I've recently gotten in touch with Alexandros Marinos, which has been writing lengthy critiques of Scott's most famous post, his review of Ivermectin.
After hearing his point of view, I must admit I've been swayed to the thinking that:
There are some obvious statistical errors in Scott's post and his interpretation of Bitterman's epidemiological data
The evidence for ivermectin, while poor, is about as reasonable as that for any repurposed covid drug (e.g. fluvoxamine), and even purpose-made ones (plaxovid)
While I fancy myself an off-label statistician I'm prone to error and maybe my interpretation is wrong. Given that Alexandros has recently finished this post which condenses his core criticisms, I was curious to see what people on LW thought about it.
This is a shotgun comment, and sorry if I'm being very ignorant here (I've stopped following most covid science-y stuff in the last year+), but:
The evidence for ivermectin, while poor, is about as reasonable as that for any repurposed covid drug (e.g. fluvoxamine), and even purpose-made ones (plaxovid) [emphasis mine]
Aren't the effects of Paxlovid pretty extreme?
In studies, mortality benefits large enough (>10x?) it really slams you in the face.
My understanding is that in 2022, covid mortality has gotten lower in the general population, even among unvaccinated people.
My understanding is that you don't have effects nearly this large and well-studied for ivermectin on covid. If anything (feel free to correct me!) countries that use ivermectin a lot have pretty high covid mortality, though of course there are many confounders.
Given that this was my claim and not the author's I'd rather not discuss it since I'd detract from the point.
But tl;dr, strength aside, if you count all trials ivm efficacy is arguably higher than plaxovid, once you start eliminating and de-biasing the story changes, the direction and magnitude of change is the whole story that generated e.g. Scott's ivm post and this reply.
I've recently gotten in touch with Alexandros Marinos, which has been writing lengthy critiques of Scott's most famous post, his review of Ivermectin.
After hearing his point of view, I must admit I've been swayed to the thinking that:
While I fancy myself an off-label statistician I'm prone to error and maybe my interpretation is wrong. Given that Alexandros has recently finished this post which condenses his core criticisms, I was curious to see what people on LW thought about it.