Covid-19 Discussion

So tell us what you think "heart failure" means in this context. You'll either get it completely wrong and embarrass yourself (because it takes two seconds to just look it up) or you'll get it right and demonstrate that your previous post was one of the dumbest things that you could possibly say.

So let's see if you choose one of those or to run away again.

On the subject of real science, here is an interesting article about long covid published recently (Feb 22, 2024).

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scie...

Solving the puzzle of Long Covid
Long Covid provides an opportunity to understand how acute infections cause chronic disease
ZIYAD AL-ALY AND ERIC TOPOLAuthors Info & Affiliations
SCIENCE
22 Feb 2024
Vol 383, Issue 6685
pp. 830-832
DOI: 10.1126/science.adl0867

Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle doesn't pump blood as well as it should. Blood often backs up and causes fluid to build up in the lungs and in the legs. The fluid buildup can cause shortness of breath and swelling of the legs and feet.

Mayo

Correct. So the study looks at the risk of that problem getting worse and also the risk of death. They found that there was no increased risk of worsening and no increased risk of death (all causes) in those people.

These are people who are more vulnerable to heart complications than the average person. If vaccination was going to cause issues, these are the people it would affect most obviously.

To misunderstand the study so badly that you think the subjects being more vulnerable invalidates the result is stunning.

Indicative of why people with zero medical training should steer clear of even trying to interpret these studies.

FYP

I am probably not reading correctly but I think BJ may think

heart failure = heart attack/death.

sorry if I got that wrong BJ (if I did) but within the medical community the definition that I posted above from the Mayo Clinic is the precise definition.

Yes, sorry if there was any misunderstanding of who I was referring to.

If you had to choose between the lives of all nursing home residents nationwide, and the lives of a school bus of elementary school children, what would you choose and why? If you don't choose they all die

Ok guys, I'm back from my ban. Stay tuned for more bombshell studies and articles coming up.

The tide is turning. People are waking up to the scam at last, as the following article clearly demonstrates.

https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/aus...

Keep running from the data. Did you learn what heart failure means while you were gone?

I guess the article from BJ don’t understand that covid evolve many times during the pandemic and during June to October 2021 , what the art île makes allusion of , was exactly where the delays variant worlwide began to dominate .

Obviously the original vaccine for covid was still effective vs those variant but not has much .
So people still got sick but less then if they didn’t had vaccine at all .
Obv the link BJ quoted is hiding basic facts to have a bias view on vaccine ….

Ps: in other link made by the author so funny .
They use one week over 48 and say u see , vaccine not working because that 1 week only 3 patient without vaccine got sick while a lot more were needing to be at hospital .
No cherry picking at all lol .

I'll take that as a no.

Well let's break the stony silence with some legitimate science.

This should be the final nail in the coffin of Ivermectin for COVID-19. Should be, but it should've been dead and buried long ago, of course.

Published about a week ago:
https://www.journalofinfection.com/artic...

Findings

The primary analysis included 8811 SARS-CoV-2 positive participants (median symptom duration 5 days), randomised to ivermectin (n=2157), usual care (n=3256), and other treatments (n=3398) from June 23, 2021 to July 1, 2022. Time to self-reported recovery was shorter in the ivermectin group compared with usual care (hazard ratio 1·15 [95% Bayesian credible interval, 1·07 to 1·23], median decrease 2.06 days [1·00 to 3·06]), probability of meaningful effect (pre-specified hazard ratio ≥1.2) 0·192). COVID-19-related hospitalisations/deaths (odds ratio 1·02 [0·63 to 1·62]; estimated percentage difference 0% [-1% to 0·6%]), serious adverse events (three and five respectively), and the proportion feeling fully recovered were similar in both groups at 6 months (74·3% and 71·2% respectively (RR = 1·05, [1·02 to 1·08]) and also at 3 and 12 months.,.

Interpretation

Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-Cov-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted.

As usual the first thing we check is the conflict of interest statement and unsurprisingly what do we find?

No need to read any further.

Nobody expected you to.

BTW, there are 25 authors on this paper. Every last one of them eminently qualified.

Your approval is not requested, required, nor even desired.

Sorry buttercup but your Ivermectin study was fraudulent.

Approval is therefore denied.

Here is a comprehensive analysis of how and why it was fraudulent.

https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/t...

Also here.

https://worldcouncilforhealth.substack.c...

The study suggests it reduced time to recovery by 2 days and most long covid symptoms across the board to a marginal but statistically significant degree. Hardly a nail in the coffin.

Do you know what sort of transformation is going on where hospitalization/death rates of 1.6% iver vs. 4.4% usual care becomes "estimated percentage difference 0%"?

This is a bizarre interpretation/conclusion given the actual data.

We don't listen to Pierre Kory, sir.

You should probably read the Statistical Analysis section of the paper which explains that in great detail.

I suggest paying particularly attention to the parts discussing the futility rule.

"If there was insufficient evidence of a clinically meaningful benefit in time to recovery, futility was declared and randomisation to that intervention would be stopped, meaning other interventions could be evaluated more rapidly in the trial."

