🔗 Huge study supporting ivermectin as Covid treatment withdrawn over ethical concerns
The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.
But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”