In Re-Analysis, Ivermectin Benefits Disappeared as Trial Quality Increased | Hacker News Reader

In Re-Analysis, Ivermectin Benefits Disappeared as Trial Quality Increased

medpagetoday.com

38 pointsnradov10 comments

"For the re-analysis, Andrew Hill, PhD, of the University of Liverpool in England, and colleagues included 12 studies with 2,628 participants, and assessed them for bias." https://ivmmeta.com/ lists 64 studies, and there's no mention in the re-analysis of how they selected the 12 studies that they decided to "re-analyse". Why not re-analyse all of them?

What is "medpagetoday"? Suspicious looking source.

EDIT:

Here's an archive link: https://archive.md/rTpkl

From the FLCCCA website: [1]

> All clinical trials suffer from risks of bias in their design and conduct, as assessed by the Cochrane Risk of Bias 2.0 tool that assesses trial biases with the grades of “some concern, low, moderate, high, or serious”. Although one group of authors has assessed many of the trials as having moderate to severe risks of bias, performing meta-analyses of these trials can more accurately detect the true effects despite individual trial biases. Multiple groups, including ours, have performed meta-analyses of these trials, with all groups finding consistent benefits amongst the trials. In fact, the consistency of trial results from both sets of randomized and observational controlled trials from varied centers and countries and trial sizes and disease phases lend even more validity to the estimates of benefit.

[1) https://covid19criticalcare.com/ivermectin-in-covid-19/faq-o...

Looking at the FLCCCA’s Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Line_COVID-19_Critical_C...

It doesn’t start out great:

> According to its co-president, Paul E. Marik, the group has a shared interest in vitamin C.

Apparently they’ve pushed a lot of unproven and not-so-great stuff:

> The group initially started promoting Marik's discredited sepsis treatment protocol as a treatment for COVID-19, and in April 2020 it circulated press releases promoting vitamin C, heparin, hydroxychloroquine and other drugs, before pivoting to ivermectin promotion in October 2020.

A former member of the group expressed skepticism about their approach and resigned over his concerns (there were only 10 people to start with)

> In August 2021 one doctor, Eric Osgood, resigned from the FLCCC because the group "may be contributing to people making the choice not to get vaccinated". Osgood commented: "If you're going to have a page that's dedicated to 'How do you prevent yourself from getting COVID?' that page can't not have vaccines at the top of it".

And apparently one of their members did this:

> In 2021, Fred Wagshul, a member of the FLCCC, prescribed ivermectin for a patient in a hospital in Ohio where he did not have admitting privileges.

Granted, I guess if you were cool with fringe ideas like Vitamin C cures coming into this, none of what I quoted here will change your mind. But this doesn’t strike me as a group I’d trust, even though they have a well-designed website.

What about the questionable practices of Pfizer? Or any other vaccine maker? Do those things somehow discredit the value of the vaccines? Because I’m pretty sure the stuff you dug up on FLCCCA is pretty trivial by comparison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer#Legal_issues

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna#Criticism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_%26_Johnson#Recalls_an...

And please don’t take this as “whataboutism”. I’m just making sure you’re consistent in your criticisms.

Wikipedia is not a group one should trust for medical and nutritional information or a fair & balanced view of most controversial topics, given its funding & obvious biases.

Marik is a respected doctor and visionary sepsis treater. His treatments as prescribed have never been tested--just isolated aspects of it at different timings than stipulated.

Read up on Paul Marik's Sepsis Treatment in more detail before criticizing it.

I found his initial journal article and several failed attempts to replicate his results: https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2021/03/02/sepsis...

Is there something I'm missing here? Seems pretty damning that nobody else saw the outcomes he did.

> His treatments as prescribed have never been tested

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems you find the lack of testing to increase the credibility of the treatments? How does that work?

Not a stats expert, but this just seems like a (intentional?) fundamental misconstruing of meta-analysis. My understanding is they correct for random error, not error due to flawed study design.

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