I know not everyone wants to read a whole series on Scott Alexander’s article on ivermectin, so this is my distilled overview, written for someone with little or no prior context of my critique so far. It’s hard to deny that the Astral Codex Ten article titled “
I'm glad you realized you needed to do something at a more summary level like this. Amazing work. I'd nominate you for a Pulitzer but I'm not sure where you go to vote. Thanks for doing this. I think generic early treatment options never got a a fair trial and that there was clearly a push to discredit it from some intensely monied interests. Glad someone like you answered the call and did the work.
Side note (in reference to the comment above)...I would be shocked to learn that you do not hold an advanced degree. Your aptitude is glaringly evident. And greatly appreciated.
You've done amazing work. Doctors don't work as hard to make sure people have access to his treatment options, as you have. Before I read most of you're previous articles I didn't believe the "studies" discrediting ivermectin. Too many good doctors in the face of keeping people alive saw the benefit of using it in conjunction with other safe and effective treatments. That's all I need. I trust good doctors. The death count of those in their care is all that is relevant. I've seen plenty of garbage "studies" carrying water for the "current thing" in education and medicine. The value of studies lost my regard a very long time ago. Thank you for your hard work.
Thank you for writing this up. Though seemingly everyone made up his mind on the horse paste long ago, high quality analysis is still good to have. It will also be useful for the tribunals when we get justice for hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented with early, aggressive treatment.
Oct 10, 2022·edited Dec 1, 2023Liked by Alexandros Marinos
> On that note, I am aware that my style of writing may not be for everyone. I have done my best to keep this essay as dispassionate as possible. At this point, it’s about as good as it’s going to get. I sure wish someone more diplomatic than me could take up the mantle and articulate all this much better, but everyone seems to be busy with other projects at the moment.
The problem with your style isn't that it's not dispassionate enough, frankly I suspect that it's too technical.
What Scott is good at, is writing in such a way that a reader comes away feeling like he now understands the subject, even if neither the reader nor Scott understands it. And quite frankly Scott understands very little. By his own admission he doesn't understand mathematics (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/), and isn't even capable of seeing the problem with Immanuel Velikovsky's "Ages in Chaos", "Venus was a comet" theory (https://web.archive.org/web/20140201002705/http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html) without resorting to an appeal to authority. Nevertheless, Scott can, somehow, give the reader the impression that he understands things, in articles that are fun to read.
To steelmans Scotts original article further; it did have a substantial impact on my thinking about ivermectin. Before his piece I didnt really see a way in which all the independent ivermectin signals would melt away with more data; but there was always this thought in the back of my head that Scott would come out with an article detailing a bunch of historical cases of much stronger signals than this had been seen in the past that had completely evaporated.
He was pretty explicit about stating his biases. And despite his stated biases, he did not bring forth a convincing argument, that seriously budged the notion that widespread adoption of ivermectin seemed extremely likely to be a massive net benefit. So it did help me in a significant way, despite its flaws.
One random thought to keep myself in check: I'm trusting your analyses primarily based on your logic and presentations; however, I did the same with Scott's original post too, and I now believe I was duped.
So there's this interesting meta-question: how do we take the broader community from "that seems well written and plausible" to "I fully understand the argument"? Obviously there are limits and, at some point, one simply needs to put in the effort to verify things themselves; however, I do wonder whether pushing science more towards reproducible, open-source Jupyter notebooks would be helpful.
Besides that, one thing I've concluded from all of this is that one seemingly high quality proxy for trust is someone's openness to debate. So on that basis alone, I trust your work more than Scott's. But I must admit that it is only a moderately strong basis of trust.
