Jay Bhattacharya pulled the paper for quality reasons. Attacking him for his decision is unfair. There are 25 questions I'd like the authors to answer including why wasn't there a negative control.
I would like someone to research the CDC’s first attempt to test for Covid and why it was taken off the market in a relatively short amount of time. I believe the reason was it wasn’t effective. I’m thinking that it was effective; but the powers to be said it wasn’t because it wasn’t detecting as many cases of Covid as they wanted. So they introduced a new test that detected more cases. It has just been discovered the Covid test that they went to actually gave a lot false positives. An unbelievable percentage of false positives. It may have been the first test was actually more precise in finding actual Covid cases with fewer false positives. Somebody should check into that.
Thank you, Steve, for having a field day - like no other! - with this study and defending Jay's decision. You are a heavy counterweight to the clueless lightweights spinning yarns at NYT.
Funny this pops up today after I fell into a old study rabbit hole that seems could have shut down EUA:
(Wiki on Mexicos President)
During her administration (Claudia Schienbaum/Mexico, over 200,000 kits containing ivermectin were distributed to patients diagnosed with COVID-19 without their knowledge.[107][108]
"Mexico City gave ivermectin to thousands of covid patients. Officials face an ethics backlash."
(but what happened to those 200,000 people?)
What was their Covid illness/death rate?
"Mexico City officials eventually declared their effort a success. They issued an academic paper last spring saying the medical kits had significantly reduced hospitalization rates. That finding, they said, “supports ivermectin-based interventions” to ease the coronavirus pandemic’s burden on health systems."
Now city authorities are facing a backlash. A U.S.-based academic site that had posted their paper, SocArXiv, withdrew it last Friday, charging it was “promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.” The site accused city officials of bad science and unethical behavior — in effect, of using citizens like rats in a giant laboratory experiment, without their consent.
The decision has detonated a storm on social media. Opposition politicians are demanding an investigation.
What makes the scandal remarkable isn’t just the scale of Mexico City’s program — nearly 200,000 kits with ivermectin were distributed — but who was advocating it. Unlike in the United States, where ivermectin has been promoted by conservative commentators (and star podcaster Joe Rogan), the drug was championed in Mexico by leftist intellectuals in top government jobs."
.......
After handing out 83,000 kits, the government crunched the numbers. It reported a decline of at least 52 percent in hospital admissions among those who had received the kits, compared to others previously infected.
......
Now city authorities are facing a backlash. A U.S.-based academic site that had posted their paper, SocArXiv, withdrew it last Friday, charging it was “promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.” The site accused city officials of bad science and unethical behavior — in effect, of using citizens like rats in a giant laboratory experiment, without their consent.
(🤯 - So they are lab rats for Ivermectin experiments; but NOT Lab Rates for mRNA experiments???)
......
multiple problems.
One was that the medical kits included not just ivermectin but paracetamol, aspirin and oximeters. It wasn’t clear which of the items may have improved patients’ health, Cohen said, and the subjects of the study weren’t chosen randomly, as in a clinical trial. In addition, the city government hadn’t declared its conflict of interest — in other words, that it would benefit if the study portrayed the program as a success. And the city was mass-distributing a medication that international authorities, including the World Health Organization, said should be used to treat covid-19 only in clinical trials.
"To summarize, there remains insufficient evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19; the study is of minimal scientific value at best; the paper is part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19, which possibly continues to the present; the authors of the paper have promoted it as evidence that their medical intervention is effective. "
....
This is the first time we have used our prerogative as service administrators to withdraw a paper from SocArXiv. Although we reject many papers, according to our moderation policy, we don’t have a policy for unilaterally withdrawing papers after they have been posted. We don’t want to make policy around a single case, but we do want to respond to this situation.
We are withdrawing the paper, and replacing it with a “tombstone” that includes the paper’s metadata. We are doing this to prevent the paper from causing additional harm, and taking this incident as an impetus to develop a more comprehensive policy for future situations. The metadata will serve as a reference for people who follow citations to the paper to our site.
Our grounds for this decision are several:
The paper is spreading misinformation, promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.
The paper is part of, and justification for, a government program that unethically dispenses (or did dispense) unproven medication apparently without proper consent or appropriate ethical protections according to the standards of human subjects research.
The paper is medical research – purporting to study the effects of a medication on a disease outcome – and is not properly within the subject scope of SocArXiv.
