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Glasgow
More than 500 cases of Covid-19 have been linked to the TRNSMT music festival, new data shows.
About 50,000 people descended on Glasgow Green for the three-day event last month!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58847481next up in Glasgow
COP26
https://ukcop26.orgsuper-spreader here we come.
– “This socioeconomic view of Long Covid is rather frightening.”
This may help explain the current fuel shortages. There have always been a far greater proportion of people left with long-term damage from covid than there have been fatalities. It affects the nerves, and thus the brain, and this debilitates the working population, particularly the older and thus more senior, more experienced members. This is why I have always promoted social restrictions. Taking an example close to home, Boris Johnson always played the fool…
– “Build back butter, build back batter, build back bitter.”
– Boris Johnson publicity clips.
… but there are some things that a Prime Minister simply should not say, eg:
– “I’ve given you the most important metric which is, never mind life expectancy, never mind cancer outcomes, look at wage growth.”
– Boris Johnson on the BBC
I’m really not convinced that all of him came back from his encounter with covid.
– – – – – – – –For decades our society has been obsessed with pushing death out of our awareness, individualism thriving on the pretence that we are immortal, pushing the old folk into “care homes” lest their presence remind us of our mortality. Covid brought a rude end to that, provoking in reaction an obsession with death statistics, which in turn blinded us to a far greater, more insidious danger.
Romania
Eastern Europe is gaining covid cases, very quickly, especially Romania.
Something which others previously said, different countries are at different stages of the pandemic.
Even Poland which was doing so remarkably well is moving up, both in cases and deaths.
Yet still Russia and the U.K. are stand-out bad cases.Maybe vaccinating children will slow covid?
Next door to me everyone has covid, none had been vaccinated but three are schoolchildrenJ, I see you expect people to watch a one hour five minute video on a hosting service called Rumble. It seems a very odd venue for a scientific discussion, which usually proceeds by publishing papers to pre-print servers, thus provoking technical discussion by others in the field, and often culminates in peer review and publication in a scientific journal, of which there are many.
I further note that this video is posted by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, who have their own channel on this “Rumble” thingy. This all seemed very odd, so remembering your taste for conspiracy theory especially in scientific matters, I looked up the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons
– “The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a politically conservative non-profit association that promotes medical disinformation, such as HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections, and homosexuality reducing life expectancy. The association was founded in 1943 to oppose a government attempt to nationalize health care. The group has included notable members, including American Republican politicians Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and Tom Price.”
I am of course familiar with partisan editing at Wikipedia, it being me that helped to expose Alisher Usmanov’s PR company’s sanitisation of his page and thereby provoking an industry review, among other incidents. So can you assure me that the above section is all lies?
I further looked up Peter McCullough:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough#COVID-19_misinformation
– McCullough testified before a committee of the Texas Senate in March 2021, posted to YouTube by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, in which he made false claims about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines, including that people under 50 years of age and survivors do not need the vaccine and that there is no evidence of asymptomatic spread of COVID-19.
– Posted on the Canadian online video sharing platform Rumble, McCullough gave an interview in April 2021 to The New American, the magazine of the conservative John Birch Society, in which he advanced anti-vaccination messaging, including falsely claiming tens of thousands of fatalities attributed to the COVID-19 vaccines. In May 2021 McCullough gave an interview in which he made claims about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines which were “inaccurate, misleading and/or unsupported by evidence,” including that survivors cannot be re-infected and so do not require vaccination and that the vaccine is dangerous.
J, can you explain to me why the assertions you help promote gain insufficient approval to make headway among the scientific community at large? Is it because the scientific community is essentially a conspiracy, consisting of a bunch of socialists, or worse, commies?
J, I also find it disturbing that so many people seem so keen to give every advantage they can to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, encouraging unrestricted spread so it can hijack our cells and use as many of us as possible as hosts for its reproduction, adaptation and optimisation.
My experience is that conspiracy theorists avoid discussion like the plague (though maybe modern ones would actually go out of their way to catch Yersinia pestis, or at least to get others infected), much preferring to post a link to their supposedly knock-out argument, or “devastating case” as you put it, and then run off without a further word. But since I’d rather not watch sixty-five minutes of what I strongly suspect to be carefully cherry-picked right-wing illness-advocacy, I hope you’ll be willing to prove me wrong.
