The most important work that I've done this year - we found that the IFR of COVID-19 is double as high in developing countries compared to high-income places medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
(The graph above is a new figure that will soon be in the updated medrxiv preprint)
As you can see from the figure above, this difference is largest in young people and tapers off in the elderly. By age 80, the IFR is only 1.3x higher in developing countries than high-income areas
This MAY (emphasis on the may) be because the treatments we've got for the disease have the biggest impacts on people who already have a good chance of surviving, and the reductions are less evidence in older people
But, as we note in the paper, it is a global tragedy that a Zambian 20-year-old (for example) is nearly three times more likely to die if they catch COVID-19 than a Belgian person of the same age
Also, we looked at death rates before vaccines were widespread to avoid that confounding factor. It's likely this divergence has grown substantially as high-income nations have immunized their populations while ignoring developing countries
(The example of Zambia vs Belgium were simply two studies that assessed IFR. Zambia was included in our analysis)
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One of the more depressing things about all these god-awful ivermectin "analyses" is how much they muddy the water if the drug DOES prove effective to some degree
I mean, it's entirely possible (some would reasonably argue likely) that ivermectin has a benefit for COVID-19! It's extremely unlikely that the benefit is large, but a small benefit is still very much on the cards
We may end up being quite certain that ivermectin reduces the death rate from COVID-19 by, say, 10%. That would be important, and the medication would be a useful part of the toolkit for treatment of the disease
I'm still quite surprised at the complete and utter lack of basic integrity that has some ivermectin proponents arguing that the literature is fine because there is an "expected" rate of fraud and misconduct which has not been exceeded
This bizarre narrative states that the fraud in the ivermectin space isn't an issue because every scientific area has fraud and therefore we're just seeing exactly what we'd anticipate for any treatment
This is just genuinely nonsensical. Most of the fraudulent studies have been the most hugely positive, and there are serious concerns with many of the other papers
In the video, Dr. John Campbell repeats the claim that, since Covid-19 claims dropped after the 13th of August, and as this was the point that ivermectin was "allowed as a treatment", this means that ivermectin had some massive implied benefit
But, as Dr. Campbell notes, there was no policy change in Japan on the 13th of August. There was absolutely no difference in terms of patient care before or after this "intervention"
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
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
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