I think that's the ball park we need to get into. It is the best spent money one possibly can as Jed just wrote above.
NO.. Its a waste of money and time. Just spend them money for Ziverdo and rapid test kits. See Uttar Pradesh.
Why should we offer e.g. Pfizer crap to third world ?????
As a side note, thanks to covid we have started to have virtual coffee meetings, and the chat medium is sometimes lovely
and fun as your discussion is empowered with a better overview of the discussion and one can add references. To make my point enjoy the below.
X: Y: you will take the duty at kl 17. They have been calling a lot during em, from everywhere the world, ... I have not done anything thinking you will love to work on it ...
Y: X: I'm on it, bought me caffeine tablets, and bunker-ed up with coca cola and some blue pills that should be good from some guy at the town square who said the pill was great ...
Z: No white stuff?
Y: Z: well there was a red pill as well.
blue pill red pill
X: Viagra is blue, if I remembered correctly ...
X: You should have taken the red one, see "You take the blue pill—the story ends," according to Morpheus.
Y: lol, I'm not the kind that fights the bad guys, I just want to program and be with the kids, But that will bore the viewers and hence the story naturally ends there.
X: Y: I thought you where: "The one, the chosen one" as the Oracle prophesied, but I understand:. You wont stay in Wonderland then and you will never know how deep the rabbit hole goes, will you?
Y: No need for the pill, .. to tell you a secret, I am the programmer of the computer running the world, But I forgot to implement a guard for the self-referentialness that would be the consequences of taken the red pill.
Everybody: LOL
Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid 'miracle' drug
Another study from Iran seemed to show that ivermectin prevented people dying from Covid.
But the scientists who investigated it found issues. The records of how much iron was in patients' blood contained numbers in a sequence that was unlikely to come up naturally.
And the patients given the placebo turned out to have had much lower levels of oxygen in their blood before the trial started than those given ivermectin. So they were already sicker and statistically more likely to die.
But this pattern was repeated across a wide range of different measurements. The people with "bad" measurements ended up in the placebo group, the ones with "good" measurements in the ivermectin group.
The likelihood of this happening randomly across all these different measurements was vanishingly small, Dr Sheldrick said.
Dr Morteza Niaee, who led the Iran study, defended the results and the methodology and disagreed with problems pointed out to him, adding that it was "very normal to see such randomisation" when lots of different factors were considered and not all of them had any bearing on participants' Covid risk.
But the Lebanon and Iran trials were excluded from a paper for Cochrane - the international experts in reviewing scientific evidence - because they were "such poorly reported studies". The review concluded there was no evidence of benefit for ivermectin when it comes to Covid.
The largest and highest quality ivermectin study published so far is the Together trial at the McMaster University in Canada. It found no benefit for the drug when it comes to Covid.
and...
These channels have co-ordinated harassment of doctors who fail to prescribe ivermectin and abuse has been aimed at scientists. Prof Andrew Hill, from the University of Liverpool, wrote an influential positive review of ivermectin, originally saying the world should "get prepared, get supplies, get ready to approve [the drug]".
Now he says the studies don't stand up to scrutiny - but after he changed his view, based on new evidence emerging, he received vicious abuse.
A small number of qualified doctors have had an exaggerated influence on the ivermectin debate. Noted proponent Dr Pierre Kory's views have not changed despite the major questions over the trials. He criticised "superficial interpretations of emerging trials data".
Dr Tess Lawrie - a medical doctor who specialises in pregnancy and childbirth - founded the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (Bird) Group.
She has called for a pause to the Covid-19 vaccination programme and has made unsubstantiated claims implying the Covid vaccine had led to a large number of deaths based on a common misreading of safety data.
That is the science, not the politics.
It is interesting and worrisome that so many of the ivermectin advocates are strong antivaxxers. there is no reason why those supporting a drugs, if for scientific reasons, should be against the vaccines. Which adds evidence to the proposition that the pro-ivermectin crowd are biased and following prejudice.