What claims does this video make? What evidence does it present to support them? And in which scientific papers (preferably meta-studies and/or systematic reviews) can readers find this evidence, so that they can examine it for themselves?
I have now watched some twenty minutes of McCullough’s lecture. The first few minutes are merely McCullough going on about how great he is. After that, it is not sober, scientific assessment of facts; rather, it is notably frantic advocacy against covid-19 vaccination, interspersed with finger-pointing and accusations against the US medical authorities and government. It takes no account of the context, the serious and rapidly spreading pandemic, as if the only danger to be considered was vaccination.
There is only so much of this stuff I can listen to; such arguments should be presented in a paper, with tables and graphs, not as a rapid-fire lecture with flashed-up and partial slides of other people’s articles, and political accusations interspersed. If McCullough were right, there would be many such properly presented papers either in the peer-reviewed scientific journals, or at least available as pre-prints. Unless, of course, the vast majority of the scientific community is colluding in some diabolical conspiracy.
You haven’t seen the majority of the data, nor the argument and aren’t fit to comment, hence the innadequecy of your critique and the bizarre nature of your line of attack as though you had the full context of the argument from a few minutes.
Several examples:
Point 1.
You say “It takes no account of the context, the serious and rapidly spreading pandemic, as if the only danger to be considered was vaccination.“
Several studies proving the efficacy of a number of treatments, as attested to by the WHO’s own work in India using Doxycycline and Ivermectin: https://www.who.int/india/news/feature-stories/detail/uttar-pradesh-going-the-last-mile-to-stop-covid-19
Within five weeks of this WHO trial, cases dropped to just 22 in Uttar-Pradesh and nearly zero deaths despite 5% vaccination, compared to thirty thousand cases and two hundred deaths a day at the same time in Kerala, with 20% vaccinated.
Your argument serves to illustrate that those who prevented treatment until cases were acute and specifically denied access to treatments like Ivermectin, those people actually condemned almost everyone suffering with Covid19 to death. Those who run interference for these authorities are also complicit in my opinion.Point 2
You say: “it is notably frantic advocacy against covid-19 vaccination, interspersed with finger-pointing and accusations”
As though this were the only criteria discussed or of relevance. Masses of studies and surveys are quoted, all of which can obtained, showing that not only are the so called vaccines demonstrated definitively to be unsafe, they are more or less ineffective, because these so called vaccines are driving mutation and rapidly become worse than useless. McCullough shows how these vaccines are the only possible candidate for having created the dominance of the Delta Strain in the USA for example. The data is persuasive.
Presumably, you are arguing that having presided over such a disastrous policy, no attempt should be made to prosecute all of those responsible, against the advice of experienced scientists, epidemiologists and doctors around the world from day one. This advice was given and what came to pass was predicted from the begining. Best practice was ignored.
Point 3
There are several doctors notable for the fact that they ignored unreasonable guidelines and continued with best practice throughout the so called emergency, and did not lose a single Covid patient or did not lose one once a method of treatment was available. Several studies including those by WHO have shown the effectiveness of Vitamin C, Zinc, Vitamin D3, Ivermectin and Doxycycline.
How does this fact not assume prevalence above all other facts in your narrative diatribe? Is it simply because health authorities and media (for their own reasons) are not only ignoring the community of doctors to have successfully treated large numbers of their patients without expensive and unsafe vaccines, but also ignoring the WHO who have also trialed these drugs and found them to be effective and so you must parrot their anti-science for them?
Does there come a point where automatic resistance to data you cannot integrate becomes part of the block on effective treatment for Covid patients and thus indirectly responsible for the deaths you claim to care about?
By the same token: the documented under reporting of VAERS hides the potential number of Covid Vaccine related deaths in the order of 1,700,000 at the present time, with several million more serious injuries in the USA alone.
If we can expect broadly the same scale of death and injury in the UK (I personally know of three serious Covid related injuries among close friends and family) then we must ask, did those who most loudly exhorted and shamed us into unnecessary ‘vaccinations’ – remember effective treatment was potentially available almost from the beginning – do those people share culpability for those injuries and deaths or are they merely innocents?
