So I don't know if other people came across this, but it looks like a couple of studies that spruiked ivermectin were actually a hoax / academic fraud. Aside from the people ingesting horse paste, the academic fraud is another story in it's own right.
Quote:
It appears that one of the pivotal, key trials of ivermectin in humans may be an elaborate work of scientific fraud. It's hard to know if the study even happened. If true, this may mean that ivermectin has absolutely no benefit for COVID-19, and 10s of millions of people worldwide have been scammed.
...
it is a preprinted paper published on Research Square by a group of doctors from Egypt. The study is titled “Efficacy and Safety of Ivermectin for Treatment and prophylaxis of COVID-19 Pandemic”, and is quite impressive on face value, with the authors recruiting 400 people with COVID-19 and 200 close contacts and randomly allocating them to either get ivermectin or a placebo. Amazingly, the study found that people treated with ivermectin were 90% less likely to die than people who got the placebo, which if true would make ivermectin the most incredibly effective treatment ever to be discovered in modern medicine.
...
excluding just this single piece of research from various meta-analytic models almost entirely reverses their results. It's not an exaggeration to say that this one piece of research is driving almost all of the benefit that people currently attribute to ivermectin.
...
However, even at first glance there are some problems. The authors used the wrong statistical tests for some of their results — for technical people, they report chi-squared values for continuous numeric data — and their methodology is filled with holes. They don't report any allocation concealment, there are questions over whether there was an intention-to-treat protocol or people were shifted between groups, and the randomization information is woefully inadequate. As a study, it looks very likely to be biased, making the results quite hard to trust.
But that's perhaps not surprising, given that
it's possible the study never even happened....
the entire introduction appears to be plagiarized. Indeed, it's very easy to confirm this — I copy+pasted a few phrases from different paragraphs into Google and it is immediately apparent that most of the introduction has been lifted from elsewhere online without attribution or acknowledgement.
...
For example, there are numbers that are incredibly unlikely, verging on impossible. In table 4, the study shows mean, standard deviation, and ranges for recovery time in patients within the study. The issue is that with a reported range of 9-25 days, a mean of 18 and a standard deviation of 8 there are very few configurations of numbers that would leave you with this result. You can even calculate this yourself using the SPRITE tool developed by the clever fraud detectives James Heathers, Nick Brown, Jordan Anaya, and Tim Van Der Zee —
to have a mean of 18 days consistent with the other values, the majority of the patients in this group would have to have stayed in the hospital for either 9 or 25 days exactly. Now that might not be entirely impossible, but it's so odd that it raises very serious questions about the results of the trial itself.
...
the study reports getting ethical approval and beginning on the 8th of June, 2020, but in the data file uploaded by the authors onto the website of the preprint fully 1/3 of the people who died from COVID-19 were already dead when the researchers started to recruit their patients. Unless they were getting dead people to consent to participate in the trial, that's not really possible.
...
Moreover, about 25% of the entire group of patients who were recruited for this supposedly prospective randomized trial appear to have been hospitalized before the study even started, which is either a mind-boggling breach of ethics or a very bad sign of potential fraud. Even worse, if you look at the values for different patients, it appears that most of group 4 are simply clones of each other, with the same or largely similar initials, comorbidities, lymphocyte scores, etc.
A second paper, from Argentina (by a doctor Hector Carvallo) is also under dispute.
Quote:
For anti-vaccine activists, the clinical trial results couldn't have been better. The drug ivermectin, scientists in Argentina announced last year,
prevented 100% of COVID-19 infections.
...
But there are signs that at least some of the experiments — as written up in a paper published in November — didn't happen as advertised.
...
The numbers, genders, and ages of the study's participants were inconsistent. A hospital named in the paper as taking part in the experiments said it has no record of it happening. Health officials in the province of Buenos Aires have also said that they also have no record of the study receiving local approval.
...
And the researcher overseeing the project, Hector Carvallo, a retired endocrinologist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, has declined to widely share his data — including with one of his own collaborators, emails show.
Ivermectin is so effective at treating Covid that it makes you younger and changes your gender. Seriously who is to doubt the near-miraculous properties of a drug that can take a 48 year old man of German descent and turn him into a 25 year old Latina woman? All while preventing Covid!