So simply looking at that pure recovery numbers which you did (because the grifter you got suckered by convinced you that's all that matters) is not enough to properly evaluate the effect.

The interesting part is that Pierre Kory is qualified enough to know this. One might wonder why he didn't pass this along.

Oh, he sells exorbitantly priced ivermectin treatments?

Well, that makes sense.

I went and looked at his supposed analysis, too. He's lies even more egregiously. He knows he can get away with it because the study design is complicated.

He claims the futility gate was fraudulent because it was designed to be used when ivermectin was showing no improvement in recovery time, but the results showed a 2 day improvement! Therefore lies!

Oh, silly, Pierre. The 2 day improvement result was after they switched to using treatments already known to improve outcomes because ivermectin wasn't working. You can't include those recovery times in the evaluation of whether they should have adjusted the treatments. Not honestly, anyway.

This is all included in the design of the study. He knows this because he's qualified. You can pay him exorbitant amounts of money for a hack ivermectin treatment package. This his constant crusade to demonstrate ivermectin is effective.

And people buy it. Literally and figuratively.

Go figure.

For clarity, here's the kind of thing I mean. The table referenced above (showing a 4.4 to 1.6 difference in severe outcomes) includes people who were not actually enrolled in the ivermectin arm of the study but were included in the dataset evaluating other treatments.

Focusing only on that result is nothing but pure dishonesty by Kory. The relevant results are quoted below.

Another "error" Kory makes is conflating reduction in recovery time days to hazard ratio.

From the study:
"This result was statistically significant (HR = 1·14, 95% Interval= 1·07 – 1·23), but the estimated hazard ratio was less than the pre-specified meaningful effect of 1·2."

Kory claims that the study disagree swith itself since it predefined a relevant decrease in recovery time of 1.5 days or larger.

But it didn't.

Below is the pre definition statement:

For the purposes of defining futility rules, we pre-specified a clinically meaningful hazard ratio for time to first reported recovery as 1·2 or larger (equating to approximately 1·5 days difference in median time to recovery, assuming 9 days recovery in the usual care arm).

The key here is "assuming 9 days recovery in the usual care arm."

What was the median recovery in the usual care arm? 14. So no, the approximation of 1.5 for 9 days is not relevant here. The hazard ratio is all that actually applies and it was below the threshold (1.14 is less than 1.2).

Kory again misleads the reader. Shocked yet? There's still time to buy his ivermectin treatments!

edit to add: you can disregard my first reply, it was early and I confused some things. I retract that and stand by my most recent two.

lol

Further conflating the two figures (pure reduction in recovery days and hazard ratio) he then just blatantly lies and says:

"
to support this statement they instituted an almost impossible bar to clear, that of a “pre-specified hazard ratio level that must be greater than 2.0.”
"

Nowhere is a hazard ratio of 2.0 even mildly suggested. His 2 days of reduction equates, again, to a 1.14 hazard ratio (for the median 14 days of recovery in the control group). He either doesn't understand the difference between these numbers (he does, he's qualified) or he is blatantly lying

We can only guess why.

Edit: haha he even says it himself, but calls it "damning" (yeah, to his own argument):

"
Even more damning is that nowhere in their trial protocol is there any mention of setting an HR of 2.0 or greater as the requirement for “clinical meaningfulness.”
"

You don't say, eh doc? Then why did you just express incredulity at the fact that they did?

Hilarious.

More stupidity from this joke of a blog post.

"
So basically, they do not know how to randomize? Why even compare to a non-temporally related population? Who knows but they did, and when they did so, they found a massive reduction in mortality (from 4.4% down to 1.6%, a difference of 2.8%. My “question marks” in the above table refers to the fact that they instead report this difference as 0%. I have to admit I am lost on this one, and have no idea why this is.
"

Yes they know how to randomize. That's why the process was extensively documented in the paper. Including the reasons why you can't compare the non-temporally related populations. He acts baffled by this, but the reasons are obvious and explained in the paper.

And the paper doesn't compare the two. He does. They are listed in the paper, yes, for transparency, but the comparison is for the corrected groups from the same time period.

You obviously can't compare groups from different times. The control group initially contained tons of people from early in the pandemic when outcomes were much worse (lower immunity levels, lower care quality due to unknowns, triaging, etc.). The ivermectin group did not contain people from that period. That's why the rate was much higher.

When you remove that period and look at only the times when both groups were active, there was no reduction.

This seems simple and it's basic study design.

I pasted in the section of the study that details this in an earlier post.

Kory can't figure this out for some reason.

"I have to admit I am lost on this one, and have no idea why this is."

-Pierre Kory.

just lol

I looked briefly at some of the data and could possibly agree that there does seem to be some possible benefit for long covid, though the quality of that data is probably pretty low, which is likely why it's not really focused on in the meat of the paper. I'd need to spend more time examining the details of the data in that section to really comment further on it, but he isn't as egregiously wrong as he is on the rest of the paper on a quick glance about that part.

Here's another detailed summary of everything that is wrong with the study.

https://c19ivm.org/principleivm.html