Dealing With Ivermectin Fraud and Covid-19

What do we do when science fails us?

Pictured: stock photo results for fraud are very…literal. Source: Pexels

Note: this article is about a paper that colleagues and I recently published in Nature Medicine. You can find the scientific paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01535-y

As you’ll no doubt have noticed if you’ve been following me for the last few months, there’s a big problem in the scientific literature. After a lengthy investigative project, myself and a group of colleagues have discovered a deep well of fraudulent research that underlies the entire literature behind ivermectin for Covid-19. Not just one or two problematic papers, but a staggering volume of studies that appear to either be so fatally flawed that they cannot be trusted or research that literally never happened at all.

It’s been a pretty wild ride. I suggest checking out parts 1, 2, and 3 if you are interested in catching up on the story. I’ll wait.

We’ve got all the time in the world. Literally, because you’re talking to a text online, and text has no perception of time. Source: Pexels

Even worse, I’ve currently got parts 4, 5, and 6 sitting in my drafts folder waiting to be put online — you have to be really careful in investigations like these so it takes a while to get them out even when you’re pretty certain of the facts.

Now, the thing about ivermectin is that serious, genuine academics believed that it worked just a few months ago. As I discussed, real meta-analyses by very competent PhDs came out arguing that ivermectin had a huge benefit in the treatment of Covid-19 and should be adopted throughout the world. People put on their metaphorical white coats, followed the mandated steps of the scientific methods, and came up with a conclusion that on face value appeared to be entirely correct. They put together systematic reviews and meta-analyses where they collected all the evidence on ivermectin and Covid-19, and concluded that it was probably an effective treatment for the horrible infection.

Until the fraud was revealed, and we realized that it might all be complete nonsense.

All of this brings us to a fairly terrifying fact— the process by which we gather knowledge to derive medical treatments, which might literally…