Continuation The One Covid-19 Science and Medicine Thread Part 4

[Klimax]

Summary on antibodies from infection:
No, your antibodies are not better than vaccination: An explainer

Quote:

The timeframe for the CDC study coincides with the rise of the delta coronavirus variant in the US, which may also play a role in protection levels from past infection. In a French study published in July in Nature, researchers examined antibodies in 56 unvaccinated people who had recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to the rise of delta. Six months after their infection and amid the rise of delta, the researchers found that their neutralizing antibody levels were 4 to 6 times lower against delta than they were against earlier variants.

The researchers next looked at a different group of 47 people who had gone a year since a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Of those 47, 26 were still unvaccinated and 21 had received one dose of a vaccine. At that point, the unvaccinated 26 had extremely low levels of neutralizing antibodies against any SARS-CoV-2 variants, particularly delta. Many people had no detectable levels of neutralizing antibody against delta. The vaccinated group, meanwhile, had high levels of neutralizing antibody similar to or above the levels seen in people who were fully vaccinated.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by Klimax

Summary on antibodies from infection:
No, your antibodies are not better than vaccination: An explainer

Nice to have it confirmed, but the example of Manaus was a good guide that prior infection wasn't an ideal counter. Interesting that a single shot + infection seems to work, though.

[abaddon]

Originally Posted by rjh01

The ACT in Australia has a table giving where the hotspots are including the times. I put that table into an Excel spreadsheet. Then I gave it the third degree. It told me that the most dangerous times to be out shopping are between 11 am and 4 pm.

That's interesting. Those are the times I avoid in the supermarket. Why? Because those are the times the supermarket is least populated.

Perhaps don't share this nugget with the vaxidiots. It will become a CT.Supermarkets are intentionally restricting shopping hours or whatever. Some mad claim.

[Chris_Halkides]

At In the Pipeline Derek Lowe wrote about molnupiravir, "Congratulations to the team at Emory that discovered it years ago, to Ridgeback Therapeutics for licensing it for development, and to Merck for putting their resources behind it after that."

This passage brings to mind an interesting question. Can academic/industrial partnerships be a successful part of the drug industry?

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Chris_Halkides

At In the Pipeline Derek Lowe wrote about molnupiravir, "Congratulations to the team at Emory that discovered it years ago, to Ridgeback Therapeutics for licensing it for development, and to Merck for putting their resources behind it after that."

This passage brings to mind an interesting question. Can academic/industrial partnerships be a successful part of the drug industry?

Why not? One of those is Oxford University with Astra-Zeneca.

[Elaedith]

Protection Across Age Groups of BNT162b2 Vaccine Booster against Covid-19

Data from Israel suggest that a third shot of Pfizer in those already vaccinated is associated with 10-fold lower infection rates and is effective across all age groups.

[angrysoba]

This Twitter thread compiles the reasons for believing that pretty much all supporting evidence for the prophylactic or treatment use of Ivermection for Covid is based on data that is either (charitably) very unreliable or (more likely) outright fraud.

Link

The papers covered are:

- Elgazzar
- Carvallo
- Cadegiani
- Samaha
- Niaee

I have noticed that some of the more vocal proponents have either stopped talking about Ivermectin suddenly (instead of loudly retracted their claims which they should do!) or claim conspiracy, or scaled back their claims to something like, "but why isn't it being properly studied...?" etc...

[rjh01]

Originally Posted by abaddon

That's interesting. Those are the times I avoid in the supermarket. Why? Because those are the times the supermarket is least populated.

Perhaps don't share this nugget with the vaxidiots. It will become a CT.Supermarkets are intentionally restricting shopping hours or whatever. Some mad claim.

Your first paragraph does not make sense. Do you choose to go shopping at busy times?

In Australian news, in the last week, NSW has had only 70% of the new cases it had in the previous week. VIC cases continue to increase out of control. They have four times the number of new cases of NSW. ACT cases are steady.

[marting]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I have noticed that some of the more vocal proponents have either stopped talking about Ivermectin suddenly (instead of loudly retracted their claims which they should do!) or claim conspiracy, or scaled back their claims to something like, "but why isn't it being properly studied...?" etc...