But, I don't need that, or even want it. The evidence on ivermectin looks good in the wrong way. Low quality stuff ultra-good - some of it known bogus - some of it known fraudulent. (Bogus means could be fraudulent, or juts really bad methodology and systematic unconscious mistakes). FLCC, and other advocates, claim that RCTS, or any trial capable of testing ivermectin, would be unethical.
Even so - I'm not totally negative on ivermectin. It seems to do very little harm, and it has strong somatic actions of various sorts, so you never know. it might make some difference.
There is no reason at the moment to think that a positive difference.
yup LOL
FUD'DERIO Glorioso.
The joy to find crap must be a real exchange for sex...
Just look at India's mantra:: Living in Uttar Pradesh with no pandemic. No need for reading fake news & crap.
Reality is all that counts. Not crappy forum minds, that act like mud worms enjoying the dark side of the universe....
The unforgivable sin!
Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views and not necessarily those of TrialSite. This article is FREE to SHARE and read without paying.
One wonders how it is possible that while it has now been reported that vaccinated shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people, the vaccinated are still protected against severe disease, whereas the unvaccinated are said to be unprotected. So, how can one explain that viral shedding and transmission and hence, viral replication no longer seem to be impacted by the vaccine, whereas the opposite still applies to the occurrence of (severe) disease?
Based on their study results, the authors from the above-mentioned report conclude that there is no significant difference in viral load between groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic people who became infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. So, again: Considering that the vaccinated shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people, how could one even postulate that unvaccinated people are susceptible to severe disease whereas vaccinees are still largely protected from severe disease?
Frankly speaking, this doesn’t make any sense at all. So there must be a ‘small’ detail the current ‘narrative’ overlooked.
Wait a minute … Does the above-mentioned comparison of viral load between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated include people who contracted SEVERE disease? It didn’t! So, could it be that the unvaccinated are only susceptible to severe disease when their first (i.e., innate) line of immune defense is weakened because of a lowered functional capacity of their innate, poly-reactive antibodies (Abs)? Hmmm, this could explain why elderly people, those who are immune-suppressed or have underlying diseases, are susceptible to severe Covid-19 disease. But what about our healthy youngsters and children as these age groups are thought to have excellent innate, pre-existing immune effector cells but are now also increasingly contracting severe Covid-19 disease. Could this be due to spike(S)-specific Abs that young and healthy children may harbor for up to 8 weeks after they contracted asymptomatic infection and that outcompete their innate protective Abs? If this is true, this would imply that only a small part of young and unvaccinated people are susceptible to severe disease (i.e., those who get quite rapidly re-exposed to Sars-CoV-2 after previous infection) but that the vast majority of them are still protected from severe disease, regardless of which Sars-CoV-2 lineage is predominant in the circulating viral population. This seems, indeed, to be the case! Or do some of our ‘experts’ believe that the unvaccinated children and youngsters who don’t get Covid-19 disease have simply not been exposed to the virus at all? But how could that happen given the fact that in most countries, the pandemic started over 1.5 years ago and that we’re now dealing with highly infectious variants, and that infection prevention measures have largely been relaxed?
So, maybe we should not compare the functional immune capacity of unvaccinated youngsters who get severe disease with that of those who only get mild or moderate disease or don’t develop symptoms at all. However, it is viral transmission and shedding in the latter that has been compared to that in vaccinees. Does anybody realize that protection from (severe) disease in healthy children and youngsters is due to innate Abs, even regardless of the possible short-term presence of poorly functional S-directed Abs (which may even contribute to diminishing rather than strengthening their immune defence)? Does anybody realize that this mechanism of protection is fundamentally different from the one protecting vaccinees from severe disease? When present in sufficient concentration, high affinity, antigen-specific Abs readily outcompete low affinity, multi-specific Abs for binding to the same antigen. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that vaccinees experience long-lived functional suppression of their protective, CoV-recognizing innate Abs and are thereby left to rely on their vaccinal S-specific Abs for protection against severe disease.