Point 4
You say: “J, can you explain to me why the assertions you help promote gain insufficient approval to make headway among the scientific community at large?“
How would you know what is ‘at large’? Can you show me the figures for doctors who disagree with WHO sponsored treatments? Most of the argument has been censored for over a year and you continue to participate in the censorship. You have skin the game (your strong advocacy of the available Covid Vaccines) and are hardly an unbiased or reliable observer.
Can you make a reasonable estimate from your detailed and comprehensive researches, globally a) how many doctors are treating all or most of their Covid patients successfully without requiring hospitalisation without recourse to the so called vaccines? b) how many patients have been treated with the treatments mentioned above? c) how many patients have been treated only with so called vaccines? d) how many of categories b) and c) have gone on to become a Covid case, require hospitalisation, experience severe symptoms or death?
Do you even have accurate up to date data on percentage of the ‘vaccinated’ who die, are hospitalised or go on to contract Covid with severe symptoms? Do you have accurate up to date data on the percentage treated with the treatments mentioned above who die, are hospitalised or go on to contract Covid with severe symptoms?
Both are addressed in the film you ignored.
You say: “Is it because the scientific community is essentially a conspiracy, consisting of a bunch of socialists, or worse, commies?”
Is this kind of crap worthy of a response?
All your distractionary bluster aside, why do you think that your assessment of character is always the surest way to evaluate hard scientific data?
Why do you feel that you alone can assess a few minutes from a detailed and coherent argument, constructed from many separate but interdependent arguments across a wide area of study, data and clinical experience, and with perfect clairvoyance predict what the argument contains in all of it’s parts? Clearly you can’t. Your characterisation is not only factually wrong, but trite and cynical.
Your refusal to engage with more than a few minutes of contradictory argument suggests that you either do not understand the scientific method or you are happy to ignore science for some temporary ideological gain, even at the risk of continuing to advise people to take a seriously injurious course of action.
If that makes you happy, then you have my profound sympathy as well as my utter contempt.
I heard on Radio Four this morning, that England is not vaccinating children quickly enough, we are far behind many European countries, it is thought that children have been forgotten?
There is a good podcast here, together with a transcript, about the “miraculous” drug Ivermectin, and the Trump-worshipping nutcases who (needless to say) all leap on this as the Great Conspiracy they knew it to be all the time:
The Ivermectin hysteria has been whooped up by the usual right-wing media pundits – to every bit the same extent as these same characters have been downplaying Covid-19 itself, and energetically promoting pro-virus notions. Such as masks are bad for you, or do nothing. That the vaccines are all dangerous, they kill people and do nothing to stop the virus (which is harmless in itself in any case, don’t forget). They promote quack cures, the latest of which is Ivermectin.
For more examples of these pro-virus propaganda points, see J’s post above. I did little more than skim it – there is no shortage of the usual conspiracists’ claims. It’s always “they” who are denying genuine cures, “they” are forcing vaccines and “they” are pretending Covid is much more serious than it actually is.
Never once do conspiracy nuts like ‘J’ reference credible sources, because “they” run the credible sources and so it’s all a pack of lies and nonsense.
I feel there is no possibility of reaching anti-vaxxer, Covid denialists – every one of them is completely beyond reason.
“Following one of Europe’s weakest vaccination campaigns, Romania’s health system nears collapse as a ‘catastrophic’ fourth COVID wave takes hold.”
Yet they are not on our REDLIST?
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/10/10/photos-coronavirus-pandemic-fourth-covid-wave-rips-through-romania“Often ICU beds only become free because their previous occupants have died.
Figures released on Friday showed the highest death toll of the pandemic reported in one day, with 385 people succumbing to the virus.”
The focus is shifting to Eastern Europe.
J, have you gone stark raving bonkers? You wrote:
– “Several studies proving the efficacy of a number of treatments, as attested to by the WHO’s own work in India using Doxycycline and Ivermectin:
– Within five weeks of this WHO trial, cases dropped to just 22 in Uttar-Pradesh and nearly zero deaths despite 5% vaccination, compared to thirty thousand cases and two hundred deaths a day at the same time in Kerala, with 20% vaccinated.”