Yup. When you've started to turn Covid19Crusher it isn't looking good for the IVM true believers. Kyle Sheldrick has done an excellent job doing a kind of forensic analysis of IVM studies. This is the sort of stuff I've seen expose financial fraud where a created set of books shows strong statistical evidence of straight out fraud. Cool stuff. Well done Kyle.

Covid19Cruisher on the Naiee IVM study

Quote:

@GidMK
points out the abnormal distribution of the last digits of the lab markers.

Whether a legitimate behavioural bias can explain such numbers is very unclear, to be kind.

[Puppycow]

Can we revisit the Ivermectin question for a moment?

So, I just watched this video by John Campbell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy7c_FHiEac

It's titled "BBC debunks ivermectin". It soon became apparent to me that the title is sarcastic. However, he does seem to make some interesting points in the video, and it may be worth watching to the end of the video to see everything. He provides links in the video description to the things he's talking about. Anyway, he is very much on his high horse in this video about the following BBC "reality check":

Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid 'miracle' drug

To be fair, the BBC report is the Lay press, for general audiences and not aimed at scientists.

At the end he also talks about the following "live meta-analysis":

https://ivmmeta.com/

Which seems to support ivermectin efficacy.

He also mentions a Japanese paper:

Quote:

Kitasato University, based on the judgment that it is necessary to examine the clinical effect of ivermectin to prevent the spread of uncertain COVID-19,

asked Merck & Co., Inc. to conduct clinical trials of ivermectin for COVID-19 in Japan.

This company has priority to submit an application for an expansion of ivermectin’s indications, since the original approval for the manufacture and sale of ivermectin was conferred to it.

However, the company said that it had no intention of conducting clinical trials.

He said something along the lines of "a cynic might wonder whether the reason why Merck did not intend to conduct a clinical trial might have something to do with the fact that it is off patent. (my paraphrase)" (The patent has run its course, and the drug can now be made generically.) Is the issue that potential profit is too low because it is no longer protected by a patent?

[Pixel42]

Lots of existing drugs have been, and are being, tested to determine if they can help treat Covid 19. Many are off patent.

[angrysoba]

Sorry, but if John Campbell is promoting Ivermectin then I have to wonder about him.

The point of the studies that were looked into were because they were the biggest studies.

The ones that remain tend to have low numbers or high risk of bias. Few of them seem to be well-constructed from what I understand, and/or they vary in dosages and treatments.

Besides, that website was, for a long time, and until very recently, continuing to trumpet studies on hydroxychloriquine.

There are also ongoing large-scale trials for Ivermectin which apparently show nothing (or very little effect).

In addition, John Campbell seems to be getting some of his infomation from Tess Lawrie. She and Pierre Kory seem to be two of the biggest promoters of Ivermectin and for me it is becoming more and more inescapable that the two of them have a wider alt-med agenda that takes in total anti-vaxxers, such as Mercola and Ryan Cole and others.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

He said something along the lines of "a cynic might wonder whether the reason why Merck did not intend to conduct a clinical trial might have something to do with the fact that it is off patent. (my paraphrase)" (The patent has run its course, and the drug can now be made generically.) Is the issue that potential profit is too low because it is no longer protected by a patent?

This is just obnoxious conspiracism in my opinion.

Why wouldn't a company that still holds the license for a particular drug and which is most associated with a drug not want to be seen as saviours of humanity?

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Sorry, but if John Campbell is promoting Ivermectin then I have to wonder about him.

The point of the studies that were looked into were because they were the biggest studies.

The ones that remain tend to have low numbers or high risk of bias. Few of them seem to be well-constructed from what I understand, and/or they vary in dosages and treatments.

Besides, that website was, for a long time, and until very recently, continuing to trumpet studies on hydroxychloriquine.

There are also ongoing large-scale trials for Ivermectin which apparently show nothing (or very little effect).

In addition, John Campbell seems to be getting some of his infomation from Tess Lawrie. She and Pierre Kory seem to be two of the biggest promoters of Ivermectin and for me it is becoming more and more inescapable that the two of them have a wider alt-med agenda that takes in total anti-vaxxers, such as Mercola and Ryan Cole and others.