As the mechanism of immune defense in vaccinees is totally different from the one at play in unvaccinated individuals, the mantra of mass vaccination stakeholders that vaccination of youngsters and children will provide them with improved protection from contracting severe disease is a textbook example of scientific nonsense. Their irrational, erroneous extrapolations lead people to believe that they should get their children vaccinated, whereas there is barely any more catastrophic immune intervention one could think of. In line with the intrinsic functional properties of innate, multi-specific Abs, healthy children and youngsters are NOT ‘naturally’ susceptible to any Sars-CoV-2 lineage but exclusively acquire such susceptibility as a direct consequence of functional suppression of their well-established innate immune capacity due to a rapid re-exposure event or, even much worse and long-lived, due to vaccination. The likelihood of rapid re-exposure to Sars-CoV-2 after previous infection dramatically increases when highly infectious variants expand in prevalence. Such an expansion in prevalence directly results from mass vaccination campaigns as mass vaccination turns vaccinees into an excellent breeding ground for naturally selected S-directed immune escape variants.
So, unless there is any contradiction in the above reasoning and unless somebody could explain how similar viral replication and transmission dynamics in vaccinated as compared to unvaccinated individuals could lead to dissimilar clinical manifestations of infection, we can only conclude that the scenario is the following: Vaccination of children and youngsters is turning off their broadly protective innate immunity in exchange for S-specific vaccinal Abs that are becoming increasingly useless since their neutralizing capacity becomes more and more eroded as a result of enhanced escape of Sars-CoV-2 from neutralizing Abs [NAbs](a trend that has been clearly confirmed by molecular epidemiologists). Resistance to the neutralizing effect of vaccinal Abs that are nevertheless still able to bind Sars-CoV-2 virions and thereby outcompete protective innate Abs is likely to enhance the susceptibility of vaccinees to ADE (Ab-dependent enhancement of disease).
Unless virology and immunology are being rewritten, I cannot imagine how mass vaccination of our youngsters and children will not lead to an even more disastrous outcome of all the scientifically irrational and unjustifiable vaccination efforts. Not only will these dramatically increase the children’s risk to succumb to (accelerated) Covid-19 disease, but it will also take away the highly efficient capacity of healthy, unvaccinated people to diminish the dangerous, ever-rising viral infectious pressure in the population. By vaccinating our youngsters, children, and, even more generally, all people in excellent health, we deprive an important part of the population from its ‘anti-viral’ capacity and instead turn them into a breeding ground for more infectious and increasingly NAb-resistant variants. In other words, mass vaccination of children will inevitably obstruct the process of building herd immunity in the population. While unvaccinated children who contract Covid-19 disease in the vast majority of cases don’t suffer severe disease and contribute to the buildup of herd immunity in the population, mass vaccination campaigns in children will prevent them from contributing to herd immunity because more infectious viral variants are increasingly escaping from neutralization by vaccinal anti-S Abs and gaining a significant fitness advantage in such an immunological environment.
There can be no doubt that large-scale immune interventions which ignore the immune pathogenesis of the disease are recipes for massive disasters.
It cannot be that highly knowledgeable vaccinologists don’t understand this clear-cut message. I can only shout at all of them, no matter their international reputation, the number of awards and recognitions they’ve gotten, the number of books they’ve written, or high-ranked papers they’ve published in peer-reviewed journals: SHAME ON YOU FOR NOT STANDING UP!
Any effects from wildfire smoke and volcanic ash on cov. population studied?
"The records of how much iron was in patients' blood contained numbers in a sequence that was unlikely to come up naturally."
my question is now, did they go out on a fishing expedition or did they post before-hand what checks they will do. You see
if you do not post beforehand what you will check you can find strange things in basically any papers data. This is one of the hardest
thing using statistics as people are curious and tend to look at the data too much. Kind of ok if you are trying to find a signal, but
probably the main reason that so many results in sciences are wrong (they would like to counter this with needing a higher confidence
for accepting a fact but I prefer that people learn to use Bon Ferroni in stead as it then becomes evident what your actions mean for
statistical power).
