..
Excerpts:
Paper used to support claims that ivermectin reduces COVID-19 hospitalizations is withdrawn by preprint server
The overseers of the preprint server SocArXiv have withdrawn a paper which claims that treating Covid patients with ivermectin dramatically reduces their odds of hospitalization, calling the work “misleading” and “part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19.”
“Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19: evidence from a quasi-experimental analysis based on a public intervention in Mexico City,” has been a source of controversy for SocArXiv since it was accepted for the site in May 2021.
The paper was written by José Merino, head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), along with co-authors DAPI, the Mexican Social Security Institute and the Mexico City Ministry of Health. They claimed to find that:
We found a significant reduction in hospitalizations among patients who received the ivermectin-based medical kit; the range of the effect is 52%- 76% depending on model specification.
The controversial article, which has been downloaded more than 11,000 times, has been used to justify expenditures on ivermectin by the Mexican government to the tune of “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to SocArXiv, which cites this article in Animal Politico.
Merino did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch, but we understand he and his colleagues did not agree to the retraction. [See update at end of post.]
.
n a posted statement linked from the page where the article appeared, the SocArXiv Steering Committee said:
This is the first time we have used our prerogative as service administrators to withdraw a paper from SocArXiv. Although we reject many papers, according to our moderation policy, we don’t have a policy for unilaterally withdrawing papers after they have been posted. We don’t want to make policy around a single case, but we do want to respond to this situation.
We are withdrawing the paper, and replacing it with a “tombstone” that includes the paper’s metadata. We are doing this to prevent the paper from causing additional harm, and taking this incident as an impetus to develop a more comprehensive policy for future situations. The metadata will serve as a reference for people who follow citations to the paper to our site.
Our grounds for this decision are several:
1. The paper is spreading misinformation, promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.
2. The paper is part of, and justification for, a government program that unethically dispenses (or did dispense) unproven medication apparently without proper consent or appropriate ethical protections according to the standards of human subjects research.
3. The paper is medical research – purporting to study the effects of a medication on a disease outcome – and is not properly within the subject scope of SocArXiv.
4. The authors did not properly disclose their conflicts of interest.
.
Update, 0000 UTC, 2/5/22: Merino and colleagues sent us a statement they submitted to the SocArXiv editors. They write that they
are deeply concerned by your decision to remove our work from your site. We consider it an indulgence in political innuendo rather than an examination of statistical evidence, and the management of a scientific debate as a Twitter confrontation and not as a scholarly dialogue.
Your decision to remove the paper is based on flawed arguments, a lack of understanding, and several false statements.
The statement’s 12 points end with:
You should be ashamed and present your resignation to your post at SOCARXIV. Your behavior in this case has been both deeply unscientific and unethical, and contrary to the commitment for evidence building associated with your post.
Of note, one of the statement’s references about the alleged evidence supporting the use of ivermectin in COVID-19 has been subjected to an expression of concern, with the authors saying they would retract the paper and publish a re-analysis. That re-analysis, which was posted on Research Square, concluded that “the significant effect of ivermectin on survival was dependent on largely poor quality and potentially fraudulent studies.”
..
Excerpts|
Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid ‘miracle’ drug
By Rachel Schraer & Jack Goodman
BBC Reality CheckPublished6 October 2021
.
Campaigners for the drug point to a number of scientific studies and often claim this evidence is being ignored or covered up. But a review by a group of independent scientists has cast serious doubt on that body of research.
The BBC can reveal that more than a third of 26 major trials of the drug for use on Covid have serious errors or signs of potential fraud. None of the rest show convincing evidence of ivermectin’s effectiveness.
Dr Kyle Sheldrick, one of the group investigating the studies, said they had not found “a single clinical trial” claiming to show that ivermectin prevented Covid deaths that did not contain “either obvious signs of fabrication or errors so critical they invalidate the study”.
Major problems included:
- The same patient data being used multiple times for supposedly different people
- Evidence that selection of patients for test groups was not random
- Numbers unlikely to occur naturally
- Percentages calculated incorrectly
- Local health bodies unaware of the studies
The scientists in the group – Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, Dr James Heathers, Dr Nick Brown and Dr Sheldrick – each have a track record of exposing dodgy science. They’ve been working together remotely on an informal and voluntary basis during the pandemic.
They formed a group looking deeper into ivermectin studies after biomedical student Jack Lawrence spotted problems with an influential study from Egypt. Among other issues, it contained patients who turned out to have died before the trial started. It has now been retracted by the journal that published it.
The group of independent scientists examined virtually every randomised controlled trial (RCT) on ivermectin and Covid – in theory the highest quality evidence – including all the key studies regularly cited by the drug’s promoters.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58170809
..
weehingthong 