Reply To: Please explain Ivermectin

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FrumStatistician
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Most of the RCT’s on that website for ivermectin have extremely small samples and/or data quality issues. There is also an issue that most of those studies come from less well known researchers in third world countries who face major publication bias issues (this is the issue that it is harder to get a paper showing no effect published). While it is sometimes possible to combine a number of smaller studies, various data issues preclude that for most of these studies. These reasons are why the two meta-analysis mentioned above used only a small portion of these studies, and the authors of at least one of those two meta-analysis have retracted their paper pending a re-analysis excluding the paper with fraudulent data.

Just because a study is an “RCT” does not mean it is a good or useful study. Indeed, a small sample size RCT is often worse than a much larger observational study with a large and high quality sample. A properly designed and handled large scale RCT will (almost) always be better than a observational study, but the key points are properly designed and handled large scale RCT.