The Meta-Analytical Fixers: An Ivermectin Tale – The Chloroquine Wars Part XL
The Roman/Hernandez meta-analysis comes at a politically contentious moment. Their language and behavior appear political. Their work is error-laden, takes research out of its true context, uses numbers that don’t seem to come from the actual studies, chooses papers testing ivermectin under the least favorable circumstances, gives unexplained and inappropriate weights to the small amount of data that stands as outliers to the bigger picture, and still drives a conclusion of “don’t use this” from a massive average mortality reduction that did not quite reach statistical significance. At the same time the authors consistently complain about the “low quality of evidence” represented by the studies they do and do not include, nearly all of which I would describe as produced by higher quality scientists who can at least tally numbers correctly.