Maybe you should look at Mexico city who passed out ivermectin to positive patients. During the experiment, hospitalized and mortality fell like a rock, yet it was called unethical and the government stopped treatment. Although information wasn't suppressed it was called unethical and the media followed. Kory in my opinion has every right to be upset with the way ivermectin information is being peddled by a bought and paid media. You included!!!
and the withdrawn paper details: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/r93g4/
It seems there were severe conflicts of interest here. And the author who agreed with the retraction was a data analyst...
Hmmm - why would that be I wonder. Observational studies are very error-prone, even when well-conducted. Little details of how data is processed make a big difference to results. My question to you is why do you think this study is useful, when everyone else (except for like-minded antivaxxers and FLCC fanatics) thinks it is very low reliability? That is specially true for COVID where COVID rates vary so much over time and with age, so that comparing one set of results with another is very challenging. We have worked through all those stuff in detail here before, if you remember, when this thread was less of a political stomping ground for antivaxxers.
This study may or may not have been unethical - but was certainly poorly conducted.
We have any number of poorly conducted low reliability studies on ivermectin. It is pretty clear from evidence I posted a year ago that greater reliability => less strong results. The data fro this is compelling. In which case a low reliability trial with positive results tells us nothing.
The ethical issue is quite interesting on the issue - raised by you and otehrs here - of why reliable studies do not use ultra-high doses of ivermectin.
Two recent ethics scandals have cast a further shadow over ivermectin research. First, a report of an experimental study in Mexico City that gave almost 200 000 ivermectin based medical kits to residents with covid-19 was retracted from the preprint server SocArXiv.10 The report was retracted, says SocArXiv’s director, because the experiment was conducted “without proper consent or appropriate ethical protections.”11 Second, in an experiment in a jail in Arkansas, USA, four incarcerated men developed severe side effects after a physician gave them high dose ivermectin as a supposed covid-19 treatment without their knowledge.10 The four men are suing the jail.
Lack of consent was not the only ethical violation in these two scandals. The research participants were exposed to a risk of drug side effects without knowing they had been given ivermectin. In Mexico, the failure to give information to the participants infringed on a human right established in Mexico’s constitution: the right to access information.12 The Arkansas case raises additional concerns as it involved incarcerated people, who risk coercion and exploitation when they are enrolled in clinical research.
It is also arguably unethical and a waste of resources to conduct drug research in an emergency that is of such low quality that no conclusions can be drawn about the drug’s efficacy. That is the situation we find ourselves in today—it is still unclear whether ivermectin is safe or has any benefit in the treatment or prevention of covid-19.13 The flawed and potentially fraudulent research represents a huge missed opportunity to answer an important research question.
At the doses suggested higher than those used in all the properly recorded trials side effects become a real issue. Since most people recover from COVID fine, in early-stage treatments, even 1% severe side effects are a real issue in a drug that works. We have as yet no evidence that ivermectin works, if it worked say 20% of the time that means that 0.2% bad side effects becomes relevant.
This highlights the difference between politics, where facts are hard to find and even those well attested (like the validity of a US election) get trashed by politicians who find them inconvenient, And science where everyone admits to the (relative) certainties and uncertainties, and people are cautious, waiting for a coherent relationships between sets of studies before coming to conclusions and using known past information (e.g. that observational studies in preprint tend to bias results and that the urgency of COVID has greatly magnified this tendency) to inform views, rather than doing a political "cite only the views that support your position" thing.
We cannot know that ivermectin in some form is not useful. But the big RCTs having results that are not clearly positive is very strongly inconsistent with all that FLCC evidence. Since the evidence is highly inconsistent (proven) we cannot give the least reliable bits of it weight. So your, and FLCCs arguments on this not scientifically justified.
I could agree with the doses are too small argument if you had good data to contradict the maximum safe dose levels that everyone (even FLCC) seems to use for early-stage therapy. That could be discussed here properly with complete references till we get to the bottom of what evidence we have of lack of side effects at very high doses? It would need to include the time ivermectin stays in the body and the dose regime over time, compared with things we know are safe.
THH