Debunking the BBC debunk of ivermectin

you're very welcome to this video talk now i've had not a few comments and questions on the bbc article recently which uh debunks ivamektin now this is the study here published on the bbc news website i've meched in how false science created a covered miracle drug now i can't flick through this and show you it because it's got a lot of copyrighted images on it which i'm not allowed to use but i'll put the link there you can flick on it and read through it yourself so the bbc um has got a really good international reputation the british broadcasting corporation because it used to be a really good uh organization so if you haven't if you're outside and you haven't in the united states or something the bbc so it's like a national institution in the uk and it used to be really good anyway that they've done this article to uh basically debunk ivamectin now it's very good of the bbc because here we all are getting a bit confused and they come in and they do this thing the article's called a reality check so we're a bit divorced from reality and then the bbc bring us back to reality that which is true in objective empirical realism so it's good of the bbc to do that and this was done via two journalists now on a completely separate matter i've had a bit of a bad tummy lately i must say uh i'll tell you what i'm gonna do i'm gonna go and see a journalist to get it properly diagnosed they'll know what's wrong with me and uh you can you can imagine if you're going for an operation and uh someone walks up to you and green scrubs and says well i'm mr smith i i'm a journalist i'm going to be doing your anaesthetic and and this is mrs patel she's the she's the journalist she's going to be doing the operation i don't think so you know the these people are journalists and as far as i can see these individuals are just journalists they're not science graduates they're not doctors and yet they they they seem to have this great wisdom which they kindly bestow on the rest of us so that's nice anyway so let's look at it um this is the so-called reality check bbc reality check now um but the bbc can reveal that now it's in italics it's a direct quote from the source i am using uh the bbc can reveal there are serious areas and numbers of case that is about the that proponent the drug proponents rely on so there's something really wrong with studies that people who think either mectin might be efficacious and safe well they rely on studies which have been debunked now apparently it would appear but thousands of supporters many of them anti-vaccine activists have continued to vigorously campaign for its use now what is the fact that these people are many people are anti-vaccine activists is that true they give no evidence for that let's take me for example and a lot of other people i've been talking to we are very pro-vaccination because we want to prevent human pain suffering and death of eye disease but also very pro treatment if treatments are available we want that treatment we i'm greedy i want both i want to help as many people as much as i can that's what you go into health care for anyway so so is this a false dichotomy that's been set up here i'll let you decide that it could be a false dichotomy apparently members of social media groups have been swapping tips to get hold of drugs even advocating virgins used for animals oh dear so is is an animal medicine this is a horse medicine is that the implication there um i think they forget to mention in the video in the article rather that 3.7 billion doses of this have been given to humans but and it is likely as they say used for veterinary purposes as well now i think most of this bbc article seems to be based on um this study here which is published in nature medicine lessons of either mectin meta-analysis based on summary data alone are inherently unreliable and i want to look at this article in some detail shortly but for now just one thing i want to notice the lead author of this paper that the bbc seemed to be relying on so heavily as jack lawrence i'm sure jack's a very intelligent chap and there's a one there beside his name so one relates to george's university hospital london in the united kingdom so george's university hospital london united kingdom presumably a professor or a senior academic well no actually he's a student there these other people are academics doctors or other academics uh to have a student as a lead author that the bbc article relies on so heavily is uh let's just say some might find that uh surprising i make no comment of course now um large pro ivermectin facebook groups again direct quotes from the article have turned into forums for people who find advice on where to buy including preparations meant for animals again of course we would strongly condemn that on this channel we should never take drugs that are designed for animal use they could be different and different in doses very bad idea indeed um but anyway so that's that's kind of another point that's put up now we're not we're not saying that we're not saying either mexicans good or bad here we're just critiquing this article from the bbc the debunks because um you know who guards the guardians who debunks the debunkers that that i've got this massive publicity machine behind them in the official media of the the bbc all right the bbc can reveal that more than a third of 26 major trials of the drug for use on covet have serious errors or signs of potential fraud i don't like the sound of that fraud potential potential fraud even even the messenger of the word ford i don't like now this seems to be based again as we say on this publication here um or even here and um these this academic group um jack lawrence there's the leading author apparently this academic group have apparently looked at 26 studies but the 26 studies that they look at are not in this article the critique of the 26 studies they look at are not in this article and in fact this article contains no research data at all as far as i can see as a seven references there which we might come back to later on it's basically an opinion piece and we'll be talking about