The ivermectin literature is full of fraud

What can we do about it?

Our new paper in @NatureMedicine argues that we need a systematic change to counter this issue

nature.com/articles/s4159…
The basic issue is that science works on trust. We assume that no one would ever fake a study, because it's ethically and morally indefensible, and work with that

Which makes it very easy for people to fake studies
However, people generally aren't very good at faking things. There are dozens of very simple checks you can run on data to see if it's real

Problem is, you need the data to do that
So, the solution: if you are going to meta-analyze clinical research, and particularly clinical research on Covid-19 drugs, you should ask authors to provide their anonymized, individual patient data
If people refuse or fail to send through minimal datasets, it should be a red flag and the study rated as high risk of bias

It takes more work, but the alternative is accepting that our opinions may be based on fraud

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More from @GidMK

23 Sep
I cannot believe the question was asked, and the response is even more absurd

No, the pandemic is not a "social construct" what utter garbage Image
Even the explanation of why the pandemic is "socially constructed" is total nonsense. That we may have had a different response without technology does not mean that what we are doing now is "constructed" in a philosophical sense
I mean, if the pandemic had happened 3 decades ago it's almost certain that the death toll would be FAR higher, so we might have actually had a MORE intensive regulatory response
Read 5 tweets
21 Sep
It is demonstrably false to claim that intubation has led to more deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has not stopped Professor Ioannidis making the claim repeatedly

sciencebasedmedicine.org/intubations/
I also find the persistent myth that Prof Ioannidis promotes that death certification has lead to more Covid-19 deaths rather odd. I cannot find any basis for this in the literature he cites
For example, in this recent paper he makes the same claim and cites two papers. One is simply a guide to death certification, and not really an assessment of errors
Read 7 tweets
21 Sep
People promoting ivermectin keep saying "But what about Uttar Pradesh!!" as if this analysis wasn't truly woeful and totally incorrect

A short thread 1/10
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
Read 11 tweets
20 Sep
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
Read 4 tweets
18 Sep
"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
Read 7 tweets
16 Sep
COST OF A VACCINE: ~$30 USD

COST OF A SYMPTOMATIC COVID-19 CASE: ~$3,500 USD
Source for this estimate:healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.13…

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 🤷‍♂️
Read 4 tweets

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