Discussion on Ivermectin and COVID-19

Have you read Pierre Cory's book The War on Ivermectin?

No. Okay, there's something reported in this book

that it really stops you in your tracks.

It is an accidental natural experiment.

Okay, so a natural experiment is something in science

where maybe you happen on an archipelago in which you

have a bunch of different islands that have different conditions

and you can go to each island and measure the,

you know, whatever parameter it is,

because nature has given you an experiment that you can analyze.

You don't have to build islands, right? In this case,

what Pierre reports is that there were 80 court cases in

which a family sued a hospital that was refusing to give ivermectin to a patient,

and they wanted the courts to intervene and force the hospitals to administer ivermectin.

Eighty cases.

In 40 of those cases,

the courts granted the family's request and ivermectin was administered.

In 40 cases, they refused to intervene and no ivermectin was given.

In 38 of the cases where ivermectin was given,

the patient survived, and two, the patient died anyway.

In 38 of the cases where no ivermectin was given,

the patient died, and in two, the patient survived.

Wow. Okay.

Now, I find this, like, this is incredibly, I cannot vouch for the data itself.

Because it's not published in a scientific paper, I can't go look at the methods,

I can't go find the court cases.

But assuming that the data is accurately reported,

and I know Pierre well, he didn't make it up.

So

assuming that the data is accurate,

the level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical, right?

I had Heather run a pi-squared calculation,

and the p-value, I checked it also with two different AIs.

The p-value comes out to be 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15, right?

So what that means is that the chances of a result that strong, if ivermectin does not work,

are something like the chances of you guessing a random 15-digit number on the first try.

Wow. I mean, it's through the roof, right?

This is a level of statistical significance we essentially never see.

And CNN turned it into a veterinary medicine.

Right. It turned you green.

Hilarious. Right.

So my point here is a couplefold.

One, the ivermectin story and the repurposed drug story, more generally,

is a very important puzzle piece.

Because if repurposed drugs had been allowed to be used,

if doctors had been allowed to go through the normal process

of medicine that doctors go through, where they look at a patient

who's ill, they see what their symptoms are,

they try to figure out what might work for them,

they talk to other doctors, they pool their information.

If that process had been allowed to unfold,

COVID is an entirely manageable disease in all but the most compromised people, right?

There was no important pandemic.