the opinion later but it doesn't contain it doesn't tell us which of these 26 articles were studied we don't know we simply don't know we just know what the bbc deigns to tell us that this the bbc can reveal that more than a third of so more than a third so what's the third of 26 i don't know eight or something major trials of the drugs so presumably the other two thirds are okay but that they don't say that uh the group of uh that's a group of independent scientists thank goodness for that uh led that would appear by a student but it's a group of independent scientists the group of independent scientists uh examined virtually every randomized controlled trial on iva mektin and kovid the group of independent scientists about virtually every randomized control trial well i thought it said they measured 26 of them but there you go do the bbc think that 26 is nearly all of them i don't know now this is a social media group apparently it's a twitter group so this group this international group of scientists is in fact a twitter group now this is not saying that what they're saying is good bad or indifferent i'm just i'm just reflecting on what the bbc has said here i'm more than happy to talk to this group and i'm sure they've got some brilliant opinions to share with us which which we'd love to hear about but we simply don't know what their opinions are because the bbc don't don't reference it they just give a few random quotes anyway that that's one of the social media groups this magazine here um says that's all they all met on twitter so it seems to be a twitter group nothing wrong with that and it's a twitter group so it's not an international formal group they've been working together remotely on an informal and voluntary basis during the pandemic so this is the international group of scientists that the bbc uh is referring to so we'd like some references please from the bbc now in this article of course the bbc give no references which is just nothing short of pathetic is it but they give no references although i i managed to dig around and find out some of what we're talking about the bbc can reveal that more than the 26 major trials from of the drug for use on covid that's lyrectin um have serious errors signs of potential fall what is the third it's it's it's it's nine it's just under nine isn't it three so so basically it must be saying that 17 or 18 of these trials are okay but there's a few dodgy ones of the 26 that they reviewed would be an inference possible inference from that let's go on a recent study in lebanon was found to have blocks of 11 patients that had been copied and pasted repeatedly apparently so they've picked on one study from lebanon here oh but they've retracted that so that's been retracted what study are they talking about we don't know uh we could well be that one um that's just me searching around seeing what i can find could be that one but that wouldn't seem to be retracted so normally the study is retracted and i've retracted over it so again what study are they talking about don't know they don't date to tell us but we don't need to know that all we need to do is i mean surely their conclusions are good enough for us we don't need to know the evidence do we then there's a study from iran now the study from iran talking about i think is probably this one again they don't tell us this is just me putting some names together and looking around i think they're probably talking about that one it's got the same lead author that they mention and it's got the same uh information where they're looking at low looking oxygen saturation levels so it could well be that study but we don't know because they don't they don't tell us but apparently the records of how much iron was in the patient's blood contained a number of sequences was unlikely to come up naturally okay they said the the lead the doctor in charge of the study um the doctor in charge of this study said um who led the study um defended the results and the methodology and disagreed with the problems pointed out to him so there's clearly a scientific debate going on here but how much iron of course is not the major parameter i mean nine's important of course for carrying oxygen but i'm not sure that's the main point of the study anyway this doctor from iran added uh it was very normal to see such randomizations where a lot of different factors were considered so a legitimate debate of science there but i don't think there's enough to um debunk that article even if some of the figures given for the patients iron and hemoglobin levels were um inaccurately reported what about the rest of the study they don't seem to comment on that now the bbc article does say ivamectin is generally considered a safe drug although there have been some reports of side effects well yeah imagine that a drug that has side effects well we have looked at ivormectin on on the uh the vigi base before and seen it's a remarkably safe medication that doesn't tell us whether suffocation isn't covered or not it's just tell us it's been safe in the 3.7 doses or essentially safe relatively safe compared to other drugs or safer than other drugs the other drugs we compared it to from memory were um acetaminophen ibuprofen and demoxicillin which had um many many times more adverse events reported about them than either mechtin has um so they agree it's but there are side effects so and then they go on to talk about the horrendous reports that we've had from the united states of people taking huge doses of um animal intended ivormectin and getting overdoses and having to bring hospitalized so again clearly ludicrous taking animal ivermectin but that tells us nothing about what human hypermectin is is is good or bad or not um the indirect harm can come from giving people a false sense of security now i agree with this especially if they choose either mechanism instead of seeking hospital treatment for covid i agree with that or getting vaccinated in the first place i agree with that but that those three valid points there again tells us nothing about the efficacy or otherwise of either mechanic we are no further forward on that it tells us