19/n Even a fairly surface skim shows that what appears to actually be happening here is that the authors choose the outcome that shows the biggest benefit for ivermectin
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20/n For example, the analysis includes this paper. The primary outcome was viral load, which was identical between groups Never fear however, because ivmmeta won't take "null findings" as an answer!pic.twitter.com/xW0WmYGaV9
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21/n If you dig through the supplementaries, what you find is that for "all reported symptoms" there was a large but statistically insignificant difference, represented in this graph of marginal predicted probabilities from a logistic model. It is mostly driven by an/hyposmiapic.twitter.com/h64IdG4LJF
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22/n If you eyeball "any symptoms", you get the results that ivmmeta included in their analysis But that's TOTALLY ARBITRARY. Why not choose cough (where there's no difference) or fever (where IVM did WORSE)
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23/n Also, hilariously, this study used the last observation carried forward method to account for missing data in symptom reporting. You can actually see this in the supplementaries - it's possible the entire result comes from a few people not filling out their diaries properlypic.twitter.com/rA7PO4o4hd
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24/n None of this should matter, because the trial found NO BENEFIT FOR IVERMECTIN, but this has been reported and included into ivmmeta dot com as a hugely beneficial resultpic.twitter.com/mjGBDnpVW5
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25/n This explains the bias I noted above - it's not publication bias, it's that the authors appear to have generally chosen whichever result makes ivermectin look better to include in their model Not really scientific, that!
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26/n But the fun doesn't stop there. The inclusion criteria for this website is any study published on ivermectin, which has led to what I can only call total junk science being lumped in with decent studies
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27/n Here's a study with impossible percentages in table 1 that used a comparator of 12 completely random patients as their control. They don't even say if these 12 people had COVID-19 Included in ivmmeta, no questions askedpic.twitter.com/3AlGdGcPnW
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Replying to @GidMK
Ypu think they're impossible why exactly? One percentage 48.15% was rounded up and the other 51.85% was rounded down so they add up to 100%.
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There are many possible explanations for the error, and certainly bad rounding is one of them. But it's also true to say that these percentages cannot be correct, and that is not a great sign for a scientific paper
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