Hi hayden8670,
Yes certain areas of India promoted blanket use of ivermectin. Is that the only difference between the areas though? Did they all have the same lockdown rules & restrictions, the same other treatments available, the same level of anti-bodies / prior infection among their respective populations? I've listed a few things here but there are many more. Like I said, it's uncontrolled and there's numerous other factors to consider. There's a reason uncontrolled observational studies are not best practice when determining efficacy, the results are not always reliable. I'm happy to wait for the Oxford results, other people may be different.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8248252/The above meta-analysis you linked includes Elgazzar's paper, which has been withdrawn due to the following;
"t
he group found other causes for concern, including dozens of patient records that seemed to be duplicates, inconsistencies between the raw data and the information in the paper, patients whose records indicate they died before the study’s start date, and numbers that seemed to be too consistent to have occurred by chance."https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02081-wHis paper accounted for a significant portion of the meta-analysis results. The other studies included in that meta-analysis by the paper's own labelling provide evidence of "moderate to very low" quality. It's talking about studies of 62 people in Nigeria, 72 people in Bangladesh, 100 in Pakistan, 24 in Spain etc...
I'l wait for the many thousands being included in the Oxford study. I have much more faith in their scientific methodology.
A quote from the Nature article above;
"Although the jury is still out on ivermectin, many say the retraction speaks to the difficulty of assessing research during a pandemic. “I personally have lost all faith in the results of [ivermectin] trials published to date,” says Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia who helped Lawrence to analyse the Elgazzar paper. It’s not yet possible to assess whether ivermectin works against COVID-19 because the data currently available are not of sufficiently high quality, he says" Meta-analysis below with the Elgazzar paper removed;
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab591/6310839ResultsTen RCTs (n = 1173) were included. The controls were the standard of care in 5 RCTs and placebo in 5. COVID-19 disease severity was mild in 8 RCTs, moderate in 1, and mild and moderate in 1. IVM did not reduce all-cause mortality rates compared with controls (relative risk [RR], 0.37 [95% confidence interval, .12–1.13]; very low QoE) or LOS compared with controls (mean difference, 0.72 days [95% confidence interval, −.86 to 2.29 days]; very low QoE). AEs, SAEs, and viral clearance were similar between IVM and control groups (low QoE for all outcomes). Subgroups by severity of COVID-19 or RoB were mostly consistent with main analyses; all-cause mortality rates in 3 RCTs at high RoB were reduced with IVM.
But again, the quality of evidence is labelled 'Very Low.'
Cheers!