But the link claims nothing of the kind! The link doesn’t even concern a trial, it’s about a test-and-quarantine campaign! Yes, we know that test-and-quarantine works. You wrote:
– “You haven’t seen the majority of the data”
Indeed. That’s why I asked you to link it, which you have not! As I wrote, I couldn’t stand to listen through over an hour of self-promotion and partisan political advocacy from a homophobic, HIV denialist organisation, pausing to freeze McCullough’s slideshow, manually copy references to papers, search on the references, find full copies and search out the scientific discussion about them. If you have any valid scientific points, then it is your responsibility to find the scientific case or, if it is “censored” as you claim, compile it yourself from original papers. If you have checked McCullough’s claims, then you should already have those links, making it a simple matter to post them. That you haven’t suggests that you have merely swallowed McCullough’s claims without scrutiny.
I shall answer a couple of your points as they are such obvious howlers:
– “McCullough shows how these vaccines are the only possible candidate for having created the dominance of the Delta Strain”
This is obviously nonsense because Delta has become dominant everywhere it has landed, because it is more transmissible. You yourself linked to the WHO report of Delta being dominant where (you say) only 5% of the population were vaccinated!
– “the documented under reporting of VAERS hides the potential number of Covid Vaccine related deaths in the order of 1,700,000 at the present time”
Simply go and check the shape of the “deaths from all causes” graphs; excess deaths have plummeted as mass vaccination has proceeded. As the US had some 600,000 deaths by the end of its second wave, we would expect to see a new peak nearly three times that if vaccination were as deadly as you (or McCullough?) claim.
You seem not to have applied one gramme of critical thought. You haven’t checked a single one of McCullough’s claims, have you? You’ve just swallowed them whole because you like them. Go get your vax J; it’s only a pin-prick. There, there.
Doxycycline? Why the hell should that help? It’s an antibiotic; they’re famously ineffective against viral infections – “please don’t pester your doctor for antibiotics to treat your cold”. I suppose it could help someone with severe covid if they’d picked up a secondary, bacterial infection.
OK J, an easy one. You say McCullough referenced all the data, so find and link the paper(s) showing that doxycycline is effective against covid-19.
Oh, another obvious howler now I come to think of it:
– “Most of the argument has been censored for over a year…”
and yet:
– “Masses of studies and surveys are quoted, all of which can obtained,”
Then it’s not censored, is it?
You mean “censored on Facebook and YouTube”, don’t you J? I have news for you. Facebook and YouTube are social media, not scientific literature. They are not where scientists go to become informed within their fields, and they are not what governments base their medical policies on; governments have scientific advisors they ignore for that.
J, Oct 11, 11:58
– “You have skin the game (your strong advocacy of the available Covid Vaccines) […] you are happy to ignore science for some temporary ideological gain, even at the risk of continuing to advise people to take a seriously injurious course of action.”
Come to think of it, I haven’t particularly been advocating for vaccination. Have I? I’m sure I’ve been advocating for localism, societal compartmentalisation, and prompt but brief lockdown to enable trace, test and quarantine to more successfully suppress transmission. I seem to remember expressing my opposition to vaccine passports, my dislike of probably requiring ongoing periodic booster shots, expressing doubt about how effective mass vaccination might prove, expressing concern that new variants might render vaccination ineffective, pointing out that ethical problems with vaccinating children would weaken herd immunity, accusing governments of “putting all our eggs in their vaccination basket”, and posting a comment about the leakiness of current vaccines. I think my first direct advocacy of vaccination was my quip, posted after J misrepresented my position, yesterday at 23:40; “Go get your vax J; it’s only a pin-prick”, a personal jibe about disliking needles. I dislike them too, but I got my jabs; I seem to remember commenting that I did so “because it’s the only protection my government has left us with” or something like that.
J? Is there something wrong with my memory? In which case please link. Or have you been proceeding upon assumptions you made?