The authors did not properly disclose their conflicts of interest.
We appreciate that of the thousands of papers we have accepted and now host on our platform, there may be others that have serious flaws as well.
We are taking this unprecedented action because this particular bad paper appears to be more important, and therefore potentially more harmful, than other flawed work. In administering SocArXiv, we generally err on the side of inclusivity, and do not provide peer review or substantive vetting of the papers we host. Taking such an approach suits us philosophically, and also practically, since we don’t have staff to review every paper fully. But this approach comes with the responsibility to respond when something truly harmful gets through. In light of demonstrable harms like those associated with this paper, and in response to a community groundswell beseeching us to act, we are withdrawing this paper.
We reiterate that our moderation process does not involve peer review, or substantive evaluation, of the research papers that we host. Our moderation policy confirms only that papers are (1) scholarly, (2) in research areas that we support, (3) are plausibly categorized, (4) are correctly attributed, (5) are in languages that we moderate, and (6) are in text-searchable formats. Posting a paper on SocArXiv is not in itself an indication of good quality – but it is often a sign that researchers are acting in good faith and practicing open scholarship for the public good. We urge readers to consider this incident in the context of the greater good that open science and preprints in general, and our service in particular, do for researchers and the communities they serve.
We welcome comments and suggestions from readers, researchers, and the public. Feel free to email us at socarxiv@gmail.com, or contact us on our social media accounts at Twitter or Facebook."
It all comes down to what outcomes each side wants. Vaccine hesitancy comes from studies like this with no control groups, biased science and outcomes hedged by political desires.
I'm immediately suspicious when the government uses emotional blackmail to coerce me into taking a medication you know can't be well studied due to compressed time frames from desire to mass rollout in under a year. Those who want globalization see vaccines as a vehicle to lower fertility rates, lower mortality ages and increase terminal cancer diagnoses
. That creates genocide without the messy parts of widespread communist revolution. How do you take over the world? You make sure the losing side is unarmed, helpless and low in numbers. A small armed force can control a larger population under those conditions.
Those of us on this side of the debate have more simple desires. We want medicines that are well tested using scientific evidence and research. We want medications that work and solve more problems than they cause. We want medicine that won't cause our teenager's hearts to explode in their chest while playing basketball. We don't want to be lied to by people trying to get rich, who are *clearly* and obviously lying to us, and ushering in a system of authoritarianism whether they or we realize it or not.
One of those groups is on the side of the angels and one of them is not. I'll let you decide which side you come down on, but know this, the politicians of the day tipped their hands in 2020 and into the future. Prior to 2020, I would have laughed and called you a conspiracy theorist if you'd told me our gov't wanted its tax base dead, but after CCP Virus, can you truly come to any other conclusion?
Yes well done Jay, and an excellent 25 questions Steve. I think it is a seriously critical problem that society doesn’t understand even the basic hierarchy of science . Any jack rabbit can do a study and anyone from the same tribe will latch onto it like it’s the word of God. Science quality has layers. It would do the CDC snd FDA good to educate the public on those layers…oh wait …they won’t do that because they’d just draw themselves into a corner and wouldn’t be able to fudge science to their advantage any more.
YES JAY IS DOIG A GREAT WORK IN DEMANDIG MORE TRANSPARENCY WITH CDC REPORTS. WELL DOES BIG PHARMER HELP THEM WITH THEIR REPORTS. THE ONLY PROBLEM THAT VERY FEW UNDERSTAND EVEN YOU STEVE IS:. IT WAS NEVER A VACCINE BUT A DANGEROUS JAB. YES THERE HAS TO BE A COVERUP.. . DR BRIYAN ARDIS SHOW .COM EXPLAINES THE JAB WAS NEVER MRNA BUT PLASMA WITH SNAKE VENOM. THIS WAS TO PRODUCE SPIKE PROTINE IN THE BODY.. WILL ALWAYS PRODUCE IT.. LONG COVID ONLY ONE RESULT. BLOOD CLOTS MOST COMMON BUT A SIMPLE WAY OF DEALING WITH THEM. THEY ARE THE BIGGIST KILLIER. . CANCER +++ OTHERS AS TO MANY TO MENTION.
