Let's take a look at this meta analysis of Ivermectin. First it is important to make several points:
- The meta-analysis was done by research team are associated with a British pro-ivermectin organization and the money for the research was raised by a GoFundMe campaign headlined “Help us get a life-saving drug approved for COVID-19.”
- The bulk of the data points in the meta analysis was from the large 600-patient trial Egyptian study of Ivermectin. The Egyptian study was withdrawn for being completely fraudulent.
- Dropping the Egyptian results from the meta-analysis changes the conclusion about ivermectin completely. According to Australian epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, if one removes the Egypt data and re-runs the meta-analysis, “the benefit...largely loses its statistical significance.” In other words, ivermectin has no effect on COVID-19.
Let's go read the information about this meta analysis
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-07-22/ivermectin-another-bogus-covid-treatment
So let’s take a look at the evidence for ivermectin as a COVID treatment. Cutting to the chase: There isn’t any evidence with scientific validity.
The most recent research paper invoked to support the use of ivermectin is a meta-analysis purporting to find that administering the drug to COVID patients reduced the risk of death by an average 62%. This is a spectacular result, if true.
Meta-analyses are done by aggregating results from many smaller studies to produce a large study sample with credible statistical power. In this case the researchers combined 15 clinical trials with a total of 2,438 participants. As Gorski and others point out, though, meta-analyses are only as good as their raw material, a phenomenon Gorski labels “garbage in, garbage out.”
In this analysis, the quality of the components is poor; many are too small to have useful results, in some cases the subjects are poorly described so that the meta-analysts can’t tell what’s being measured.
All the members of the research team are associated with a British pro-ivermectin organization and the money for the research was raised by a GoFundMe campaign headlined “Help us get a life-saving drug approved for COVID-19.”
The biggest problem with the meta-analysis concerned one of its key component studies. This was a 600-patient trial conducted by Egyptian researchers in 2020 that found a strong therapeutic effect. As data researchers
Nick Brown and
Jack Lawrence showed, however, there were glaring problems with that trial, its data and the report itself.
To begin with, Lawrence found what he termed
“significant levels of plagiarism” in the report. Brown found that the data were a mess, with indications that some of the data were duplicated within the report. The results, he concluded, had “probably been extensively manipulated by hand.”
The report was not peer-reviewed before publication, so it probably should never have been incorporated in the meta-analysis at all. At any rate, on July 14, as the Brown and Lawrence reports went online, the preprint server that had published the Egyptian paper withdrew it
“due to an expression of concern” that is “now under formal investigation.”
Dropping the Egyptian results from the meta-analysis changes the conclusion about ivermectin completely. According to Australian epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, if one removes the Egypt data and re-runs the meta-analysis, “the benefit...largely loses its statistical significance.” In other words, ivermectin has no effect on COVID-19.
That wouldn’t be a surprise to the
World Health Organization, the
Food and Drug Administration or, indeed,
Merck, a manufacturer of ivermectin. The drug company says there is “no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and; a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”
To put it another way, the ivermectin craze could threaten your health and the health of the community.
“The rather horrifying reality is that there have been enormous numbers of people treated with ivermectin largely based on a trial that, if it is not entirely fraudulent, is so flawed that it should never have been used for any treatment decisions anyway,” Meyerowitz-Katz remarked in reference to the Egyptian paper.
The same thing happened with hydroxychloroquine. Legions of people were misled by the promotion of a supposed remedy that was not only ineffective, but dangerous. Money and time were spent on clinical trials to debunk claims for a drug that should never have been part of the anti-COVID arsenal in the first place.
Now the same process is happening with ivermectin. Let’s be clear: Information about the drug isn’t being “suppressed” for political reasons. It’s being treated as what it is: dangerous misinformation.
