[apinstein]

They went to all the trouble to create a huge trial and didn’t make it double-blind, placebo controlled? That is so suspect. We know how to create good experiments, so I just have little trust in bad experiments, especially at this scale.

I don’t care what the outcome is, treatments are treatments. I have no hope for a particular outcome. It’s just bad science. And I might argue bad faith science.

Potential biases: for instance in Brazil there is a very high level of prior Covid infections. What I’d previously infected people were more likely to opt in to treatment bc they are more afraid of reinfection, and the result came from reduction due to prior immunity? What if people that took the Medecine behaved differently than non-takers?

[nradov]

The authors didn't "create a huge trial". This was just an observational study. While observational studies are less powerful than randomized controlled trials they're not necessarily bad science. Much of our current knowledge in other areas of medicine came from observational studies.

While this study is rather weak and doesn't give us any really definitive results it is a useful data point that can be rolled into future meta analyses.

[apinstein]

Are you sure?

> Results: Of the 223,128 citizens of Itajaí considered for the study, a total of 159,561 subjects were included in the analysis: 113,845 (71.3%) regular ivermectin users and 45,716 (23.3%) non-users.

That reads to me like 160k people participated, and 113k optionally choose to take Ivermectin as prophylaxis.

Am I missing something ?

[incrudible]

I'm inclined to agree, but I must ask: Would you have the same standards when it comes to the vaccines?

I'm not aware of any double-blind placebo-controlled trial that is powerful enough to determine risk reduction for death or severe disease in vaccines, much less over several months.

[iandanforth]

I'm not sure I understand your statement https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389 showed an absurdly large effect in a controlled blinded trial which was at least part of the reason emergency approval was granted.

[cloutchaser]

As far as I know this was explained away with - it's too urgent and it's not ethical to have placebo controlled vaccine trials at this time, since everyone will contract covid. So we didn't have any.