J, Oct 11, 11:58
– “Your argument serves […] Those who run interference for these authorities” [You are] “also complicit in my opinion. […] Presumably, you are arguing that […] no attempt should be made to prosecute all of those responsible. […]” [You are] “indirectly responsible for the deaths you claim to care about […] You have skin the game […] and are hardly an unbiased or reliable observer. […] you are happy to ignore science for some temporary ideological gain…”
Ah ha! So I’m either an agent of the conspiracy, or a sheeple. You’re acting like a conspiracy theorist J, and I claim my five pounds!
Bad news.
We have a new variant in the UK, a variation of Delta with two new mutations. It’s called AY.4.2 so far. It’s out-competing Delta, spreading rapidly; maybe around 25% more infective.
I wonder if conspiracy peddlers like ‘J’ actually bother to examine the references they provide?
It really is laziness compounded. Just send on an article which they haven’t bothered to read properly, containing references they never looked at, and claim this proves their case, and also shows up members of the reality-based community to be stooges, stupid, sheeple and so on.
In her testimony to US Congress last week, Haugen spoke of Facebook’s approach was to increase conflict and division wherever possible, because this gets more attention, and attention means more revenue.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-frances-haugen-whistleblower-regulation
They could ensure that people pass on information from more reliable sources, and check that people actually bother looking at an article before forwarding it, but creating this ‘friction’ would slow down the sensational aspect of whatever ‘news’ users are so keen to pass around.
Remember a few years back, we were looking at the Wakefield scandal, concerning MMR and autism? One of our correspondents produced a paper which provided absolute proof, so it was claimed. We took the trouble to actually look at it, and follow the links provided. The links either had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject they purportedly proved, or had a tangential bearing – it did reference vaccines – but still proved absolutely nothing concerning a MMR/autism link. They didn’t even talk about it.
The behaviour of conspiracy peddlers like ‘J’ is truly reprehensible. Not only are they too lazy to study the behaviour they are promoting, they are also dishonest enough to ignore solid refutations when they are made.
This isn’t some abstract exercise, like questioning the validity of the moon landings, or indulging in speculation on the WTC demolition – Covid denialism is costing lives, by the thousand, every day. It is blighting the health of millions, and promoting a disease which could eventually kill vastly more – by mutating into a very much more deadly form in the unvaccinated.
One should have to be so sure of their case, that only mental health problems or a very significant expertise would provide that certainty. I am sure – particularly in the case of denialists we see here – we can rule out any expertise whatsoever.
“I wonder if conspiracy peddlers like ‘J’ actually bother to examine the references they provide?”
Apparently not. Here’s a case in point. In Point 1, J said:
“Several studies proving the efficacy of a number of treatments, as attested to by the WHO’s own work in India using Doxycycline and Ivermectin: https://www.who.int/india/news/feature-stories/detail/uttar-pradesh-going-the-last-mile-to-stop-covid-19
As there’s no mention of Doxycycline or Ivermectin in the linked report (from 7 March), it can hardly attest to their efficacy. It only states that Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) will be deployed widely and the results will be monitored centrally. There’s no mention of any findings because the monitoring project was only starting at the time.
How can advance notice of a forthcoming study be used to imply efficacy? The implication must be that because the state of Uttar Pradesh started conducting a study of these purportedly therapeutic drugs, that they must therefore be effective. That argument is a bit presumptive. J continues:
“Within five weeks of this WHO trial, cases dropped to just 22 in Uttar-Pradesh and nearly zero deaths despite 5% vaccination, compared to thirty thousand cases and two hundred deaths a day at the same time in Kerala, with 20% vaccinated.”
Really? Who says?? (Maybe ‘WHO’ says?) That’s the essential part of J’s argument which requires a reliable source. But none is provided.
The sources I’ve consulted say different. It turns out that the study found the drugs were *not* effective so they were dropped from the Indian government’s recommended treatment protocol.
Here’s an update to the story published a month after the report linked above: https://www.asiafinancial.com/ivermectin-loses-favour-in-indias-covid-treatment-protocol
June 8, 2021
(AF) India’s Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) on Monday announced revised guidelines for treating Covid, dropping all medicines including the widely-used and controversial Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine and Favipiravir as approved drugs, except antipyretic and antitussive drugs for asymptomatic and mild cases.As Indian states like Goa, Karnataka, and Uttarkhand allowed the use of Ivermectin to all its adult residents as a Covid prophylactic, New Delhi in April 2021 too joined the bandwagon to “recognise” the low evidence of Ivermectin therapy and said that it “may be” used for those with mild cases and in home isolation.