Might be worth watching that video then, as he does seem to make some good points. The student who produced the opinion piece that is the basis of that BBC report appears to want to throw out the entire process of meta-analysis going forward.

John is the biggest proponent of vaccination going. He is just also keen to see if there are viable therapeutics that can be used ALONG with vaccination, not INSTEAD of it.

Its entirely fair to say that ivermectin has been picked up by anti-vaxxers as an "instead of" treatment, but that doesn't mean that everyone interested is that way inclined, or should be tainted by association.

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

This is just obnoxious conspiracism in my opinion.

Why wouldn't a company that still holds the license for a particular drug and which is most associated with a drug not want to be seen as saviours of humanity?

Cynical answer: when they can sell something that is reportedly more effective for 700 USD instead of 2 USD?

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Might be worth watching that video then, as he does seem to make some good points. The student who produced the opinion piece that is the basis of that BBC report appears to want to throw out the entire process of meta-analysis going forward.

John is the biggest proponent of vaccination going. He is just also keen to see if there are viable therapeutics that can be used ALONG with vaccination, not INSTEAD of it.

Its entirely fair to say that ivermectin has been picked up by anti-vaxxers as an "instead of" treatment, but that doesn't mean that everyone interested is that way inclined, or should be tainted by association.

I might go back to watching it later but I am already a bit annoyed listening to him. He starts by sarcastically asking if we should get our information from journalists. Do you go to a journalist if you have any upset tummy? This is disingenuous. The BBC is reporting from work done by medical scientists. Then, the BBC make a false dichotomy re: anti-vaxxers…. Am I an anti-vaxxed then? Are the people I speak to? Well, Campbell isn’t, but one of the people he has spoken to, Tess Lawrie, is. She apparently did a dumpster dive on VAERS and called for the vaccines to be halted. Then Campbell points to the bit where the BBC mention people have even taken the animal version (“oh are they saying it is an animal drug?” - no, Doctor Campbell! They are saying there are animal versions of the drug which people have been taking. Its plainly written!)

…. Jeez Louise. I hope the good points appear soon.

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

Might be worth watching that video then, as he does seem to make some good points. The student who produced the opinion piece that is the basis of that BBC report appears to want to throw out the entire process of meta-analysis going forward.

John is the biggest proponent of vaccination going. He is just also keen to see if there are viable therapeutics that can be used ALONG with vaccination, not INSTEAD of it.

Its entirely fair to say that ivermectin has been picked up by anti-vaxxers as an "instead of" treatment, but that doesn't mean that everyone interested is that way inclined, or should be tainted by association.

Yep. However, I did get the sense from the video that he was prone to take the studies at face value without closely examining them for evidence of fakery, and the suggestion that some of them might be fraudulent seemed beyond the pale to him. (He complained that the word "fraud" was used) Which made me think maybe he's a little bit naive about it.

I thought he made some interesting points, and the BBC "reality check" was rather sloppy and lacked supporting details for its broad-brush conclusions.

[angrysoba]

One of the authors is a student. Dun dun dunnnnnm!

Okay, and?

PhD students publish papers approximately ALL THE BLOODY TIME. In fact, it is sort of what they do. If the team also has experienced scientists in the group it is not surprising to see them named in last place as part of a mentoring role.

This analysis of ivermectin studies has been coming out all the time by some of the same researchers - often on Medium.

David Gorski has also been writing about it as well on his blogs.

It’s strange that Campbell puts so much stock suddenly in questioning credentials etc…. while people he was talking to were promoting papers published in pay to publish predatory open access journals.

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I might go back to watching it later but I am already a bit annoyed listening to him. He starts by sarcastically asking if we should get our information from journalists. Do you go to a journalist if you have any upset tummy? This is disingenuous. The BBC is reporting from work done by medical scientists. Then, the BBC make a false dichotomy re: anti-vaxxers…. Am I an anti-vaxxed then? Are the people I speak to? Well, Campbell isn’t, but one of the people he has spoken to, Tess Lawrie, is. She apparently did a dumpster dive on VAERS and called for the vaccines to be halted. Then Campbell points to the bit where the BBC mention people have even taken the animal version (“oh are they saying it is an animal drug?” - no, Doctor Campbell! They are saying there are animal versions of the drug which people have been taking. Its plainly written!)