Alexandros, you are amazing! Your critique is smart and detail oriented. No error gets past you! I wish I had a friend like you to analyze and discuss medical journal articles with - I fear many of those published these days contain grave statistical errors and draw conclusions inappropriately. Without brilliant minds like yours to call these authors out in a fair and balanced way I think much medical research these days may be compromised by the loudest megaphone. I love what you did at the end - an offer to contribute to Scott Alexander’s research should he be open to a fair minded critique of his work. So classy of you. There are not many like you out there. Brilliant, open minded, fair, balanced, classy and un-afraid of the real answers whatever the answers may be. Thank you thank you for the effort you put into this Hurculean analysis. It is MUCH appreciated!!!!!
Thank you very much for all of your work on this topic. On March 16, 2020 around 11:35pm, I saw the first article on a easy very successful treatment for people who went to the hospital because of covid19 ............. within days I could not find the article by any kind of search that I could try ... but I had copied the original link so could access and share it that way............ long story short.... link eventually didn't work... I could find it different times in different ways over the past 2+ years ...... latest link I found is this one ..... long story short chloroquine and/or lopavir/ritonavir ...... an older malaria drug and a prev 4th gen hiv drug ...... interesting to note that ritonavir is a part of Paxlovid. https://www.analyzingamerica.org/2020/03/587877/ Anyway, all of that to say, early on I knew there were successful treatments that they were ignoring /suppressing ....... came across the reason at one point ..... the vaccines could not be given Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by U.S. Law, if a successful therapeutic existed......... so huge huge huge financial incentives by media, government, and pharmaceutical industry to squash news of successful therapeutics in the U.S. Interestingly, poor countries who would not be vaccine customers where allowed to use successful treatments... like Bangladesh. By that time, I realized that given that it was a man made virus, and as Francis Boyle, a bioweapons / bio engineered viruses expert mentioned back in Feb 2020 I think it was, that as a man made virus, the "antidote" would have been developed at the same time as the virus ...... and would presumably be something cheap and easy to administer.... it did seem that China unleashed it on its own population presumably because the Hong Kong weeks/months of unrest were spilling over into China in the fall of 2019 ?? and China celebrated its 70th anniversary of the current power in October 2019.... all too aware I imagine of the fall of the Soviet Union after 69 years in 1989...... made the Australian story linked to above make sense.... also followed worldometers.info for Australian cases and deaths numbers in 2020 and that whole summer/fall they stayed around 900 some deaths .... so apparently the 70 Australian and 10 New Zealand hospitals who were part of the clinical trial mentioned in the link above were all using the chloroquine and/or lopinavir/ritonavir. When I came across news of ivermectin .... I thought right away they would be suppressing it .......... Key West Florida and Ivermectin (3 clinics in Key West), Broward County and Ivermectin (a 4 or 5 hospital system), Dominican Republic (6000 covid19 patients treated with ivermectin from March 2020 to September 2020 in 3 clinics in the Dominican Republic) )were some of the first stories I saw ............... Uttar Pradesh, 2nd largest state by population (210 million ) in India ... ivermectin given out by population in Sept 2020..... used in all of India in May 2021........ used in Japan August 2021 ......... it just goes on and on and on .......... ivmstatus.com is a source ....... it just becomes crazy .........150-200 U.S. Congressmen and women and their staffs and families take ivermectin ?? according to Dr. Pierre Kory's Oct 8 2021 tweet? I called a compounding pharmacy just blocks away from the huge NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland .... even drove by it .... and they assured me on 2 different calls that they would fill a prescription for ivermectin for covid19. It just becomes silly ......... and then come to find out that there are many more successful, easy, low risk medical treatments that have been suppressed in favor of high profit medical treatments going back years by the industry/Congressmen and women and federal agency/media sharing profits......... not to mention hidden vaccine risks (learntherisk.org is just one source) There are so many avenues to go down, I've limited myself for now to higher blood levels of vitamin d, (Dr. Michael Holick 40 