Not an innocent error
The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.
As in, ethical concerns over possible fakery.
[T]he drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
…
“The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records,” Brown told the Guardian. “It’s certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren’t even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural.”
That’s quite an error.
The Elgazzar study was one of the the largest and most promising showing the drug may help Covid patients, and has often been cited by proponents of the drug as evidence of its effectiveness. This is despite a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases in June finding ivermectin is “not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients”.
Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that “this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there”, and it appeared to him the data was “just totally faked”. This was concerning because two meta-analyses of ivermectin for treating Covid-19 had included the Elgazzar study in the results. A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies to determine what the overall scientific literature has found about a treatment or intervention.
“Because the Elgazzar study is so large, and so massively positive – showing a 90% reduction in mortality – it hugely skews the evidence in favour of ivermectin,” Meyerowitz-Katz said.
“If you remove this one study from the scientific literature, suddenly there are very few positive randomised control trials of ivermectin for Covid-19. Indeed, if you get rid of just this research, most meta-analyses that have found positive results would have their conclusions entirely reversed.”
Well he’s just a shill for Big Pharma, right?
The conservative Australian MP Craig Kelly, who has also promoted the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 – despite there being no evidence that it works – has been among those promoting ivermectin. Several Indian media outlets ran stories on Kelly in the past week after he asked Uttar Pradesh to loan the state’s chief minister, Adityanath, to Australia to release ivermectin. After this story was initially published, Kelly contacted the Guardian to say he disagreed with the statement that there was no evidence that hydroxychloroquine worked, and that he stood by his views.
Remember when Trump used to disagree too?
Time for another round of bleach-injection I guess.
It’s strange that right wingers dispute and deny the effectiveness of vaccines, but then turn around and tout some other pharmaceutical intervention. Are people promoting particular “treatments” like this, hoping to cash in quickly before their true ineffectiveness becomes clear? Looking at it from a business or investor’s standpoint, that’s only going to benefit short-term payoff, not long-term returns. A failed treatment is going to blow up in their faces if they don’t sell their shares quickly enough. Not to mention that people die.
Krebiozen and Laetrile were both loony-right shibboleths in the U.S. Unquestioning belief was obligatory in some circles. The Nazis loved homeopathy and Bates ‘exercises.’
There’s a fertile field for sociologists and psychologists. Just how and why do such dumb ideas catch on so successfully when combined with fascist leanings?