'Cureus' is an open-access journal, i.e. anyone can publish anything they want on it. "Peer-reviewed" simply means someone else read it before it went out; in the case of that article, peer-review was completed in nine days and it was published two days later - which basically means the peer-reviewer didn't raise a single question or edit on it. So ask yourself how rigorous that process was? A study on 150,000 people and they nailed the write-up first time around?
For reputable journals - and again, NEJM is probably the most respected medical journal in the world - you would expect to do several rewrites over a number of months before it would finally be published.
There is simply no comparison. Saying the mainsteam media didn't report it is like saying RTE didn't pick up on my Instagram post from my holiday in Lanzarote last week, but gave lots of coverage to the Ukrainian president going to London.
I do not know the answer as I do not have the background to know, but what is in it for Cureus to keep a paper making "false claims" on its website? Surely people would have notified them by now saying the paper is making false claims and they would have removed it or redact it as it would be bad for their reputation to have such a paper on their website.
So are the issues raised in this piece about the Together Trail not valid, without merit?
They have intervened and corrected the conflicts of interest section here
https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis-used-for-covid-19-a-citywide-prospective-observational-study-of-223128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching/correction/126
See link no.3 below:
Ivermectin: the largest randomized, double-blind trial yet conducted, with early treatment, indicates there is no difference compared with placebo. It doesn't work. Period.
just published @NEJM
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115869
As pointed out previously the design of this trial was very good, but its execution left a lot to be desired.
It is named:
Effect of Early Treatment with Ivermectin among Patients with Covid-19
But the start of the treatment was anything but early, being administered to
Patients who had had symptoms of Covid-19 for up to 7 days and had at least one risk factor for disease progression
It was supposed to estimate
The efficacy of ivermectin in preventing hospitalization or extended observation in an emergency setting among outpatients with acutely symptomatic coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19),
but those enrolled were attending emergency rooms. That is not an early stage of infection, although technically it could be said that it is the early stage of the development of the Covid illness after being infected for maybe 7 days.
Also in this well designed trial they changed the dosage during the trial.
Huh?
Something very weird there.
Lots of other concerns have been expressed about this section of the trial also by many commentators.
Hopefully all those who call into question different Ivermectin trials for various reasons, will take a good look at this trial and apply the same critical standards to it.
Some of the problems discovered with the Ivermectin part of the Together trial are highlighted in the following
The main difference for me is the deaths calculations for both arms of the trial.
It reports
But if those deaths were calculated against the number of people who adhered to the trial criteria to the end, then the numbers would come out as
If the above is really what has happened then we are looking at a huge difference in outcome.
Hopefully there is some information forthcoming from those who ran the trial to properly explain these apparent discrepancies to everyone's satisfaction.
This thread is soon(ish) to be obsolete…
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