year vitamin d pioneer), high dose / iv /liposomal vitamin c (Dr. Robert Cathcart, orthomolecular.org select "Library", select "News Releases", Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University, ivtogo.com, livonlabs.com, and ivermectin (Dr. Hulda Clark books in 1990s, parasites and toxins are the source of diseases/illnesses.... ivermectin was only discovered in 1987 I believe it was ..... presumably "they" know this and that is why ivermectin couldn't even be mentioned while hydroxychlorquine could in the early days? Hearing that people who did take ivermectin for covid19 are reporting other health problems have been resolved?? The great news.... once you know to look for these medical treatments that are being suppressed, they are fairly easy to find. I now search on vitamin d and xyz or vitamin c and xyz with any medical problem/issue that we experience.... just as a starter. Also have searched on "ivermectin and cancer" or "vitamin c and vaccines" or "vitamin c and cancer", etc,etc it is amazing seeing what is out there. kidney disease and niacin is also amazing. There is great news ahead of us on the medical front ... things already discovered but just suppressed for competing with the status quo profits. The funny thing is they really can't do anything about it once people know. Ban vitamin c ?? there are actually books out there on how to make your own liposomal vitamin c. Ban sitting in the sun for 15 minutes a day around solar noon /1pm for higher vitamin d levels?? Beyond sad the unnecessary suffering over the past 2+ years, even the past decades, especially those who lost loved ones to the influence of greed on the medical field.................... incredible, amazing health news and many years of life to be saved ahead.
It seems like you have enough information to write a formal meta-analysis. Maybe Andrew Bryant may be the guy?
There have been more IVM studies since Scott’s article which of course will have to be considered.
Maybe if you are formally preparing a meta-analysis then TOGETHER etc will release their data? Without this release you can potentially exclude it from your analysis and make a bit of a point about it in the paper....although of course Cochrane were happy to include TOGETHER without the data.
I guess I’m just trying to offer an option to put all your hard work towards making a meaningful change. Unfortunately the conventional scientific community do not rate Substack’s credibility
All I have is personal experience: as an RN working with my county public health and with an elderly community as their nurse as well as with my many animals whom I give ivermectin.
As an RN during outbreaks in the elderly community, I took ivermectin as a prophylactic and never contracted the virus. I worked through 3 outbreaks in the community and never once tested positive on a rapid antigen test, however did have one positive pcr test. With the positive PCR test, I called the lab to obtain the CT. I was told it was 35. I asked what their cut off is; I was told 36 for their machine.
I never had symptoms.
Working with my farm animals, I have administered ivermectin rather routinely to my sheep and llamas as well as to my dog and cat. Of course I used human pharmacy grade ivermectin for myself. livestock grade for livestock and veterinary grade for my dog and cat.
Working for public health I saw the vaccine roll out and all that lead up to it as to guidance being given to general public and businesses... when I questioned why, given the facts in the vaccines pamphlet, are we not pursuing good early treatments? Why are the only options to stay home, mask, distance and wash hands... why no post exposure early treatments?
I mean the vaccine companies admitted it had no long term safety studies ( thus why only EUA authorized) they admitted you must continue to mask and distance. This even if vaccinated per the vaccine pamphlet and original CDC guidance... by early March we were already seeing tons of breakthrough cases.... and no reinfection cases. Reinfection case protocol is that the PCR test must have a CT less than 28! This was rarely if ever looked at or considered with general population diagnosis with PCR tests! So many felt they didn’t have it, like me! And per the PH reinfection protocols of a positive case having to have a CT of less than or equal to 28, most who had a positive diagnosis with no symptoms, were indeed not positive.
Anyways.... when I asked about why not focus on early treatment, I was fired on the spot. As a nurse we are now no longer allowed to question any narrative... it regardless of the blatant misinformation being spread by the public health and our government/ one in the same. We received threats of loss of our license if we didn’t perpetuate their lies because the public trusts nurses and doctors in general! Well, I’m not willing to lie. My eyes, my experiences don’t lie either.