One wonders how it is possible that while it has now been reported that vaccinated shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people, the vaccinated are still protected against severe disease, whereas the unvaccinated are said to be unprotected. So, how can one explain that viral shedding and transmission and hence, viral replication no longer seem to be impacted by the vaccine, whereas the opposite still applies to the occurrence of (severe) disease?
Based on their study results, the authors from the above-mentioned report conclude that there is no significant difference in viral load between groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic people who became infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant. So, again: Considering that the vaccinated shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people, how could one even postulate that unvaccinated people are susceptible to severe disease whereas vaccinees are still largely protected from severe disease?
Yet another antivaxer who does not even slightly read the literature, so is surprised at things that most people find make sense.
Most people believe that:
(1) delta spreads more because it reproduces much better in nasal passages then previous variants (high nasal viral load is evidence)
(2) vaccine generates antibodies in blood, but not nose-specific antibodies (antibody response is known, and this is expected)
(3) serious disease comes from when disease colonises other parts of the body (e.g. lungs) - this is common to all respiratory diseases.
(4) therefore it makes sense that vaccines protect against serious disease much better than protecting against nasal infection, shedding, and transmission.
Now, this is not rocket science. I have no idea why there are people on this thread who go along with these TSN op eds that show a complete cluelessness and inability to look at the evidence.
The evidence that vaccines do protect, very well, against serious illness is incontrovertible. you have to do calculations ignoring X10 base rate errors, like W, or something similarly contrafactual, to argue that the vaccines do not protect. this is not a complex argument between different experts. There is no doubt, which is why antivaxxers ignore that and concentrate on transmission and infection where (a) it is more difficult to measure things, so antivaxxers can make things up more easily and (b) anyway the vaccine is less effective for the good reason noted above.
I am just cross that some of the reactions on this thread seem to be based on preconceived ideas and not even a little bit influenced by evaluation of evidence. It is a poor thing.
It is not BTW that the vaccines provide no protection against delta transmission, though see below one part of this seems pretty minimal - and when evaluating evidence note that it is known they work more in younger people who have stronger immune systems, which is why I quote (for older people) a lower protection that the population average figures would show.
Note the study below which measures transmission from somone infected - the vaccines still can reduce transmission overall if they reduce probability of being infected. Though the evidence on that is not certain, because there are always possible behavioural differences between those who choose to get vaccinated and those who do not, although it is a pretty definite effect.
You can see all the hedging. It is not easy to get 100% good evidence here, but in spite of that it is clear that against delta the vaccines work a lot less well at cutting transmission. Just as it is clear that delta better transmission related to 1000X larger viral loads in the nose from those with mild infection.
The first study to look directly at how well vaccines prevent the spread of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 brings good news and bad.
The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot.
The findings add to scientists’ understanding of the vaccination’s effect on curbing Delta’s spread, but are “both more and less encouraging”, says Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Previous studies have found that people infected with Delta have roughly the same levels of viral genetic materials in their noses regardless of whether they’d previously been vaccinated, suggesting that vaccinated and unvaccinated people might be equally infectious2. But studies also suggest that vaccinated people are less likely to spread the virus if they subsequently catch Delta: their levels of nasal virus drop faster than do those of unvaccinated infected people, and their nasal swabs contain smaller amounts of infectious virus3,4.
The latest study examined the effect of vaccines on transmission more directly. It analysed testing data from 139,164 close contacts of 95,716 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 between January and August 2021 in the United Kingdom, when the Alpha and Delta variants were competing for dominance.
The authors found that although the vaccines did offer some protection against infection and onward transmission, Delta dampened that effect. A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha. And that was on top of the higher risk of having a breakthrough infection caused by Delta than one caused by Alpha.
Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
A reduction was also observed in people vaccinated with the jab made by US company Pfizer and German firm BioNTech. The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab was 42%, but increased to 58% with time.
“There’s a step-change with Alpha versus Delta, but then there’s also a change over time,” says co-author David Eyre, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, UK. The results “possibly explain why we’ve seen so much onward transmission of Delta despite widespread vaccination”.
But the results also offer the “intriguing possibility that if you do run a booster campaign because you want to protect individuals, it may also have this effect of reducing transmission,” says Eyre.
