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Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

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Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#411

Post by unreal37 »

rajin444 wrote: post #248
VikingCoder wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unproven != disproven. How many people have been convinced by the supposed effectiveness of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine that they then decided to not get vaccinated? It's really not as simple as "unproven != disproven".

How many people were convinced of the "95+%" effectiveness of the vaccine only to learn that it fades? Why weren't they told it would fade up front?

I certainly knew last year, as we were watching the stage-1 stage-2 trial results come out, that "how long it lasts" was not known. The news was even saying, it may need to be renewed every few years.

And I'm not really a big follower of science. I just assumed it was like "the flu shot" which you need to get every year.

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#412

Post by OrvalWintermute »

simpleguitar wrote: post #93
ajross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes the quality of scientific research in this area has been rather bad with rushes to publish and ineffective peer review Well, sure, but what else is new? The Ivermectin paper was surely bad, but it wasn't outrageously bad nor unexpectedly so. The mania that resulted isn't, at it's core, about bad science. This won't fix the problem.

> The Ivermectin paper was surely bad, but it wasn't outrageously bad nor unexpectedly so. Oh, yes it was bad. Very very bad. Outrageously bad. The data was mostly fabricated: https://gidmk.medium.com/is-ivermectin-for-covid-19-based-on...

> Ivermectin is an antiparasitic medication used to treat various types of worms and similar diseases. It’s pretty safe, widely in use across the world, and in most ways a useful medication to have on hand if you think you’ve been exposed to contaminated human feces, or if you just need to disinfect your sheep.

Ivermectin is an antiparasitic, but it also has well-known antiviral properties too [1] [2] against Dengue Fever & Yellow Fever, to name two.

The fact that Ivermectin is in Standard of Care for several viral diseases, and he is describing it as an anti-parasitic purely, is indicative of something sordid. Either he is ignorant of the literature (unlikely, it is common knowledge and he claims to be an Epidemiologist), he is pushing a narrative (high potential), he doesn't believe the copious amounts of literature on the use of ivermectin as an anti-viral (again, unlikely), he is minimizing mentioning it for editorial reasons (not a chance, he writes long.....), he misread several viral diseases as actually being worm parasite based (not probable), or he is intentionally misinforming his readers.

This is all regardless of a position about whether or not it is an effective antiviral in the case of this specific virus, or should we say, series of variants.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327999/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22535622/

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#413

Post by timr »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #366
aabaker99 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also skeptical of meta-analyses. I will re-post some thoughts I have previously shared from John P.A. Ioannidis who is a professor of medicine and thoughtful critic of medical research. He often raises good points about trends in research and research ethics. His view is that meta-analyses are mass produced, redundant, misleading, and conflicted [1]! One criticism of meta-analyses in [1], using anti-depressants…

> I will re-post some thoughts I have previously shared from John P.A. Ioannidis who is a professor of medicine and thoughtful critic of medical research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis#COVID-19 > In an editorial on STAT published March 17, 2020, Ioannidis called the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic a "once-in-a-century evidence fiasco" and wrote that lockdowns were likely an overreaction to unre…

Your comment is the worst kind of ad hominem. You're simply dismissing one of the most-cited scientists in the world because he wrote something you disagree with.

He was right about the IFR for Covid-19, by the way. Subsequent research has upheld the finding. The primary factor that influences average IFR is the age of the population you're looking at:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554

> All systematic evaluations of seroprevalence data converge that SARS-CoV-2 infection is widely spread globally. Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1

> The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85. Moreover, our results indicate that about 90% of the variation in population IFR across geographical locations reflects differences in the age composition of the population and the extent to which relatively vulnerable age groups were exposed to the virus.

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#414

Post by OrvalWintermute »

tedunangst wrote: post #264
cyounkins wrote: post #224

There is a lot of confusion on whether there actually was a significant increase in calls to poison control centers due to ingestion of ivermectin. This [1] official Mississippi government document says, "At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers." But then the AP [2] seemed to say that was incorrect: "The As…

There was an absurd rush to report that ivermectin is bad that resulted in a pretty bad breakdown of the fact checking process. A lot of semi-adjacent facts and statements got merged. A hospital is full and a hospital treated someone for overdose became all the hospitals are filled with overdose victims. (I think eating horse paste is dumb, but that doesn't excuse rolling stone lying about the consequences of doing s…

> A lot of semi-adjacent facts and statements got merged. A hospital is full and a hospital treated someone for overdose became all the hospitals are filled with overdose victims.