I'm glad you realized you needed to do something at a more summary level like this. Amazing work. I'd nominate you for a Pulitzer but I'm not sure where you go to vote. Thanks for doing this. I think generic early treatment options never got a a fair trial and that there was clearly a push to discredit it from some intensely monied interests. Glad someone like you answered the call and did the work.
Side note (in reference to the comment above)...I would be shocked to learn that you do not hold an advanced degree. Your aptitude is glaringly evident. And greatly appreciated.
You've done amazing work. Doctors don't work as hard to make sure people have access to his treatment options, as you have. Before I read most of you're previous articles I didn't believe the "studies" discrediting ivermectin. Too many good doctors in the face of keeping people alive saw the benefit of using it in conjunction with other safe and effective treatments. That's all I need. I trust good doctors. The death count of those in their care is all that is relevant. I've seen plenty of garbage "studies" carrying water for the "current thing" in education and medicine. The value of studies lost my regard a very long time ago. Thank you for your hard work.
Thank you for writing this up. Though seemingly everyone made up his mind on the horse paste long ago, high quality analysis is still good to have. It will also be useful for the tribunals when we get justice for hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented with early, aggressive treatment.
> On that note, I am aware that my style of writing may not be for everyone. I have done my best to keep this essay as dispassionate as possible. At this point, it’s about as good as it’s going to get. I sure wish someone more diplomatic than me could take up the mantle and articulate all this much better, but everyone seems to be busy with other projects at the moment.
The problem with your style isn't that it's not dispassionate enough, frankly I suspect that it's too technical.
What Scott is good at, is writing in such a way that a reader comes away feeling like he now understands the subject, even if neither the reader nor Scott understands it. And quite frankly Scott understands very little. By his own admission he doesn't understand mathematics (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/), and isn't even capable of seeing the problem with Immanuel Velikovsky's "Ages in Chaos", "Venus was a comet" theory (https://web.archive.org/web/20140201002705/http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html) without resorting to an appeal to authority. Nevertheless, Scott can, somehow, give the reader the impression that he understands things, in articles that are fun to read.
To steelmans Scotts original article further; it did have a substantial impact on my thinking about ivermectin. Before his piece I didnt really see a way in which all the independent ivermectin signals would melt away with more data; but there was always this thought in the back of my head that Scott would come out with an article detailing a bunch of historical cases of much stronger signals than this had been seen in the past that had completely evaporated.
He was pretty explicit about stating his biases. And despite his stated biases, he did not bring forth a convincing argument, that seriously budged the notion that widespread adoption of ivermectin seemed extremely likely to be a massive net benefit. So it did help me in a significant way, despite its flaws.
One random thought to keep myself in check: I'm trusting your analyses primarily based on your logic and presentations; however, I did the same with Scott's original post too, and I now believe I was duped.
So there's this interesting meta-question: how do we take the broader community from "that seems well written and plausible" to "I fully understand the argument"? Obviously there are limits and, at some point, one simply needs to put in the effort to verify things themselves; however, I do wonder whether pushing science more towards reproducible, open-source Jupyter notebooks would be helpful.
Besides that, one thing I've concluded from all of this is that one seemingly high quality proxy for trust is someone's openness to debate. So on that basis alone, I trust your work more than Scott's. But I must admit that it is only a moderately strong basis of trust.
Hey, this, from Scott, is thanks to you IMO :
Epistemic status: not totally sure of any of this, I welcome comments by people who know more.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/how-trustworthy-are-supplements
Great summary. Minor mistake in misspelling Ioannidis' name a few times.
I deeply appreciate your hard work on this. Thank you.
Alexandros, you are amazing! Your critique is smart and detail oriented. No error gets past you! I wish I had a friend like you to analyze and discuss medical journal articles with - I fear many of those published these days contain grave statistical errors and draw conclusions inappropriately. Without brilliant minds like yours to call these authors out in a fair and balanced way I think much medical research these days may be compromised by the loudest megaphone. I love what you did at the end - an offer to contribute to Scott Alexander’s research should he be open to a fair minded critique of his work. So classy of you. There are not many like you out there. Brilliant, open minded, fair, balanced, classy and un-afraid of the real answers whatever the answers may be. Thank you thank you for the effort you put into this Hurculean analysis. It is MUCH appreciated!!!!!
