5 ms·

The other takeaway is that preprint publication is a pathway ripe for abuse. The major paper that drove most of this situation, and the meta analysis, appears t

The other takeaway is that preprint publication is a pathway ripe for abuse. The major paper that drove most of this situation, and the meta analysis, appears to have been a straight up fraud. But it got circulated a lot as a preprint to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. If the preprint had been more private, this might have been averted.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
What's the motivation for this sort of thing? It seems the very thing they crave (attention) will invariably bring them undone as attention invites scrutiny.
- avhon1 5y ago
  For one, money. There is an organized group that charges $90 online for hocus-pocus covid medication prescriptions [1]. The more people that can be convinced that this is a worthwhile purchase, the more money they get. https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/treatments/how-do-i-get-covid-19-medication/ https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/treatments/how-do-i-get...
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    That and politics. The frontline group was also involved in the Hydroxychloroquine debacle, and they were selected specifically by political actors as a pro-trump solution to the pandemic. With any of these politically connected things, there’s always a mix of grift, political opportunism, and true believers.
sjwalter 5y ago
> The major paper that drove most of this situation, and the meta analysis, appears to have been a straight up fraud. Umm, wat?! The vast majority of the studies about Ivermectin have been observational, run by front-line clinicians. Prior to 2020, basically everyone on earth agreed (including the WHO, who STILL agrees) that front-line clinicians and observational studies are excellent signals that can lead to scientific investigations that can lead to medical breakthroughs. The evidence for IVM as a treatment for covid (and many other viruses) is quite strong. There is, no, no large-scale RCT for IVM. However, it is inherently obvious that none will happen, none that give it a fair shake. The entire public health apparatus in the West has a huge desire to treat all illness with only on-patent, new medications. Do you not thin that this incentive influences what gets into the news? Do you think the public health authorities in Uttar Pradesh (https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-pradesh-government-says-ivermectin-helped-to-keep-deaths-low-7311786/ https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-prade...) are lying?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Feel free to actually read the article, it covers this.
- mlyle 5y ago
  > The vast majority of the studies about Ivermectin have been observational, run by front-line clinicians. OK, so weak evidence. > Prior to 2020, basically everyone on earth agreed (including the WHO, who STILL agrees) that front-line clinicians and observational studies are excellent signals that can lead to scientific investigations that can lead to medical breakthroughs. Sure-- weak/crappy evidence and practitioner intuition can definitely point at worthwhile things to study rigorously, even if most of what they generate is trash. > The evidence for IVM as a treatment for covid (and many other viruses) is quite strong. ??? Quite a leap you made there.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    Calling the investigatory and experiential evidence of thousands of highly-trained doctors (some of whom pioneered the standard of care for covid) as "weak evidence" is something that only somebody carrying water for large pharmaceutical companies would say. Doctors in my area are prescribing IVM to treat covid because in their experience and that of their peers IT WORKS. They have fewer deaths, fewer complications. But it's "weak" evidence just because Pfizer didn't sponsor a gigantic RCT to "prove" it. "The only science is real is expensive science done by large corporations!"
    - dionian 5y ago
      Agreed, retract all the meta-analyses you want, but never dismiss actual front line results by physicians. If you have a regimen with zero deaths for a disease, I don't think we should be suppressing their clinical data. What a world...
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        “Zero deaths” should have set off your alarm bells. That’s way too neat of a number for the real world; you only get that kind of result with small sample sizes or fraud. Even the vaccines, which are very effective, do not have a 0% death rate from infection.
saalweachter 5y ago
> ... to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. It's worse than that; if you're reading individual papers without the context of the larger body of research in a domain, you're setting yourself up to get a distorted view of the world. Peer review isn't magic; peer reviewed papers can still have errors, oversights, mistakes, outright fraud, or just get unlucky in how random chance played out. Peer review just filters out the obviously fraudulent or flawed papers so that only three reviewers have to spend an afternoon reading and understanding why they are useless, and not a thousand journal subscribers. There's nothing wrong with following scientific developments as a layperson, but you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking because you read something in a published, peer-reviewed paper -- even one in a prestigious, well-respected journal like Science or Nature -- that it must be true.
- angelzen 5y ago
  This is a very important point. It is incredibly easy to accidentally cherry pick and/or misread results that confirm one's preexisting bias. As a layperson, the default stance is 'I don't know'. Scanning the abstract of a handful of papers for 5 minutes cannot possibly change that stance. The troubling thought is that in a field as complex and poorly understood as the intersection of virology with immunology at scale in the middle of a pandemic, the Experts are not much more informed than the layperson. I have yet to hear a single Expert showing even a tiny sliver of epistemic humility.
jacquesm 5y ago
That wasn't an accident.
nextlevelwizard 5y ago
>But it got circulated a lot as a preprint to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. peer review doesn't really mean as much as most people think and the paper was circulated by people who very well knew the difference and might have been circulating it precisely because of it.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