…. Jeez Louise. I hope the good points appear soon.

I agree about the jab at journalists. I thought that bit was bad.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by GraculusTheGreenBird

The student who produced the opinion piece that is the basis of that BBC report appears to want to throw out the entire process of meta-analysis going forward.

Okay, John Campbell's video is full of fallacious reasoning in my opinion. As we have seen, he takes an ad hom approach to the main letter-writer being a student. His argument is a kind of argument from sarcasm: "Oh, look, here is the lead author from a university hospital in the UK. He must be a professor or a doctor or...oh no, he's a student." *turns to the camera and makes a gurning face* "I won't comment!" - he says, while blatantly leaving the viewer to conclude that "the student" is out of his league.

But here are two more problems with John's "debunking the debunkers":

First of, John was pretty much ridiculing "the student" for including the Elgazzar study in the letter that John is criticizing. Why? Because John says that the Elgazzar study has been retracted. He tries to make some big deal out of there only being 7 references and two of them are the Elgazzar study then claiming that if you take those out there are only five studies. But that's a really pointless objection. It's a letter, not a review article.

Then he says, "I think the student was the one who found the mistake in the study so fair play to him!" - John contradicts his own objection. This also contradicts the previous objection of "the student" only being a student. Surely the fact that the student found flaws in the paper and had it retracted means we can put to bed the patronizing objection that "the student" isn't fit to critique BS ivermectin studies.

Then the thing about the meta-analysis comes up. Here John ties himself up in knots by first agreeing that the "five Twitter scientists" are right that "in a perfect world all meta-analysis should involve looking at the data" then throws in some total strawman by saying that because he this is not done, then he assumes the authors are calling for all meta-analyses in history to be thrown out. John has either not properly read the very short letter he is criticizing, or he has and is misrepresenting it. Look!

Quote:

Most, if not all, of the flaws described above would have been immediately detected if meta-analyses were performed on an individual patient data (IPD) basis. In particular, irregularities such as extreme terminal digit bias and the duplication of blocks of patient records would have been both obvious and immediately interrogable from raw data if provided.

We recommend that meta-analysts who study interventions for COVID-19 should request and personally review IPD in all cases, even if IPD synthesis techniques are not used. In a similar vein, all clinical trials published on COVID-19 should immediately follow best-practice guidelines and upload anonymized IPD so that this type of analysis can occur. Any study for which authors are not able or not willing to provide suitably anonymized IPD should be considered at high risk of bias for incomplete reporting and/or excluded entirely from meta-syntheses.

They are here, specifically talking about Covid-19 and not saying that all meta-analyses prior to that have to be thrown out. It would be pretty easy to see why a sudden emergency could lead to poor studies either from those who are desperate to find something that works, and also because of opportunism by unscrupulous researchers.

Then, they go on to say...

Quote:

We recognize that this is a change to long-accepted practice and is substantially more rigorous than the standards that are typically currently applied, but we believe that what has happened in the case of ivermectin justifies our proposal: a poorly scrutinized evidence base supported the administration of millions of doses of a potentially ineffective drug globally, and yet when this evidence was subjected to a very basic numerical scrutiny it collapsed in a matter of weeks. This research has created undue confidence in the use of ivermectin as a prophylactic or treatment for COVID-19, has usurped other research agendas, and probably resulted in inappropriate treatment or substandard care of patients.

They acknowledge then that this is new, yet John makes it sound like he is telling the viewers this and as if the writers of the letter are somehow unaware. But the point they make seems eminently reasonable.

I think that John is engaging in motivated reasoning. He has been a big believer in Ivermectin. Unlike others who have been pushing it, he is NOT an anti-vaxxer, but his blindspots here are glaring.

And to top it off, he even links to that flaming garbage dump of a website called ivmmeta.

This has also been debunked by one of the same Twitter scientists on Twitter.

Link

Of course, I know we could all say, "Yeah, but that Twitter thread is not a peer-reviewed paper in a high impact journal", but of course neither is that "live meta-analysis" on ivmmeta.

John: "This is a really interesting site..."

The only thing "interesting" is how taken in by the claims of the Ivermectin Evangelists.