Truth is a fractal. When you dig down, everything changes like the edge of the Mandelbrot set. Thanks for the write-up.
Thank you very much for all of your work on this topic. On March 16, 2020 around 11:35pm, I saw the first article on a easy very successful treatment for people who went to the hospital because of covid19 ............. within days I could not find the article by any kind of search that I could try ... but I had copied the original link so could access and share it that way............ long story short.... link eventually didn't work... I could find it different times in different ways over the past 2+ years ...... latest link I found is this one ..... long story short chloroquine and/or lopavir/ritonavir ...... an older malaria drug and a prev 4th gen hiv drug ...... interesting to note that ritonavir is a part of Paxlovid. https://www.analyzingamerica.org/2020/03/587877/ Anyway, all of that to say, early on I knew there were successful treatments that they were ignoring /suppressing ....... came across the reason at one point ..... the vaccines could not be given Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) by U.S. Law, if a successful therapeutic existed......... so huge huge huge financial incentives by media, government, and pharmaceutical industry to squash news of successful therapeutics in the U.S. Interestingly, poor countries who would not be vaccine customers where allowed to use successful treatments... like Bangladesh. By that time, I realized that given that it was a man made virus, and as Francis Boyle, a bioweapons / bio engineered viruses expert mentioned back in Feb 2020 I think it was, that as a man made virus, the "antidote" would have been developed at the same time as the virus ...... and would presumably be something cheap and easy to administer.... it did seem that China unleashed it on its own population presumably because the Hong Kong weeks/months of unrest were spilling over into China in the fall of 2019 ?? and China celebrated its 70th anniversary of the current power in October 2019.... all too aware I imagine of the fall of the Soviet Union after 69 years in 1989...... made the Australian story linked to above make sense.... also followed worldometers.info for Australian cases and deaths numbers in 2020 and that whole summer/fall they stayed around 900 some deaths .... so apparently the 70 Australian and 10 New Zealand hospitals who were part of the clinical trial mentioned in the link above were all using the chloroquine and/or lopinavir/ritonavir. When I came across news of ivermectin .... I thought right away they would be suppressing it .......... Key West Florida and Ivermectin (3 clinics in Key West), Broward County and Ivermectin (a 4 or 5 hospital system), Dominican Republic (6000 covid19 patients treated with ivermectin from March 2020 to September 2020 in 3 clinics in the Dominican Republic) )were some of the first stories I saw ............... Uttar Pradesh, 2nd largest state by population (210 million ) in India ... ivermectin given out by population in Sept 2020..... used in all of India in May 2021........ used in Japan August 2021 ......... it just goes on and on and on .......... ivmstatus.com is a source ....... it just becomes crazy .........150-200 U.S. Congressmen and women and their staffs and families take ivermectin ?? according to Dr. Pierre Kory's Oct 8 2021 tweet? I called a compounding pharmacy just blocks away from the huge NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland .... even drove by it .... and they assured me on 2 different calls that they would fill a prescription for ivermectin for covid19. It just becomes silly ......... and then come to find out that there are many more successful, easy, low risk medical treatments that have been suppressed in favor of high profit medical treatments going back years by the industry/Congressmen and women and federal agency/media sharing profits......... not to mention hidden vaccine risks (learntherisk.org is just one source) There are so many avenues to go down, I've limited myself for now to higher blood levels of vitamin d, (Dr. Michael Holick 40 year vitamin d pioneer), high dose / iv /liposomal vitamin c (Dr. Robert Cathcart, orthomolecular.org select "Library", select "News Releases", Linus Pauling Institute, Oregon State University, ivtogo.com, livonlabs.com, and ivermectin (Dr. Hulda Clark books in 1990s, parasites and toxins are the source of diseases/illnesses.... ivermectin was only discovered in 1987 I believe it