What's the motivation for this sort of thing? It seems the very thing they crave (attention) will invariably bring them undone as attention invites scrutiny.

avhon1 5y ago
For one, money. There is an organized group that charges $90 online for hocus-pocus covid medication prescriptions [1]. The more people that can be convinced that this is a worthwhile purchase, the more money they get. https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/treatments/how-do-i-get-covid-19-medication/ https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/treatments/how-do-i-get...
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  That and politics. The frontline group was also involved in the Hydroxychloroquine debacle, and they were selected specifically by political actors as a pro-trump solution to the pandemic. With any of these politically connected things, there’s always a mix of grift, political opportunism, and true believers.

sjwalter 5y ago

> The major paper that drove most of this situation, and the meta analysis, appears to have been a straight up fraud. Umm, wat?! The vast majority of the studies about Ivermectin have been observational, run by front-line clinicians. Prior to 2020, basically everyone on earth agreed (including the WHO, who STILL agrees) that front-line clinicians and observational studies are excellent signals that can lead to scientific investigations that can lead to medical breakthroughs. The evidence for IVM as a treatment for covid (and many other viruses) is quite strong. There is, no, no large-scale RCT for IVM. However, it is inherently obvious that none will happen, none that give it a fair shake. The entire public health apparatus in the West has a huge desire to treat all illness with only on-patent, new medications. Do you not thin that this incentive influences what gets into the news? Do you think the public health authorities in Uttar Pradesh (https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-pradesh-government-says-ivermectin-helped-to-keep-deaths-low-7311786/ https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/lucknow/uttar-prade...) are lying?

ashtonkem 5y ago
Feel free to actually read the article, it covers this.
mlyle 5y ago
> The vast majority of the studies about Ivermectin have been observational, run by front-line clinicians. OK, so weak evidence. > Prior to 2020, basically everyone on earth agreed (including the WHO, who STILL agrees) that front-line clinicians and observational studies are excellent signals that can lead to scientific investigations that can lead to medical breakthroughs. Sure-- weak/crappy evidence and practitioner intuition can definitely point at worthwhile things to study rigorously, even if most of what they generate is trash. > The evidence for IVM as a treatment for covid (and many other viruses) is quite strong. ??? Quite a leap you made there.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  Calling the investigatory and experiential evidence of thousands of highly-trained doctors (some of whom pioneered the standard of care for covid) as "weak evidence" is something that only somebody carrying water for large pharmaceutical companies would say. Doctors in my area are prescribing IVM to treat covid because in their experience and that of their peers IT WORKS. They have fewer deaths, fewer complications. But it's "weak" evidence just because Pfizer didn't sponsor a gigantic RCT to "prove" it. "The only science is real is expensive science done by large corporations!"
  - dionian 5y ago
    Agreed, retract all the meta-analyses you want, but never dismiss actual front line results by physicians. If you have a regimen with zero deaths for a disease, I don't think we should be suppressing their clinical data. What a world...
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      “Zero deaths” should have set off your alarm bells. That’s way too neat of a number for the real world; you only get that kind of result with small sample sizes or fraud. Even the vaccines, which are very effective, do not have a 0% death rate from infection.

saalweachter 5y ago

> ... to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. It's worse than that; if you're reading individual papers without the context of the larger body of research in a domain, you're setting yourself up to get a distorted view of the world. Peer review isn't magic; peer reviewed papers can still have errors, oversights, mistakes, outright fraud, or just get unlucky in how random chance played out. Peer review just filters out the obviously fraudulent or flawed papers so that only three reviewers have to spend an afternoon reading and understanding why they are useless, and not a thousand journal subscribers. There's nothing wrong with following scientific developments as a layperson, but you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking because you read something in a published, peer-reviewed paper -- even one in a prestigious, well-respected journal like Science or Nature -- that it must be true.

angelzen 5y ago
This is a very important point. It is incredibly easy to accidentally cherry pick and/or misread results that confirm one's preexisting bias. As a layperson, the default stance is 'I don't know'. Scanning the abstract of a handful of papers for 5 minutes cannot possibly change that stance. The troubling thought is that in a field as complex and poorly understood as the intersection of virology with immunology at scale in the middle of a pandemic, the Experts are not much more informed than the layperson. I have yet to hear a single Expert showing even a tiny sliver of epistemic humility.

jacquesm 5y ago

That wasn't an accident.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago

>But it got circulated a lot as a preprint to people who didn’t understand the difference between a preprint and a peer reviewed paper. peer review doesn't really mean as much as most people think and the paper was circulated by people who very well knew the difference and might have been circulating it precisely because of it.