
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
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