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

I am one of those people that would trust Ivermectin more for treating (or prevention) of COVID compared to a mRNA-based vaccine and I have plenty of reasons for thinking so.

Some reasons I would avoid mRNA based vaccines:

- There's plenty of strokes into my family and I worry that I could easily get a stroke as well, perhaps due to genetically smaller arteries in my head (just a hunch). Seems many deaths of mRNA based vaccines were caused by blood clots.

- Looking at the numbers, I really don't believe COVID is very dangerous for most people. COVID is mostly dangerous for obese people, old people, people with co-morbidities and for those people it might make sense to use a vaccine (same we used to do with the flu every year).

- I feel the number of reported deaths are not correct, since in many countries, if people die with COVID, it's reported as a COVID death, while people might have died from e.g. cancer. As such, actual deaths are probably much lower.

- The media's unfair and sensationalist reporting of "horse dewormer" is one of the reasons I don't trust big media anymore (and there's many others in the past as well).

- Overall, Ivermectin is really very safe when using dosages based on body weight. It's cheap and easy to get. It's easy to mass produce. So even if Ivermectin would not work, there's very little risk when using the medicine responsibly.

- I've read many articles and looked at graphs of countries using Ivermectin and to me it seems there's a clear relation with the use of Ivermectin and the reduction in deaths and COVID cases.

- Even if the whole world would take the vaccine, it's very unlikely we'd stop COVID due to immune escape. Several sources already believe COVID is here to stay, like the flu. And I don't wanna bother to take every year a booster for some COVID mutation.

- In my view we can't be sure if the mRNA vaccines are totally safe in the long run. I will wait a couple of years (5 or more) and see if people receive any adverse long term effects. If not, I will be ok to accept mRNA-based vaccines in the future, but not going to take one right now.

- I was actually open to get the (traditional, e.g. weakened or killed off virus) Sinovac vaccine for COVID if it would make movement around easier in Thailand, but since Thailand now wants to combine the Sinovac vaccine with AstraZeneca, I won't bother.

population normalized death incidence is down by 10x in vaccinated over unvaccinated (which includes recovered individuals in with the unvaccinated, so the number compared to susceptible is probably 20x). with a bit over half the population vaccinated that suggests that at least the 100,000 deaths since june would have been twice as bad without vaccinations. not including any effects of vaccination on reducing infection/transmission (and for all the hype about "waning" the protection against infection is still substantial).

There more studies you include, the greater the chance you'll get a bad one. If you look at where these meta-analyses often fail, you'll often see just a few "Bad" studies that end up corrupting their results.

You'd think the statistical tools they bring to bear in these would be resistant to this, but it appears to not be the case in several recent cases.

>Regarding Ivermectin, The Desert Review covers it extensively to the point where you would think this is an Ivermectin promotion source. Perhaps it is as nearly every article talks about the positive virtues of Ivermectin such as this Gaslighting Ivermectin, vaccines and the pandemic for profit and this The great Ivermectin deworming hoax. Many pro-Ivermectin opinion articles are written by Justus R. Hope, MD., who admits this name is a pseudonym underneath the articles he writes.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-desert-review-bias/

If you are concerned about wasting money, consider that for one dose of (also unproven!) medication like convalescent plasma you could buy about a thousand doses of generic, cheap drugs like ivermectin. And that has been tried about 500000 times, still is unproven but is not considered controversial.