A popular study that claims ivermectin has shown no effectiveness against all-cause mortality contains false information but remains uncorrected.
The meta-analysis, published in 2021 by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, explores how groups in randomized, controlled trials fared after receiving ivermectin compared to control groups.
Among five trials included for the portion on all-cause mortality, none showed an effect for ivermectin, the authors claimed.
Ivermectin “did not reduce all-cause mortality,” they wrote.
But the claim is wrong. One of the five trials was described as finding ivermectin recipients were more likely to die, but actually found that ivermectin recipients were less likely to die. “The risk base estimation ... confirmed that the average mortality obtained in all of ivermectin treated arms was 3.3%, while it was about 18.3% in standard care and placebo arms,” the authors of that paper said.
Dr. Adrian Hernandez, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut’s School of Pharmacy, and other authors of the meta-analysis are aware of the false information. The group released their study as a preprint before the journal published it. The first version included the false information. A corrected version properly portrayed the trial’s results for all-cause mortality in a figure summarizing the results, but still falsely said none of the trials showed a benefit against all-cause mortality.
Dr. Hernandez and Clinical Infectious Diseases did not respond to requests for comment.
The lingering false information is in a paper that has attracted numerous citations in other studies, in the press, and on social media. Altmetric, which tracks engagement, scores it at 5,900. A score of 20 or means a paper is doing “far better than most of its contemporaries,” according to the company.
Morimasa Yagisawa of Kitasato University and other researchers pointed out the issue in a March review of ivermectin trials, saying they were “concerned about the spread of misinformation and/or disinformation” about trial results.
“The articles on systematic reviews and meta-analyses are often erroneous or misleading. This is perhaps because the authors were not involved in the clinical trials or patient care and only searched for and analyzed articles and databases on clinical trial results,” they wrote. The problems are “particularly serious” in the paper for which Dr. Hernandez was the corresponding author, the researchers said.
“Although it was a clear error, the wrong content of the preprint was published as a major article in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the official journal of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, without being changed,” they wrote. “Many comments were made questioning the insight of the reviewers and the Editor-in-Chief for publishing a paper with such inconsistencies, but the paper is still published without correction. Since this is a prestigious journal of a prestigious society, an early corrective action is required.”
“There have been several fraudulent meta-analyses, and this is a striking one,” Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief officer of the FLCCC Alliance and author of the book The War on Ivermectin, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“In this meta-analysis, they selected only 10 of the 81 controlled trials, 33 of which were randomized, on ivermectin that were available at the time. Eight of the ten they selected involved mild COVID-19. Typically, mild COVID does not lead to death. And here they were looking at death rates and, as expected, saw very few. The inclusion criteria they used were intended to show no effect. And they succeeded. Conflicted researchers have been doing this to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin since the beginning of the pandemic,” he added.
Issues in other meta-analyses include the improper inclusion of papers that did not describe clinical trial results, Mr. Yagisawa and his co-authors said.
They noted that a number of trials have found ivermectin recipients were better off. That includes trials cited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in its position that ivermectin is not effective against COVID-19.
The FDA recently settled a lawsuit over that position, agreeing to take down several web pages and social media posts.