I thought they said gunshot victims weren't getting treated in some podunk tiny town of less than 10k residents, then they plagiarized a photo to add a racial element, using African Americans, then spread the story everywhere?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/rolling-stone-covid-19-deb...

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#415

Post by unreal37 »

threeseed wrote: post #241
cableshaft wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine found a doctor to prescribe it but his pharmacy won't fill it. He is so pissed. He was only planning to take small doses here or there as he's a teacher and around sick kids all the time, as if it were like Zinc to hopefully help reduce the severity of Covid-19 if he does get it, but despite going through the effort and succeeding in finding a doctor willing to prescribe it (and my friend even signed…

> pharmacy shouldn't be allowed to decide not to fill it, as if they know better than your doctor They are legally required to make decisions about whether or not to fill it. They are not just some supermarket cashier.

Pharmacists go to school 4-6 years to learn about drugs. But hey - they don't get to use any of that knowledge in their job... "Just give me the little white box in cabinet #2 please."

Why do Pharmacists even study and train for up to 6 years if you don't want their opinion on how this drug will affect you?

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#416

Post by angelzen »

saalweachter wrote: post #79
ashtonkem wrote: post #26

The other takeaway is that preprint publication is a pathway ripe for abuse. The major paper that drove most of this situation, and the meta analysis, appears to have been a straight up fraud. But it got circulated a lot as a preprint to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. If the preprint had been more private, this might have been averted.

> ... to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. It's worse than that; if you're reading individual papers without the context of the larger body of research in a domain, you're setting yourself up to get a distorted view of the world. Peer review isn't magic; peer reviewed papers can still have errors, oversights, mistakes, outright fraud, or just get unlucky in how…

This is a very important point. It is incredibly easy to accidentally cherry pick and/or misread results that confirm one's preexisting bias. As a layperson, the default stance is 'I don't know'. Scanning the abstract of a handful of papers for 5 minutes cannot possibly change that stance.

The troubling thought is that in a field as complex and poorly understood as the intersection of virology with immunology at scale in the middle of a pandemic, the Experts are not much more informed than the layperson. I have yet to hear a single Expert showing even a tiny sliver of epistemic humility.

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#417

Post by ufo »

listless wrote: post #292
doliveira wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you guys should take a look at Brazil as a cautionary tale for what happens when these miracle treatments are adopted by politically inclined doctors and sold to the masses as the magical solution.

Source?

The most recent example would be the PreventSenior debacle:

https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/politica-brasil/exclusivo-...

https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-paulo/noticia/2021/08/26/cpi-rec...

Early into the pandemic, a health insurance company ran a fraudulent study to show that HCQ was effective at treating COVID. The patients were enrolled without their consent, the data was manipulated to remove people who died from the statistics, and doctors were pressured to prescribe HCQ and other medications that did not have proof that they are effective.

This fraud was intended to promote a political agenda of mass contamination. The people running the fraudulent study were in contact with high-ranking officials in the Bolsonaro government, by means of a so-called "shadow cabinet" of pro-HCQ doctors and businessmen. This shadow-cabinet bypassed the experts inside the health ministry, in order to promote the idea that the best way to get through the pandemic was to allow it to spread as fast as possible, and try to use HCQ to treat people when they inevitably got infected.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brazil...

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#418

Post by davidw »

tawmec wrote: post #340
davidw wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ohsu.edu/2021/09/17/five-oregonians-hospitalize... doesn't look retracted to me. Only stands to reason that if people are taking it kind of randomly, a few are going to screw up and take too much.

Not once in that article is an overdose mentioned.

So you're suggesting that taking even a regular dose might send people to the ICU?

Re: Lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are unreliable

#420

Post by ufo »

rory wrote: post #25

Ivermectin probably doesn't do anything to fight Covid-19, but the American media has really shown their corruption in the way they've treated it. It's clearly a safe drug to take in human-designed doses, and it's cheap to produce. Laughing at people for poisoning themselves with "horse dewormer" instead of pointing out that they are turning to the vet store because their access to medicine has been marginalized is s…

The human-designated dose of ivermectin is usually a one-time dose. One of the problems is that not only have some people use non-human doses, but there are also many who are on a continuous regimen of ivermectin. That can also be dangerous, because it is not how the drug was designed to be used!
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