13 Comments
Aug 8, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

If you deliberately set out to undermine the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid, then all of the above makes sense does it not?

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Mostly. The wild admissions over email would have to be explained with some additional factor, but otherwise, yes.

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Aug 8, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

I personally know four people (two couples) in Estado do Rio de Janeiro who were prescribed ivermectin for post-exposure prophylaxis (exposure to different individuals) and for routine prophylaxis. BTW none became infected even though one couple had close contact with someone who was hospitalized shortly after meeting with them. I don't believe Mills' claim that ivermectin was not widely used in Minas Gerais when his data were being collected. If that claim is so crucial to the Together trial, why haven't the investigators done a poll in Minas asking people whether they took ivermectin during the period of the trial?

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Aug 8, 2022Liked by Alexandros Marinos

Could the "or were likely to have taken it" be a reference to multiple imputation?

This would then be a crazy post hoc exclusion based on some likelihood the case might have taken ivm?

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Interesting idea. I would classify it under "too horrifying to think about". Just imagine. These dudes can't even get their multiple imputation to produce repeatable results.

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have you ever talked with David Wiseman about the Lopez trial? If not, you may want to reach out to David who spent time wading through the differences in the AEs between the three different weeks as the protocol changed and changed again during the trial. I took notes back when he told me about it, and planned to write an article, but was too focused on the N other HCQ analyses/articles I was working on. I've since let the finer details drain from my head, but David knows them intimately.

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Yes, he's talked me through the whole mess. What a story.

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Did you know that if you DON"T Take ivermectin, you are much better off than if you DON't TAKE hydroxycloroquinine.

That's what the TOGETHER TRIAL results say.

If that doesn't make any sense to you, you are starting to see that the Together Trial doesn't make sense.

In particular, experiment control group placebo treatments have to be at the same timeframe as the drug patients. In multi-arm trials they sometimes "chose" who was in the control group afterwards. Balancing things they want to be even, such as sex, wieight... But they didn't balance the time frame.

And the virus changed. on them.

So the control group had a different virus than the drug group.

Sloppy work. They should retract the paper and go in to TimeOut.

from: ivnmeta.com

Unequal randomization, significant confounding by time. The trial reports 1:1:1:1 randomization, however independent analysis shows much higher enrollment in the ivermectin treatment arm towards the start of the trial [c19ivermectin.com (D), longhaulwiki.com]. This introduces very significant confounding by time due to the major change in the distribution of variants. [Zavascki] show dramatically higher mortality for Gamma vs non-Gamma variants (28 day mortality from symptom onset aHR 4.73 [1.15-19.41]). Many more patients were randomized to ivermectin vs. placebo in the first few weeks, for example the first week shows 82 ivermectin vs. 28 placebo patients, 2.9x higher. The period of excess ivermectin enrollment coincides closely with a period of significantly higher deaths and CFR in Brazil.

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Sadly he's bought the story about the high% dropoff in the placebo group in the TOGETHER Trial. Oh well. Otherwise excellent.

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So if Ivermectin use has been high in South America shouldn't those countries have better case fatality rates? Brazill is the 2nd highest country listed in observed case fatality ratio per Johns Hopkins? https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality Back in the day just eye balling Africa's numbers figured it served as evidence to support the notion HCQ and Ivermectin at least helped. That should hold wherever early treatment is in play.

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Well, at the very least I can say that I never made much of a fuss about the Africa data.

Interesting observation nonetheless.

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