Listen, I will await the findings of the Oxford University RCT, and the Together trials on Ivermectin, but seriously, how long before people give up the ghost on this one?

(I think the new pivot will be to Vitamin D... in fact, Bret Weinstein already seems to be going there).

[angrysoba]

Here is David Gorski's opinion of the Ivermectin studies in response to the BBC article and the research being done by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, Kyle Sheldrick and others:

Quote:

The BBC, of course, has to be circumspect, as do the intrepid team of ivermectin study investigators who uncovered these problems, but I don’t. This reeks to high heaven of fraud, particularly given that it was primarily the studies that found large positive effects against ivermectin due to the drug were the ones with the biggest problems. As the BBC reports, the worst problems were found “all in the studies making big claims for ivermectin—in fact, the bigger the claim in terms of lives saved or infections prevented, the greater the concerns suggesting it might be faked or invalid, the researchers discovered.” Sheldrick, for instance, concedes that it’s very difficult to rule out human error, but to me these errors are so bad that they are virtually indistinguishable from fraud. Moreover, if these were in fact human errors, then the investigators behind these trials have no business being anywhere near anything resembling clinical trials or human subjects research—or any medical research of any kind. I wouldn’t even want them in a position to experiment on mice.

Link

[dann]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

(I think the new pivot will be to Vitamin D... in fact, Bret Weinstein already seems to be going there).

Wasn't he already there last year?!

[angrysoba]

Also, John Campbell completely contradicts his own criticisms of ridiculing the researchers for having a student in their ranks, for their research being reported on by journalists and for the paper he looks at being a letter to Nature.

Why? He recommends a "meta-analysis" that is an anonymous website with literally no named authors (they could be anyone) and that has undergone no peer review itself and isn't published in a journal. So why does John Campbell put so much stock in this website? He says, "Oh, it is easy to do the meta-analysis. You just push a button now..."

Seriously, that video of his is a disaster zone.

[dann]

Has anybody heard anything about the Cuban drug Jusvinza?
CIGB-258, a peptide derived from human heat-shock protein 60, decreases hyperinflammation in COVID-19 patients (NCBI, Feb 24, 2021)

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by dann

Wasn't he already there last year?!

LOL! I forgot. He has a bottle on his windowsill.

[marting]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

In addition, John Campbell seems to be getting some of his infomation from Tess Lawrie. She and Pierre Kory seem to be two of the biggest promoters of Ivermectin

Amazing what happens to people once they glom onto an idea. BTW, IIRC, I ran across some anti 5G stuff Tess Lawrie was involved with over a year ago. Sigh.

At least John Campbell is very pro mask and vaccine unlike the majority of IVM zealots. As for Vit. D, while these zealots generally advocate it it hasn't been touted as much by the same crowd. Probably because Fauci takes it.

[The Atheist]

Another very promising drug, with emergency approval being sought: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/...or-death-by-50

With that one offering a potential 50% reduction in severe harm and death, and the Merck drug also giving an apparent 50% reduction, I make that if you get both drugs, you have 100% chance of surviving!

And on a lighter front - dope smokers are more likely to have breakthrough infections! https://nypost.com/2021/10/10/covid-...a-study-finds/

Horrors - dope decreases your vaccine's ability to protect you!

Or, maybe it's simply dope smokers sitting cramped together in unventilated rooms, passing around joints, swapping saliva, and coughing a lot...

[marting]

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...10.08.463699v1

Quote:

SARS-CoV-2-specific memory B and T cells reached a peak at 3-6 months and persisted in the majority of patients up to 15 months although a significant decrease in specific T cells was observed between 6 and 15 months. Conclusion: The data suggest that antiviral specific immunity especially memory B cells in COVID-19 convalescent patients is long-lasting, but some variants of concern, including the fast-spreading Delta variant, may at least partially escape the neutralizing activity of plasma antibodies.

[Puppycow]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

I think that John is engaging in motivated reasoning. He has been a big believer in Ivermectin. Unlike others who have been pushing it, he is NOT an anti-vaxxer, but his blindspots here are glaring.

This is similar to my own view.

