[quote ollyollyoxenfree]@IncredulousOne
and to simply try to shut down all such discussion as conspiracy theories or horse dewormer has the opposite effect to the one you are intending.
at no point have I done either of these things - I've pointed out when you're posting misinformation (when not deleted by MNHQ). I've repeatedly brought the discussion back to the actual scientific evidence surrounding ivermectin.
You seem to have multiple posting strategies.
A couple of posts ago you were banging on about 65 studies on the fraudulent ivnmeta website, ignoring all comments about the issues surrounding the site. You then tried to promote a poor quality narrative review as evidence of effect and stated people should be receiving guidance on how to take it.
Re your last post where it's like you've had a personality transplant: the study is low risk of bias and is a reasonable quality. However, as the authors state themselves, it is not robust evidence of effect. This is particularly relevant when contrasted against the two large, better quality RCTs which have shown a null effect.[/quote]
Maybe not you (I'm not going to go back over all the posts to find out who said what, when), but others have tried to shut down debate in this way.
The change in tone is probably because we have (finally) got the discussion round to actual scientific evidence of specific papers.
FWIW, simply dismissing the ivnmeta as a "fraudulent website" is not a scientific debate about the merits of the data contained therein - you can say that their statistical analysis is faulty, but at the least I would expect you to back this up with a proper justification (if you're an epidemiologist, this should be a straightforward explanation).
I note that you have accused the ivnmeta site of "cherry-picking data". That may or may not be the case, I haven't read all the papers. (For balance, I would point out that I have heard similar criticisms of the Cochrane review that concluded there wasn't sufficient evidence to recommend its use). But anyway, surely cherry-picking data is kind of the point? i.e.
If you are trying to prove that something is an effective treatment, you try lots of stuff (e.g. different dosing regimes, different stages of illness, using it with different adjuvants, etc) and some of it will work and some of it won't. Conversely, the fact that it doesn't work for each and every permutation is not evidence that it doesn't work at all.
(Incidentally, this is why I think that people trying to get off-label prescriptions for ivermectin are probably wasting their time - the chances of someone at home stumbling across the right combination of dosage, adjuvant etc is probably pretty small).
I don't want to re-ignite the earlier argument, but the issue I had with your statement ("no robust evidence for ivermectin") was the sweeping generality presented as settled fact. IMO, there is lots of evidence of a positive effect (not a magic cure, but even the study you quoted showed a positive effect - not a null effect). Taken in isolation, these effects might not be robust (hence the conclusions of individual papers, the cautious wording of which is typical in life science publications) but when dozens of papers report measurable positive effects then the overall body of evidence becomes robust. You can say that you think the overall balance of evidence is that there isn't a significant benefit, but to say make sweeping statement that there is no evidence is not IMO a balanced statement.
Here is another review of the evidence which I think presents a fairly balanced overall picture:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7521351/
They note promising results from multiple studies, but also note that the benefits are still under review and that there is no current definitive answer. It would be easy to cherry pick sentences from this paper to support either a pro- or an anti-ivermectin argument, but reality is more nuanced than that.