In May, the ICMR also updated its guidelines and started suggesting Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine as optional treatments for mild cases.
However, alarmed by its overuse, in mid-May World Health Organization jumped in and warned that the general use of Ivermectin is for treatment of parasitic infections – not for Covid.
“Safety and efficacy are important when using any drug for a new indication. WHO recommends against use of Ivermectin for Covid except within clinical trials,”’ Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist, tweeted.
‘J’ didn’t mention that (rather crucial) part of the story: “the WHO’s own work in India” which he cited as an endorsement of those “bandwagon” drugs in fact proved they were so ineffective that the WHO advised health boards to stop using them.
“All the necessary data is in”, indeed.
What? You mean, health authorities and governments all over the world aren’t distorting scientific data to lure us to our deaths with vaccines? But they’re always doing that! They’ve killed me three times already!
– – – – – – –Look J, you don’t get it. Power systems effectively farm populations, or rather, it’s a lot like farming except that the producers are also the consumers.
Capitalism diverts a proportion of every transaction towards capital, hence the name, and those who hold significant capital are called “the rich”. The more producers and consumers, the more transactions to divert a proportion from, so the “depopulation” conspiracy theory is bunk. Vaccines are about “reopening society” ie. getting the plebs back to work where they’ll make more plastic toot, and back into the shops, pubs and other venues where they’ll buy it and then throw it “away” (wherever that is), so that yet more said toot can be churned out.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s an exploitation cycle, but covid keeps stopping it because people would rather avoid losing their sense of smell, gasping for breath, and possibly dying. The rewards of the exploitation cycle just don’t seem worth that sort of commitment, especially among the middle classes who have more of a choice, so bits of the system keep grinding to a halt, hence all the shortages.
I know it’s evil, but there’s no need to complicate it by pretending that lying Republican homophobes are your only allies.
Russia admits it is not doing too well against covid, lack of people getting jabbed, partly to blame.
“The situation with Covid-19 in Moscow has worsened significantly and the occupancy of the city’s primary coronavirus hospital in Kommunarka is quickly increasing due to the low number of citizens vaccinated against the virus.”
https://www.rt.com/russia/537260-situation-covid-in-moscow-worsened/
Today Russia had just shy of a thousand covid deaths.It’s amazing but true that when one is determined not to understand something, it is therefore impossible to understand it.
One example of where Ivermectin was used in India: https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-pradesh-government-says-ivermectin-helped-to-keep-deaths-low-7311786/
Overall, the state has a total of 199 active cases, while the positivity rate came down to less than 0.01 per cent. The recovery rate, meanwhile, has improved to 98.7 per cent. As per the state’s health bulletin, Uttar Pradesh reported only 11 new Covid-19 cases and zero deaths in the last 24 hours.
One example of where Ivermectin was not used in India: https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/tamil-nadu-leads-india-in-new-infections-denies-citizens-ivermectin/article_32634012-ba66-11eb-9211-ab378d521f9a.html
Sixty four studies showing the efficacy of Ivermectin: https://ivmmeta.com/
Brian Tyson, M.D. and George Fareed, M.D. on their studies into Ivermectin: https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/doctors-story-of-light-and-life-the-covid-19-darkness-overcome-part-i/article_5ae16f0c-f614-11eb-8351-cf0d67e94c25.html
We made the news in late September and October when we started publishing our data, and people realized that we had seen more COVID-19 patients face-to-face than probably anyone in the nation, and maybe even worldwide. We did that and have not recorded a single death for anyone that was placed on (our) treatment.
Are we learning yet?
I’ll take the most sciency-looking one first:
Misleading clinical evidence and systematic reviews on ivermectin for COVID-19 – BMJ
– Different websites (such as ivmmeta.com, c19ivermectin.com, tratamientotemprano.org/estudios-ivermectina/, among others) have conducted meta-analyses with ivermectin studies, showing unpublished colourful forest plots which rapidly gained public acknowledgement and were disseminated via social media, without following any methodological or report guidelines. These websites do not include protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates. Prospective registration of systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis protocols is a key feature for providing transparency in the review process and ensuring protection against reporting biases, by revealing differences between the methods or outcomes reported in the published review and those planned in the registered protocol. These websites show pooled estimates suggesting significant benefits with ivermectin, which has resulted in confusion for clinicians, patients and even decision-makers. This is usually a problem when performing meta-analyses which are not based in rigorous systematic reviews, often leading to spread spurious or fallacious findings.