I don't get the feeling that he's a dishonest guy, or some kind of silver-tongued charlatan. He's not really selling anything other than his YouTube channel, and I guess he has become a sort of minor Internet celebrity (and fame can always be parlayed into money some way or another). However, he does seem to have blind spots, and a lack of skepticism with respect to some things.

[Klimax]

I wouldn't be surprised if Ivermectin had some effect in 3rd world countries against Covid by removing parasites.

[marting]

A Systematic Review of the Protective Effect of Prior SARS-CoV-2 Infection on Repeat Infection

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34592838/

Quote:

The weighted average risk reduction against reinfection was 90.4% with a standard deviation of 7.7% (p-value: <0.01). Protection against SARS-CoV-2 reinfection was observed for up to 10 months. Studies had potential information, selection, and analysis biases. The protective effect of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection on re-infection is high and similar to the protective effect of vaccination.

[Tippit]

Originally Posted by Klimax

I wouldn't be surprised if Ivermectin had some effect in 3rd world countries against Covid by removing parasites.

Ivermectin is effective against Covid because it is a protease inhibitor which blocks the replication of certain viral particles, in addition to being an anti-parasitic.

[marting]

Originally Posted by Puppycow

He said something along the lines of "a cynic might wonder whether the reason why Merck did not intend to conduct a clinical trial might have something to do with the fact that it is off patent. (my paraphrase)" (The patent has run its course, and the drug can now be made generically.) Is the issue that potential profit is too low because it is no longer protected by a patent?

More than too low. Once a drug is off patent the cost of doing a large, DBRCT, would be sunk money. They are very expensive to do and the small profit they might later make would take a long time if ever to make up for the initial cash outlay. This is a generic problem in the industry. So financial incentives strongly favor creating new drugs which can be sold at 100X cost of manufacture to make up for the high front end costs of safety and efficacy studies of which only some work out.

Off label uses are not uncommon, but when RCTs are done, they are usually later and funded by non-profits and occasionally, govt. health agencies. There are ongoing IVM RCTs by NIH and Oxford. Results of the better studies to date are inconclusive.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Tippit

Ivermectin is effective against Covid because it is a protease inhibitor which blocks the replication of certain viral particles, in addition to being an anti-parasitic.

It is effective in vitro. What evidence do you have it is effective in vivo?

[Chris_Halkides]

Originally Posted by marting

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...10.08.463699v1

Thank you; I have long wondered how long the memory cells remained.

[Klimax]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

It is effective in vitro. What evidence do you have it is effective in vivo?

IIRC Unfortunately, all competently ran studies only looked at use after hospitalization long after damage was done (and often long after infection itself was gone)

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by Klimax

IIRC Unfortunately, all competently ran studies only looked at use after hospitalization long after damage was done (and often long after infection itself was gone)

Not sure if that is really true. The Oxford trial, for example, I believe does not require hospitalized patients, and is for those who have tested positive within two weeks. Many of the ivermectin supporters claim that it works well in all cases, prophylactic, mild and serious infections.

As with most things, ivermectin supporters will claim that any study that finds nothing will have something wrong with the dosing or the time it appeared or probably the variant it is used on etc… just like Jude Law in Contagion and the HCQ supporters.

Anyway, a podcast by Gideon M-K and Kyle Sheldrick has just been released. I’ve just started listening and seems interesting so far….

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR...MTE0MDkzMTYzOQ

[Puppycow]

Some interesting statistics on Covid from Japan:

80% of Tokyoites under 60 who die of COVID-19 are male, study finds

Quote:

A group of researchers at Kitasato University studied digital medical records covering 28,095 people in the United States who were COVID-19 patients between January and November 2020.

Specifically, they analyzed the risks of being 65 years old or older, being male, having type 2 diabetes and being obese (a BMI higher than 30).

They found that if one of the four risk factors was present, the likelihood of hospitalization for COVID-19 increased threefold.

If two risk boxes were checked, hospitalization for COVID-19 was 6.5 times more likely, while three boxes represented a sixteenfold increase.

A COVID-19 patient with all four risk factors was 19 times more likely to be hospitalized, according to the study.

Takayuki Uematsu of Kitasato University Medical Center said the immune system is weaker among people who are obese or have diabetes.