was ..... presumably "they" know this and that is why ivermectin couldn't even be mentioned while hydroxychlorquine could in the early days? Hearing that people who did take ivermectin for covid19 are reporting other health problems have been resolved?? The great news.... once you know to look for these medical treatments that are being suppressed, they are fairly easy to find. I now search on vitamin d and xyz or vitamin c and xyz with any medical problem/issue that we experience.... just as a starter. Also have searched on "ivermectin and cancer" or "vitamin c and vaccines" or "vitamin c and cancer", etc,etc it is amazing seeing what is out there. kidney disease and niacin is also amazing. There is great news ahead of us on the medical front ... things already discovered but just suppressed for competing with the status quo profits. The funny thing is they really can't do anything about it once people know. Ban vitamin c ?? there are actually books out there on how to make your own liposomal vitamin c. Ban sitting in the sun for 15 minutes a day around solar noon /1pm for higher vitamin d levels?? Beyond sad the unnecessary suffering over the past 2+ years, even the past decades, especially those who lost loved ones to the influence of greed on the medical field.................... incredible, amazing health news and many years of life to be saved ahead.
It seems like you have enough information to write a formal meta-analysis. Maybe Andrew Bryant may be the guy?
There have been more IVM studies since Scott’s article which of course will have to be considered.
Maybe if you are formally preparing a meta-analysis then TOGETHER etc will release their data? Without this release you can potentially exclude it from your analysis and make a bit of a point about it in the paper....although of course Cochrane were happy to include TOGETHER without the data.
I guess I’m just trying to offer an option to put all your hard work towards making a meaningful change. Unfortunately the conventional scientific community do not rate Substack’s credibility
All I have is personal experience: as an RN working with my county public health and with an elderly community as their nurse as well as with my many animals whom I give ivermectin.
As an RN during outbreaks in the elderly community, I took ivermectin as a prophylactic and never contracted the virus. I worked through 3 outbreaks in the community and never once tested positive on a rapid antigen test, however did have one positive pcr test. With the positive PCR test, I called the lab to obtain the CT. I was told it was 35. I asked what their cut off is; I was told 36 for their machine.
I never had symptoms.
Working with my farm animals, I have administered ivermectin rather routinely to my sheep and llamas as well as to my dog and cat. Of course I used human pharmacy grade ivermectin for myself. livestock grade for livestock and veterinary grade for my dog and cat.
Working for public health I saw the vaccine roll out and all that lead up to it as to guidance being given to general public and businesses... when I questioned why, given the facts in the vaccines pamphlet, are we not pursuing good early treatments? Why are the only options to stay home, mask, distance and wash hands... why no post exposure early treatments?
I mean the vaccine companies admitted it had no long term safety studies ( thus why only EUA authorized) they admitted you must continue to mask and distance. This even if vaccinated per the vaccine pamphlet and original CDC guidance... by early March we were already seeing tons of breakthrough cases.... and no reinfection cases. Reinfection case protocol is that the PCR test must have a CT less than 28! This was rarely if ever looked at or considered with general population diagnosis with PCR tests! So many felt they didn’t have it, like me! And per the PH reinfection protocols of a positive case having to have a CT of less than or equal to 28, most who had a positive diagnosis with no symptoms, were indeed not positive.
Anyways.... when I asked about why not focus on early treatment, I was fired on the spot. As a nurse we are now no longer allowed to question any narrative... it regardless of the blatant misinformation being spread by the public health and our government/ one in the same. We received threats of loss of our license if we didn’t perpetuate their lies because the public trusts nurses and doctors in general! Well, I’m not willing to lie. My eyes, my experiences don’t lie either.
Amazing work! Thank you.