– Concluding, research related to ivermectin in COVID-19 has serious methodological limitations resulting in very low certainty of the evidence, and continues to grow.37–39 The use of ivermectin, among others repurposed drugs for prophylaxis or treatment for COVID-19, should be done based on trustable evidence, without conflicts of interest, with proven safety and efficacy in patient-consented, ethically approved, randomised clinical trials.
We also have this:
– “The recovery rate, meanwhile, has improved to 98.7 per cent.”
Well, those who didn’t recover presumably died, so 100% – 98.7% = 1.3% death rate – that is absolutely nothing to be proud of; it’s around two and a half times worse than commonly expected figures!
And then this. From the opinion of Vikssendu Agrawal, Uttar Pradesh State Surveillance Officer as reported in the Indian Express in March 2020 (aeons ago in terms of the pandemic, before Delta had evolved and when India suffered a rather small wave):
– He said that apart from aggressive contact tracing and surveillance, the lower positivity and fatality rates may be attributed to the large-scale use of Ivermectin use in the state…
Yes, we already knew that contact tracing with testing and quarantine was highly successful. And isn’t that craze for ivermectin the one that was later found to be ineffective, as Dawg reported earlier? And why are you resorting to such old news? Knowledge improves; that’s the whole point of science.
– – – – – – – –J, I have no particular stance on ivermectin, except that the most trusted authorities worldwide say that so far it doesn’t seem to help but they’re continuing to look into it. But you have only reported one side of a story, apparently without checking. Again. Why? And what about all the other points you were wrong about? Are you starting to learn yet?
Sorry, the Indian Express article concerns events from May to August 2020; I don’t know where I got March from, but that was still pre-Delta and the big waves. The article itself is from May this year. On the other hand, it’s interesting that the article actually has a photo’ of the tablets’ bubble-pack complete with brand logos; companies often pay for such “advertising equivalent” content, in fact the companies often compile such articles themselves and submit them to overworked journalists with deadlines to meet.
Furthermore, J’s argument seems to be to use ivermectin (and doxycycline?!) instead of vaccination, yet the ivmmeta.com meta analysis (flagged as dodgy in the BMJ) says, fourth bullet point, in bold:
– While many treatments have some level of efficacy, they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection. Only 25% of ivermectin studies show zero events in the treatment arm.
…’events’ being hospitalisation, ventilation, ICU and death, so ivermectin can’t be a miracle cure.
Still, we already know not to expect J to actually read articles before linking to them.
J, 17:48
– “Brian Tyson, M.D. and George Fareed, M.D. on their studies into Ivermectin“
Er, no. Hydroxychloroquine. Tyson and Fareed don’t mention ivermectin.
(frustration) J, read your own damn links!!!
Glenn_nl, 13:49, sorry, I meant to reply much earlier but I’ve been too busy mopping up all the foam from J’s mouth. I’ll start with my criticism because it’s the part that could have serious consequences. You wrote:
– “…promoting a disease which could eventually kill vastly more – by mutating into a very much more deadly form in the unvaccinated.”
The current covid vaccines are ‘leaky’ ie. they reduce but don’t completely stop transmission. Leaky vaccines have been shown to apply selection pressure among the vaccinated, thus promoting vaccine-resistant variants. I posted a comment about this last week.
I commend the rest of your comment:
– “Haugen spoke of Facebook’s approach to increase conflict and division wherever possible…”
Yes, social media typically do this, and it shows in the sort of discussion they provoke, doesn’t it? Strident, inaccurate, ill-considered and aggressive.
– “They could ensure that people pass on information from more reliable sources, and check that people actually bother looking at an article before forwarding it…”
Well they could, but they’d need to drastically improve their moderator to contributor ratio and that would cost them extra wages, so they won’t.
