>>13370235>>13370244This is your brain on "the establishment is hiding the truth maaaan" heuristics.
Real meta analyses
1) Don't ignore primary outcomes and cherrypick desired ones
2) Involve systematic literature search and not browsing for studies that will make your case for you
Because the guy who made this (and the HCQ) """meta analysis""" website didn't actually have the methodology of a real meta analysis, he was either turned down by peer reviewers or never even tried because honesty is not his forte.
For example, look at just the sources at the top of the page
Chowdhury doesn't compare IVM to placebo, but IVM-Doxycycline vs HCQ-Azithromycin. It should be obvious why having no standard of care group does not tell you about the efficacy compared to standard of care, but they choose to include it anyways. They also choose to report on hospitalization even though it was not the 1ary or 2ary outcome
https://ejmo.org/10.14744/ejmo.2021.16263/ - those are missing from hius graphs
Espitia Hernandez et al. (
https://www.alliedacademies.org/articles/effects-of-ivermectinazithromycincholecalciferol-combined-therapy-on-covid19-infected-patients-a-proof-of-concept-study.pdf ) is a non-randomized study of 35 people taking ivermectin AND azithromycin whose 1ary outcome is viral positivity at 7 days, which he does include. It's puzzling that he then aggregates outcomes like hospitalization and PCR positivity to say "74%" improvement by just adding the outcome he likes
His 3rd source (
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.10.20191619v1 ) is a study of patients taking not just ivermectin, but dexamethasone, enoxaparin, and aspirin (dexamethasone has been found in large, rigorous RCTs to reduce mortality) but he still includes it as an outcome of ivermectin! The author is deliberately being misleading by including treatments with multiple pharmaceuticals in this and the previously mentioned studies.
This is why it's on a website and not peer-reviewed