Booster campaigns raise a new uncertainty, says Stephen Riley, an infectious-diseases researcher at Imperial College London: “whether the same waning of protection from infectiousness will occur after the third dose”.
The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
the evidence that vaccines do protect, very well, against serious illness is incontrovertible. you have to do claulcations ignoring X10 base rate errors, like W, or something similarly contrafactual,
Please look at real data from Switzerland. The protection against death for Pfizer is gone.
So you have to learn that the use of the plural vaccines do protect is wrong. Or may be repeat a primary school class about the meaning and the use of plural.
So we have a first crap vaccine = Pfizer that now after about 5-6 months totally fails to protect from death.
Pfizer now claims fake protection from a booster, that so far did terminate the live of about 500 Israeli, that are now missing as most vulnerable. So good luck if you take the booster. It will add nothing to protect you. You have to find out whether you are vulnerable or not or at least take a Moderna shot.
my question is now, did they go out on a fishing expedition or did they post before-hand what checks they will do. You see
if you do not post beforehand what you will check you can find strange things in basically any papers data. This is one of the hardest
thing using statistics as people are curious and tend to look at the data too much. Kind of ok if you are trying to find a signal,
You would need to look at the evidence.
I've only seen the Elgazzar analysis. It was damning. The one aspect I did not totally agree with was the LS digit non-uniformity. You can get (from some measurements) if you use equipment that quantises measurements and then do measurement conversion with anotehr quantisation after the conversion. Difficult to rule that out.
What struck me in that summary was that the average oxygen level was much lower in the Niaei placebo group. If that is true it is clear bias, because O2 level is the clearest indication of initial disease severity. I will try and find more data on the analysis of that study.
Display MoreAnother study from Iran seemed to show that ivermectin prevented people dying from Covid.
But the scientists who investigated it found issues. The records of how much iron was in patients' blood contained numbers in a sequence that was unlikely to come up naturally.
And the patients given the placebo turned out to have had much lower levels of oxygen in their blood before the trial started than those given ivermectin. So they were already sicker and statistically more likely to die.
But this pattern was repeated across a wide range of different measurements. The people with "bad" measurements ended up in the placebo group, the ones with "good" measurements in the ivermectin group.
The likelihood of this happening randomly across all these different measurements was vanishingly small, Dr Sheldrick said.
Dr Morteza Niaee, who led the Iran study, defended the results and the methodology and disagreed with problems pointed out to him, adding that it was "very normal to see such randomisation" when lots of different factors were considered and not all of them had any bearing on participants' Covid risk.
But the Lebanon and Iran trials were excluded from a paper for Cochrane - the international experts in reviewing scientific evidence - because they were "such poorly reported studies". The review concluded there was no evidence of benefit for ivermectin when it comes to Covid.
The largest and highest quality ivermectin study published so far is the Together trial at the McMaster University in Canada. It found no benefit for the drug when it comes to Covid.
and...
These channels have co-ordinated harassment of doctors who fail to prescribe ivermectin and abuse has been aimed at scientists. Prof Andrew Hill, from the University of Liverpool, wrote an influential positive review of ivermectin, originally saying the world should "get prepared, get supplies, get ready to approve [the drug]".
Now he says the studies don't stand up to scrutiny - but after he changed his view, based on new evidence emerging, he received vicious abuse.
A small number of qualified doctors have had an exaggerated influence on the ivermectin debate. Noted proponent Dr Pierre Kory's views have not changed despite the major questions over the trials. He criticised "superficial interpretations of emerging trials data".
Dr Tess Lawrie - a medical doctor who specialises in pregnancy and childbirth - founded the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development (Bird) Group.
She has called for a pause to the Covid-19 vaccination programme and has made unsubstantiated claims implying the Covid vaccine had led to a large number of deaths based on a common misreading of safety data.
- The initial (in vitro) data never looked good, at 20X the concentration achievable from recommended (by ivermectin advocates) concentrations
- The trial data from high quality all i's dotted and t's crossed RCTs is uniformly negative, positive data comes from dubious RCTs and duious observational trials
- Big trials like TOGETHER are negative on it so far
That is the science, not the politics.
