How to design a study to fail to create bad PR on Ivermectin: Plus a lesson in white lies from the W

[Elderberry]

JoNova 3/22/2022

How to design a study to fail to create bad PR on Ivermectin: Plus a lesson in white lies from the Wall Street Journal

Late last week a large prospective “study” showed that ivermectin was useless so it got headline reporting at the Wall Street Journal, unlike the other 80 controlled studies the newspaper ignored. This study is not even a peer reviewed paper, nor is it even news — The TOGETHER Trial announced results way back in August  last year, but haven’t officially published the paper yet.

It’s a case of PR now, details later.

Thanks to the FLCCC we know some of the reasons the trial was never likely to succeed. And given that several groups involved in the trial were also big clients of Pfizer, it was a very convenient failure. Bear in mind, “fail” is relative — despite all the handicaps below, the Relative Risk of dying of Covid with low dose ivermectin was still 0.82 (0.44-1.52). Meaning they found a 20% lower mortality rate, but it wasn’t statistically significant when done with a low, late dose in the wrong way, with the wrong type of trial, with the wrong type of participants.

How to design a study to fail:


            Give the control group a head start.  It helps to begin collecting data on the control group weeks earlier when there is a less deadly variant around. That way more of the control group “do well” which makes the test group less likely to outdo them.
            Give people ivermectin on an empty stomach so it is not absorbed well. It works against worms, but lowers the effective antiviral dose to about one fifth of the current clinical treatment protocol.
            Limit the trial to three days, just in case all the other handicaps weren’t enough.
            Start the treatment late — maybe as late as 8 days after symptoms start. It’s not clear exactly how late the treatments ended up being on average. We just have to wait for the paper, eh?
            Use a randomized control trial in a community that already knows how useful ivermectin is.  That way the really sick people will rule themselves out of the trial, because they won’t want the useless placebo. By comparing groups that are already low risk, ivermectin is less likely to shine. RCT trials work best in communities where the drug is not normally known or used.
            Ivermectin was so widely known in Minas Gerais, Brazil that some of the control group may have been using ivermectin before they started the trial. No one asked. Nevermind if they were the lucky ones who actually got the right dose at the right time, we can call them “controls”.
            Use vague primary outcomes like “events” that are subject to bias and exaggeration.
            Rule out sick people (if they haven’t already ruled themselves out first) by only including patients with an “expected stay of less than 5 days. “
            Tweak the protocol in the middle of the experiment:  “we hypothesize that younger patients will benefit more than older patients.” Perhaps the results weren’t going well enough?

The illustrious Wall Street Journal swallowed the junk study whole and didn’t interview any of the experts who could have explained why the trial was a waste of time.  (Unless the purpose was not to discover if Ivermectin was useful but to get rich selling more expensive and risky drugs, in which case the TOGETHER trial was just what Pfizer needed.)

Ivermectin Didn’t Reduce Covid-19 Hospitalizations in Largest Trial to Date

Patients who got the antiparasitic drug didn’t fare better than those who received a placebo

Sarah Toy, Wall Street Journal

“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful,” said Edward Mills, one of the study’s lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

It’s all in how you phrase things:

“This is the first large, prospective study that should really help put to rest ivermectin and not give any credibility to the use of it for Covid-19,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine…

It’s not the first trial of Ivermectin, not the largest trial, it’s the first large trial that should put people off ivermectin.

Even liars leave clues:

But *most* studies showing positive effects had significant limitations such as small sample sizes or poorly defined outcomes, according to the NIH.

“Most” indeed, meaning 51% or more. Not all studies had significant limitations but we don’t need to mention the ones that were bigger and better, right? Like the trial in Itajaí, Brazil with 159,000 people that showed a bizarrely low infrequent dose of Ivermectin could halve hospitalization rates and reduce deaths by 70% if it was used preventatively.

More: https://joannenova.com.au/2022/03/how-to-design-a-study-to-fail-to-create-bad-pr-on-ivermectin-plus-a-lesson-in-white-lies-from-the-wall-street-journal/

[Smokin Joe]

The same crap was done to the Zelenko protocol, of Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and zinc.

It was administered late in the disease, not at the first onset of symptoms.

It was only administered in part: Some just the Hydroxychloroquine, some with Azithromycin, too, but NEVER with the critical Zinc supplementation. (Zinc had been known to be effective against SARS as early as 2005).

Not much use in having an ionophore without the ions,

And for extra credit, a study was done in Brazil in which patients were administered lethal doses of Chloroquine (12,000 mg--LD50 is 3500 mg in the same time period) and all that was reported was that the study had to bee stopped because the patients were dying (Ya think!?), while Chloroquine was conflated in the media with its milder cousin Hydroxychloroquine.

But when Trump mentioned it, the war was on, Zelenko's very understandable (for lay persons) explanation of the protocol, the part each component played, and the strategy behind it was yanked from YouTube, and the Facebook and Twitter wars against "misinformation" were kicked off...

It turns out both antiparasitic drugs were capable of being effective against COVID when administered at the early onset stage of the disease, and with the macrolide antibiotic and Zinc supplementation.Thank you FDA, CDC, NIAID, and "big pharma", for making sure I and (just a guess) millions of Americans know what apple flavored horse wormer tastes like (not so much apples). I'll never trust any of you f**kers again.