I would like someone to research the CDC’s first attempt to test for Covid and why it was taken off the market in a relatively short amount of time. I believe the reason was it wasn’t effective. I’m thinking that it was effective; but the powers to be said it wasn’t because it wasn’t detecting as many cases of Covid as they wanted. So they introduced a new test that detected more cases. It has just been discovered the Covid test that they went to actually gave a lot false positives. An unbelievable percentage of false positives. It may have been the first test was actually more precise in finding actual Covid cases with fewer false positives. Somebody should check into that.
Follow the money 💰 always
Thank you, Steve, for having a field day - like no other! - with this study and defending Jay's decision. You are a heavy counterweight to the clueless lightweights spinning yarns at NYT.
God bless.
Funny this pops up today after I fell into a old study rabbit hole that seems could have shut down EUA:
(Wiki on Mexicos President)
During her administration (Claudia Schienbaum/Mexico, over 200,000 kits containing ivermectin were distributed to patients diagnosed with COVID-19 without their knowledge.[107][108]
107=
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/09/mexico-city-covid-ivermectin/
February 9, 2022
"Mexico City gave ivermectin to thousands of covid patients. Officials face an ethics backlash."
(but what happened to those 200,000 people?)
What was their Covid illness/death rate?
"Mexico City officials eventually declared their effort a success. They issued an academic paper last spring saying the medical kits had significantly reduced hospitalization rates. That finding, they said, “supports ivermectin-based interventions” to ease the coronavirus pandemic’s burden on health systems."
Now city authorities are facing a backlash. A U.S.-based academic site that had posted their paper, SocArXiv, withdrew it last Friday, charging it was “promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.” The site accused city officials of bad science and unethical behavior — in effect, of using citizens like rats in a giant laboratory experiment, without their consent.
The decision has detonated a storm on social media. Opposition politicians are demanding an investigation.
What makes the scandal remarkable isn’t just the scale of Mexico City’s program — nearly 200,000 kits with ivermectin were distributed — but who was advocating it. Unlike in the United States, where ivermectin has been promoted by conservative commentators (and star podcaster Joe Rogan), the drug was championed in Mexico by leftist intellectuals in top government jobs."
.......
After handing out 83,000 kits, the government crunched the numbers. It reported a decline of at least 52 percent in hospital admissions among those who had received the kits, compared to others previously infected.
......
Now city authorities are facing a backlash. A U.S.-based academic site that had posted their paper, SocArXiv, withdrew it last Friday, charging it was “promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.” The site accused city officials of bad science and unethical behavior — in effect, of using citizens like rats in a giant laboratory experiment, without their consent.
(🤯 - So they are lab rats for Ivermectin experiments; but NOT Lab Rates for mRNA experiments???)
......
multiple problems.
One was that the medical kits included not just ivermectin but paracetamol, aspirin and oximeters. It wasn’t clear which of the items may have improved patients’ health, Cohen said, and the subjects of the study weren’t chosen randomly, as in a clinical trial. In addition, the city government hadn’t declared its conflict of interest — in other words, that it would benefit if the study portrayed the program as a success. And the city was mass-distributing a medication that international authorities, including the World Health Organization, said should be used to treat covid-19 only in clinical trials.
(the site that removed the paper then said):
https://socopen.org/2022/02/04/on-withdrawing-ivermectin-and-the-odds-of-hospitalization-due-to-covid-19-by-merino-et-al/
"To summarize, there remains insufficient evidence that ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19; the study is of minimal scientific value at best; the paper is part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19, which possibly continues to the present; the authors of the paper have promoted it as evidence that their medical intervention is effective. "
....
This is the first time we have used our prerogative as service administrators to withdraw a paper from SocArXiv. Although we reject many papers, according to our moderation policy, we don’t have a policy for unilaterally withdrawing papers after they have been posted. We don’t want to make policy around a single case, but we do want to respond to this situation.
We are withdrawing the paper, and replacing it with a “tombstone” that includes the paper’s metadata. We are doing this to prevent the paper from causing additional harm, and taking this incident as an impetus to develop a more comprehensive policy for future situations. The metadata will serve as a reference for people who follow citations to the paper to our site.
Our grounds for this decision are several:
The paper is spreading misinformation, promoting an unproved medical treatment in the midst of a global pandemic.
The paper is part of, and justification for, a government program that unethically dispenses (or did dispense) unproven medication apparently without proper consent or appropriate ethical protections according to the standards of human subjects research.
The paper is medical research – purporting to study the effects of a medication on a disease outcome – and is not properly within the subject scope of SocArXiv.
The authors did not properly disclose their conflicts of interest.