It is interesting and worrisome that so many of the ivermectin advocates are strong antivaxxers. there is no reason why those supporting a drugs, if for scientific reasons, should be against the vaccines. Which adds evidence to the proposition that the pro-ivermectin crowd are biased and following prejudice.
But, I don't need that, or even want it. The evidence on ivermectin looks good in the wrong way. Low quality stuff ultra-good - some of it known bogus - some of it known fraudulent. (Bogus means could be fraudulent, or juts really bad methodology and systematic unconscious mistakes). FLCC, and other advocates, claim that RCTS, or any trial capable of testing ivermectin, would be unethical.
Even so - I'm not totally negative on ivermectin. It seems to do very little harm, and it has strong somatic actions of various sorts, so you never know. it might make some difference.
There is no reason at the moment to think that a positive difference.
The politics are nasty, but one problem I see in this article is that they do not mention or discusses that many studies that show no effect uses too young population and
seam unethical as the study is under powered. It's just the pro ivermectin studies that are flawed in this article, that is strange.
A good read about the ivermectin fraudulent study problem - but more widely about why meta-analyses at the moment are flawed, and what can be done to improve them.
Sort of thing this thread would approve of, if not mesmerised by the antivaxxer pro-ivermectin stuff!
Quoting only the concluding part:
Meyerowitz-Katz agrees preprints are necessary. “I think during the pandemic, they’ve become a vital way of disseminating scientific information quickly. For example, the RECOVERY trial, showing the beneficial effects of dexamethasone, came out as a preprint over a month before the paper was published, and that probably saved thousands of lives.”
For the data detectives, the best way to sandbag the integrity of science against the deluge of fraudulent or inept papers is for authors of a meta-analyses to request the raw patient data. It was individual patient data that allowed the data detectives to sniff out the problems in the Elgazzar paper. Likewise, the Surgisphere data provided the means of its own undoing.
Explains Sheldrick: “We won’t be able to detect sophisticated fraud but these frauds were blazingly obvious from the raw data.”
Some worry about the logistical and political difficulties of requesting individual patient data from researchers in different countries who may have different standards around research ethics. McLachlan believes it could add months to completing a meta-analysis. “The broader point here is whether researchers will be able to release individual data, whether they choose to release data or if it is in a suitable form to use in a meta-analysis.”
“It’s a good hypothesis to throw out,” says Paul Garner. “But it’s a little unnuanced – the practicalities and politics of doing meta-analyses are very important.”
In his view, the Cochrane approach of setting aside ‘fishy’ studies is the quickest way.
“The Egyptian study was obviously fake. We have never seen that sort of effect size [90%] with an antiviral. The reporting of the methods was terrible. Studies with this degree of ‘smelliness’ should be put on hold.”
Yet Hill did succeed in his efforts to request the raw patient data from the contributors to his meta-analysis. He agrees with the data detectives. In the current era, he says, “medical journals need to be enforcers.”
Some peer-reviewed journals do require the raw patient data. And following the imbroglio with Surgisphere, the Lancet has made changes. In September 2020, they announced in an article titled ‘Learning from a retraction’ that “editors will ensure that at least one peer reviewer is knowledgeable about the details of the dataset being reported and can understand and comment on its strengths and limitations in relation to the research question being addressed”.
But the battle is far from won, says Sheldrick. “It’s a step in the right direction from one journal, but we need whole-of-system change.”
Meyerowitz-Katz has also found requesting individual patient data to be less onerous than many think. “It would add work on the part of the reviewers, certainly, but having actually gone through this process with ivermectin I think that there’s no reason it would enormously delay reviews. Most of the authors we’ve communicated with who have actually conducted studies respond within 1–2 days, and in many cases we’ve gotten data less than an hour after they reply to the first email.”
Sheldrick estimates working through the individual patient data cost him around 40–120 hours.
One area that everyone agrees will be difficult is requesting data from pharmaceutical companies, because individual patient data is part of their intellectual property.
