The thing about reporting systems such as this is that they rely entirely on self-reports, which are themselves influenced by media attention. This makes comparisons problematic
The HPV vaccine is probably the most talked about product of all time, and even then we were lucky to get a single news story in a global publication once every few months since it was rolled out
Conversely, the Covid-19 vaccines have been headline news every day since May last year. Every person in the world has heard of them, and nearly half the planet has had one
Therefore, we would expect that there will be more reports of vaccine adverse events from Covid than other vaccines REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY ARE OCCURING MORE OR NOT
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The anonymous people behind ivm meta dot com have put together a response to this excellent piece. Their main argument is that it doesn't look at all the evidence
So, following Scott Alexander's fine example, let's briefly review the prophylaxis literature 1/n
2/n Here are all 15 prophylaxis studies, in their wonderful glory
I'm going to try and be brief, but we'll see how that goes
3/n First up, Shouman. In this 'randomized' study, the authors ceased allocating people into the control group at some point, no allocation concealment, and massive differences between groups at baseline
It's always fun being a debunker of sorts because whether people love it hate me depends on the popular myth du jour
I've had right-wing people super happy with me when I pointed out that fearmongering about glyphosate didn't really make sense, and very upset when I pointed out that fearmongering about lockdowns was also overblown
The low-carb people got really angry when I pointed out that the evidence isn't strong for any particular diet for long-term weightloss, but love me every time I note that meat is not as bad as headlines often paint it
One interesting thing that I think this underscores is how terrible people are at judging the benefits of treatments based on their own experience. The true figures show that people who had MATH+ may have been *more* likely to die
Now, I don't think that's likely to be causal - the treating clinicians were probably just giving the treatment to the sickest people - but the basic narrative supporting the FLCCC protocol has been clinical expertise
The central idea driving FLCCC is that these experts in clinical care - which make no mistake, they are - could tell based on their own recollections which treatments worked best
Wow. The key FLCCC paper on their main protocol has been retracted after understating the true number of deaths in the treatment group by ~78% retractionwatch.com/2021/11/09/bad…
From the hospital where this work was conducted:
"...a careful review of our data for patients with COVID-19...only 25 of 191 patients (13.1%) received all 4 MATH+ therapies, and their mortality rate was 28%" rather than 6.1% cited in the article
"This would be an incorrect calculation of a hospital mortality rate, but might explain the incorrect number of 6.1% in Table 2. Using this incorrect mortality
rate to compare with the published reports and claim a “75% absolute risk reduction” is thus an incorrect conclusion"
One of the weirdest things about the ivermectin discussion has been watching people go from "the evidence is good quality" to "it's just one fraud" to "lots of fraud isn't an issue" as the story has progressed
Most of the time, having the single biggest and most positive study looking at a topic withdrawn due to research misconduct would be enough for any researcher to reassess their position, but not with ivermectin!
Instead, people argue that it's fine because there's a "baseline" of fraud in other research, or because there are still (mostly null) trials which are not fraudulent