“Maybe a better question than “Please explain Ivermectin” would be “Please explain the difference between anecdotes and scientific studies.” There are many people posting anecdotes as if they are scientific proof that Ivermectin does or does not work against Covid.”
This is actually a great question. Unfortunately, people really have no conception of what a study is or demonstrates in real life.
The answer is that studies are nothing more than a group of documented ‘anecdotes’ where more of the underlying context is controlled and known, allowing more robust inferences with more statistical power (ie confidence/reliability) to be drawn from the “anecdotes” documented by the study. The strength and reliability of inferences entirely depends on the quality (and honesty) pf a study’s design & execution. Critically, not all studies are equal, and some are even worse than regular anecdotes (I’m limiting anecdote to a reasonably verified story, not some vagueish rumor for the purposes of this argument), because a poorly designed study can give categorically false results whereas anecdotes “are often the leading indicator of an undiscovered negative side effect, or even an unanticipated positive outcome in new drugs” (approximate quote from a review of the hierarchy of evidence in “evidence based medicine”, I will post source when I find it). Here’s an example that actually happened recently: WHO major multi-pronged drug trial added an arm to test Famotidine + Celecoxib on hospitalized covid patients, but layered them upon a backbone treatment regiment of Remdesivir & Dexamethasone, which are contra-indicated for Fam+Cel & are mevatel them, and the WHO trial was warned by the docs who ran the small trial that found the initial success of Fam+Cel that this was the case (in fact, Dexa was specifically used as a control vs the Celecoxib and they found that Dexa was harmful by comparison (there’s a reason that the FLCCC uses Methylprednisolone as the steroid of choice and not Dexamethasone)), and of course the WHO trial found no initial effect compared to control group, and dropped them from the trial altogether “concluding” that they don’t work.
Or you can take the Bangladesh study, where they neglected to establish a baseline infection rate prior to commencement of the study (big confounder), they matched towns without any real attempt to bother characterizing any of them for other relevant characteristics, they measured “reported symptoms” as a proxy to establish primary & secondary endpoint efficacy (I’m pretty sure that the study was initially designed to see what measures could increase mask compliance), which is a total and complete joke, as the study design straight up incentivized non-reporting and even straight up lying by the mask towns from financial and other various social incentives, and even their finding was so tiny that it has zero statistical power in any event with a stratospheric p-value (IY”H I hope to post a more thorough analysis of this garbage heap).
It is worth reemphasizing, studies are nothing more than documentation of a series of ‘anecdotes’ that are (hopefully) more rigorously documented and characterized so we can better understand what is actually happening (and if a one off real anecdote is more than a statistical randomness). They are not any sort of magical fount of knowledge.
Another critical point is that just because the authors of a study say something does not make it true, or even mean that it is supported by the study’s own data. Especially now, you have to go through the study itself to see if the study’s authors are competent and/or honest (which these days is the case more often than not, see John Ioannidis’ recent essay documenting how literally every branch of science – all the way through automotive engineering – has somehow published on covid).
And just for those who will immediately leap to respond that “anecdotes are fundamentally different than studies because anecdotes we know nothing about the context whereas studies are by definition a documented & controlled group of cases where we can compare/contrast all the details etc”, I already acknowledged this above and I disagree with the characterization of this as a fundamental intrinsic difference also per above.
(For the record, I haven’t forgotten about the other posts I said I’d respond to.)