I suppose that this is true more generally, and not just in Tokyo?

Males under 60 are 4 times more likely than females under 60 to die of Covid.

And, I remember hearing recently (NPR Radiolab podcast) that women (those with two X chromosomes) actually have stronger immune systems than men do. However, the downside to this is that they are also more likely to suffer from auto-immune diseases like lupus.

[marting]

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Anyway, a podcast by Gideon M-K and Kyle Sheldrick has just been released. I’ve just started listening and seems interesting so far….

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR...MTE0MDkzMTYzOQ

Those guys are really good. Hard to believe the sorts of things they uncovered looking at the patient data. I've gained a whole new level of sketicism. I also get why registered DBRCTs can even be flawed like when the treating docs screw up the study by using flashlights to see through envelopes so they avoid giving the placebo. See discussion near the end around 1:14.

[angrysoba]

Originally Posted by marting

Those guys are really good. Hard to believe the sorts of things they uncovered looking at the patient data. I've gained a whole new level of sketicism. I also get why registered DBRCTs can even be flawed like when the treating docs screw up the study by using flashlights to see through envelopes so they avoid giving the placebo. See discussion near the end around 1:14.

Yeah, there were some good explanations of how they analyszed the patient data, some of it was subtle such as the trailing digit analysis, which I had not heard of before, and then some of the fraud was apparently blatant such as the cutting and pasting etc... and the obvious plagiarism. It is a bit scary how these papers were a) so widely popularized by people who should have known better and b) in some cases ended up either in published journals or published meta-analyses.

Of course in the latter case, motivated reasoning pretty much covers it. The BIRD group and Pierre Kory's group could have simply wanted to believe.

Anyway, now Gideon M-K is on to that Vitamin D study that we talked about before. I remember thinking that it was fishy...

Originally Posted by angrysoba

Okay, so that Vit D study….I am not qualified to make many judgments about it but if I understand it correctly (someone with better statistical knowledge than me may have to chime in here) the Pearson R numbers and p numbers look pretty “meh!” to me. Unless I am missing something fundamental….

In addition, aren’t we likely to find people with co-morbidities to be deficient in vitamin D anyway? This is apparently a well recognized feature of all kinds of illnesses. For example someone dies of cancer and we notice they had low vitamin d, does it mean that if only we had dosed them with vitamin D they would have been fine? Or could it just be that vitamin d is the symptom of other problems?

Anyway, like I said, I am not qualified to make any judgments on this, but usually when you have a single study that turns everything on its head despite this having been investigated for some time, it seems odd that this would either not have received more attention unless it was simply not persuasive in some way. The conclusion in the title itself seems like a huge stretch and does not match the conclusion in the main paper….

Here is Gideon M-K's response:

Quote:

This review of vitamin D and COVID-19 is ENORMOUSLY popular online, so I thought I'd take a look

There are serious deficiencies here. I'm actually wondering if the paper is a joke?

*Screenshot of a Robert inventor-of-the-mRNA-vaccine! Malone, MD tweet promoting the study*

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As it stands, the search methodology is just...completely deficient. I would recommend the authors read the PRISMA statement and download those tools, there's just no information here to work with

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How were studies excluded? How were studies INCLUDED? How was observational defined? Etc etc etc

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The studies included, what few there are, are mostly just not useful. 7 in-hospital studies looking at correlations between vitamin D levels and mortality, and an ecological study which correlated pre-pandemic vit D with mortality

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For example, this study using a series of 144 patients is fine, but it's also just not really useful for assessing whether vitamin D is causally related to COVID-19 death

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Anyway, the authors identify use this small number of observational studies and plot their estimates of the death rate from these studies at different vitamin D levels to create a linear regression (r^2 = .133, p = 0.0194)

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This is then used to genuinely argue that at a vitamin D concentration of ~50ng/ml there is a theoretical point of zero mortality

I just...what???

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I really don't understand this paper. If it is a serious attempt, it should be corrected asap. If it is a joke, I think it may have fallen flat

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Also, I'm not trying to be mean to the authors about the joke comment, I'm genuinely a bit flummoxed. That being said, if the paper isn't a joke...feel free to email, there are LOADS of things that need to be fixed