CV and mad panic behaviour

[Mav]

Another article about Ivermectin, this time from The Age’s science reporter Daniel Mannix (whose previous work has impressed me):
Ivermectin, COVID-19, and making sense of scientific evidence, The Age.

It contains a lot of stuff about where to find credible information and how to sort the good from the bad. In particular, he recommends reviews by Cochrane, “an international non-profit bringing together top scientists to review evidence and produce easy-to-understand reports, using a special Cochrane method that eliminates sources of bias, like the insidious role of drug company funding.”

Australia’s federal government wisely funded Cochrane to set up a COVID-19 taskforce here, made up of representatives from across Australia’s medical societies. They are independent and unafraid; willing to point out a drug the government has purchased to treat COVID-19 might not work.

For these three reasons - independence, Cochrane methodology, representation across the medical spectrum - we can have a very high degree of confidence in their findings.

Compare that to c19early.com, one of the leading ivermectin websites. Put on your critical thinking hat, and ask: is an independent, government-funded, Cochrane-using panel made up of scientists drawn from across Australia’s leading institutions, or… a website put up anonymously... best placed to scrutinise the evidence?

Every week - seriously, every week - the Cochrane taskforce reviews all the new evidence generated on how to prevent and treat COVID-19. All this goes online. You can look up any treatment you want here. Just hit Ctrl-F on your keyboard.

Here’s its recommendation on ivermectin: Do not use ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 outside of randomised trials with appropriate ethical approval.

Click on ‘research evidence’ and you can see a collection of all the published ivermectin data, sorted by outcome. But the more important thing to look at is the columns on the right.

Certainty of evidence takes into account the quality of the study. A study might claim to find ivermectin works, but if the quality is low, we cannot have faith in that finding. The evidence for every single clinical outcome for ivermectin is either low or very low quality.

There is simply not enough evidence to show whether ivermectin is helpful or harmful for patients with COVID-19.

Let’s turn, now, to a study that is actually quite good.

It’s called the TOGETHER trial. It’s a randomised controlled trial, and it’s very large. It publishes all its trial methodology online for everyone to read. Mr Meyerowitz-Katz describes it as a “masterpiece of science”.

The full findings haven’t been published yet, so we should treat them with a grain of salt. But the conclusions are available via a PowerPoint slide. They found essentially no benefit to ivermectin.