However, Meyerowitz-Katz says: “Our suggestion would be that if this was standard practice in all clinical trials, it would not be an issue. It’s only a problem because right now no one does it – you have to start somewhere!”
You would need to look at the evidence.
I've only seen the Elgazzar analysis. It was damning. The one aspect I did not totally agree with was the LS digit non-uniformity. You can get (from some measurements) if you use equipment that quantises measurements and then do measurement conversion with anotehr quantisation after the conversion. Difficult to rule that out.
What struck me in that summary was that the average oxygen level was much lower in the Niaei placebo group. If that is true it is clear bias, because O2 level is the clearest indication of initial disease severity. I will try and find more data on the analysis of that study.
Yep that can be an explanation, but such things can be the result of chance and this paper are suggesting fraud. Things are so conflated and political that I feel sorry
for people that produces studies that so easy due to chance can be accused for fraud and ruin their careers.
Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid 'miracle' drug
Meanwhile, grifters gonna grift:
A network of health care providers pocketed millions of dollars selling hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and online consultations, according to hacked data provided to The Intercept. The data show that vast sums of money are being extracted from people concerned about or suffering from Covid-19 but resistant to vaccinations or other recommendations of public health authorities.
And for a bit of colour, some theorising as to why grifters seem to generally target right-wingers:
This looks like well performed study, no paper yet, but it is basically the only RCT result that seam to have enough people to be relevant.
There are a few more in the pipeline but I do not expect too much from them now.
And for a bit of colour, some theorising as to why grifters seem to generally target right-wingers:
I have a feeling trialsitenews has also identified this strategy and run with it:
What was once a rather dull website reporting on medical news has mutated into offering transparently misleading opinion pieces that pander to the mores of anti-vax, anti-government, anti-science types.
Shortly after this change in editorial policy, they started charging a monthly subscription... Bilking their marks twice it seems - intellectually and financially.
Even Fox 'News' is not that audacious.
Just got an update:: 2/3 of all vaccinations are with Moderna so it effectively protects 6x better than Pfizer crap. So we have 18% with Pfizer. 46% not yet double vaxx. So the Pfizer protection is already < 0%....
We all know that a vaccination doesn't prevent you from catching and spreading the virus, but there is good enough evidence that a vaccination offers a significant protection from ending up in the the ICU on ventilation and death vs being unvaccinated and cathing the virus.
Is there a prove that the death rate of double vaccinated is really above the average rate of deaths in the related age group? People die of very different reasons, vaccination could be one of them, but there is many more... I think it is very difficult to accurately separate this without any bias. I agree of course - the more people are vaccinated the more people die with the vaccine. If 100% vaccinated population, one can easily claim there are 100% vaccinated among the deaths... Switzerland is very good in population statistics, so maybe there is evidence that really more poeple die of vaccination than of other reasons?
Waiting for your lesson to learn on this.
that many studies that show no effect uses too young population and
seam unethical as the study is under powered. It's just the pro ivermectin studies that are flawed in this article, that is strange.
We could drill down a bit by looking at specifics. It is only the RCTs that matter, since there are enough of them and they are more accurate than any observational trial. If we take the ones used by Bryant (founder of FLCC, pro-ivermectin) we could see which ones are biassed/flawed and (from Bryant's paper) look at the evidence. One obvious omission is Elgazzar which is (we have details) highly flawed. That is, it is difficult to see how it could not e fraudulent in the sense of having innacurate data. We could also look at Niaee, where others have said it is biassed (the objective Cochrane study group - who if anyone ought to be able to do objective meta-studies - think so). If that is so, the RCTs show no strong effect, and removing a few more does not change that because none are highly poistive.
It is not that strange that only pro-ivermectin trials are highly flawed. People who believe strongly (as FLCC do) that trials are not needed and evidence for ivermectin is clear might deem it in the interests of patients worldwide to be a bit loose with methodology etc in order to get the rsults that they know should happen.
No-one can rule out a relatively weak effect on the basis of evidence so far - but we will get more data from the big trials. That from TOGETHER was negative.
THH