We appreciate that of the thousands of papers we have accepted and now host on our platform, there may be others that have serious flaws as well.
We are taking this unprecedented action because this particular bad paper appears to be more important, and therefore potentially more harmful, than other flawed work. In administering SocArXiv, we generally err on the side of inclusivity, and do not provide peer review or substantive vetting of the papers we host. Taking such an approach suits us philosophically, and also practically, since we don’t have staff to review every paper fully. But this approach comes with the responsibility to respond when something truly harmful gets through. In light of demonstrable harms like those associated with this paper, and in response to a community groundswell beseeching us to act, we are withdrawing this paper.
We reiterate that our moderation process does not involve peer review, or substantive evaluation, of the research papers that we host. Our moderation policy confirms only that papers are (1) scholarly, (2) in research areas that we support, (3) are plausibly categorized, (4) are correctly attributed, (5) are in languages that we moderate, and (6) are in text-searchable formats. Posting a paper on SocArXiv is not in itself an indication of good quality – but it is often a sign that researchers are acting in good faith and practicing open scholarship for the public good. We urge readers to consider this incident in the context of the greater good that open science and preprints in general, and our service in particular, do for researchers and the communities they serve.
We welcome comments and suggestions from readers, researchers, and the public. Feel free to email us at socarxiv@gmail.com, or contact us on our social media accounts at Twitter or Facebook."
It all comes down to what outcomes each side wants. Vaccine hesitancy comes from studies like this with no control groups, biased science and outcomes hedged by political desires.
I'm immediately suspicious when the government uses emotional blackmail to coerce me into taking a medication you know can't be well studied due to compressed time frames from desire to mass rollout in under a year. Those who want globalization see vaccines as a vehicle to lower fertility rates, lower mortality ages and increase terminal cancer diagnoses
. That creates genocide without the messy parts of widespread communist revolution. How do you take over the world? You make sure the losing side is unarmed, helpless and low in numbers. A small armed force can control a larger population under those conditions.
Those of us on this side of the debate have more simple desires. We want medicines that are well tested using scientific evidence and research. We want medications that work and solve more problems than they cause. We want medicine that won't cause our teenager's hearts to explode in their chest while playing basketball. We don't want to be lied to by people trying to get rich, who are *clearly* and obviously lying to us, and ushering in a system of authoritarianism whether they or we realize it or not.
One of those groups is on the side of the angels and one of them is not. I'll let you decide which side you come down on, but know this, the politicians of the day tipped their hands in 2020 and into the future. Prior to 2020, I would have laughed and called you a conspiracy theorist if you'd told me our gov't wanted its tax base dead, but after CCP Virus, can you truly come to any other conclusion?
Yes well done Jay, and an excellent 25 questions Steve. I think it is a seriously critical problem that society doesn’t understand even the basic hierarchy of science . Any jack rabbit can do a study and anyone from the same tribe will latch onto it like it’s the word of God. Science quality has layers. It would do the CDC snd FDA good to educate the public on those layers…oh wait …they won’t do that because they’d just draw themselves into a corner and wouldn’t be able to fudge science to their advantage any more.
great questions Steve! i bet you will only hear crickets
Smiling
Love Jay! Kick the paper to the curb.
YES JAY IS DOIG A GREAT WORK IN DEMANDIG MORE TRANSPARENCY WITH CDC REPORTS. WELL DOES BIG PHARMER HELP THEM WITH THEIR REPORTS. THE ONLY PROBLEM THAT VERY FEW UNDERSTAND EVEN YOU STEVE IS:. IT WAS NEVER A VACCINE BUT A DANGEROUS JAB. YES THERE HAS TO BE A COVERUP.. . DR BRIYAN ARDIS SHOW .COM EXPLAINES THE JAB WAS NEVER MRNA BUT PLASMA WITH SNAKE VENOM. THIS WAS TO PRODUCE SPIKE PROTINE IN THE BODY.. WILL ALWAYS PRODUCE IT.. LONG COVID ONLY ONE RESULT. BLOOD CLOTS MOST COMMON BUT A SIMPLE WAY OF DEALING WITH THEM. THEY ARE THE BIGGIST KILLIER. . CANCER +++ OTHERS AS TO MANY TO MENTION.
If the contestants wish to have it out in the pages of Econ Journal Watch, that might perhaps work:
https://econjwatch.org/authors/jay-bhattacharya