nothing some groups uh regularly contain posts about conspiracy theories of livermectin cover-ups as well as pushing anti-vaccine sentiments or encouraging patients to leave hospital if they aren't getting the drug again yes all these things are bad um it's bad not to get vaccinated it's bad to push conspiracy theories it would be bad to leave hospital if you're not giving a particular medication against the advice of your doctors of course but that tells us nothing against about the efficacy of the drug again it's another red herring and then they conclude the article with this terrible story about a south african nurse that died apparently instead of consulting a doctor she continued with ivamectin and home oxygenation and sadly died so this is one tragedy in south africa but the whole point about research is we can't extrapolate general principles from specific instances we have to take the specific from the the generalities that only research can give us we must think deductively not inductively we must think from the general to the specific not from the specific to the general so i would suggest that the bbc has put forward a classic example of a invalid inductive thinking there if the journalists want to get hold of me to argue that point of course they're more welcome to do so anyway um what's the bbc study talking about so i've looked all over for this uh paper on the 26 studies and it simply doesn't exist so what we have to conclude here unless i've and i spent about an hour looking for this all over with every possible search i could find this group of five academic twitter friends um do not seem to have published their results on their analysis of the 26 studies that they have analyzed where they found a third of them were probably uh inaccurate or fraudulent uh it doesn't seem to be published so we don't know what it is so the bbc is quoting unpublished evidence which i find i must say i'm surprised it's surprisingly bad surprisingly bad practice arguing from unpublished evidence i mean it's one thing to argue from peer review evidence it's another thing to argue from um pre-print paper evidence before peer review but to argue from no evidence at all which appears what the bbc seems to be doing um this is these are direct quotes from this study that the bb so this is the only study i could find written by these five uh international cyber friends this is the only one i could find seems to be the one that the bbc's talking about and this is it it is just a discussion paper on the practicalities of doing um meta analysis now this elgazar study here that you mentioned here i don't know why they've referenced that what date was this published this 22nd of september so this the this study here by elgazar was retracted weeks ago so why on earth would they study would they quote a source which has been retracted i'll let you read the paper and see if you can work it out for yourself but that's that's been that's been clearly retracted that and this elgazar one again retracted so that puts the references down to five doesn't it um that sort of was did have methodological flaws that i believe this student didn't identify actually to be fair to him and uh it has been retracted so not a problem there because it's been retracted anyway going into what some of the things they said uh we recommend that meta-analysis we recommend that metro analysis those who study meta-analyses who study intervention recovered 19 should request personal review ipd independent patient data in all cases so rather than getting the results from the study they recommend that everyone who does a meta-analysis should go back to the individual patient data i think that's a brilliant idea the point is this data is simply not published and this is not possible this is not done on any other studies that i've ever come across in my entire life so they're asking for something completely in my experience and i must have been reading meta analysis for about 30 years now that i really have never come across before that this has been reduced to individualized patient data it's not the way meta-analyses work so far in my experience in a similar vein or clinical trials published on covert 19 should immediately follow best practice guidelines and upload anonymized ipd interf independent patient data so this type of analysis can occur i agree but the again this is simply not done so they're recommending it should be done and i i agree it would be a good idea where it's possible where it doesn't compromise patient confidentiality if that's possible if it's possible it would be a good idea so scientifically both of these things are good ideas but then simply not done any study for which authors are not able or willing to provide suitable anonymized ipd should be considered at high risk of bias for incomplete reporting so basically all the meta analyses that have been done in the medical literature up to now according to this line of thinking have to be considered at high risk of bias so we always were taught that the highest level of evidence is is a meta-analysis of randomized double-blind controlled trials so it appears that's no longer the case now because all the meta-analyses of the randomized control trials over the past 20 or 30 years have not contained or nearly none of them have contained independent patient data so it looks like most of the things we thought we know we in fact don't know now according to the logic of this study as i as i read it which of course would cause quite a lot of confusion so basically what i'm saying is yes it's a good idea in the real world but it hasn't happened so far yes of course this is a brilliant idea but is it going to happen probably not has it happened already not very often or virtually never oh in fact look let me say that we recognize that this is a change to long accepted practice and is substantially more rigorous than the standards that are typically currently applied okay so what about all the information we currently have do we disregard that um that's not mentioned and i again stress that this is all just information from this short um opinion piece from these uh these five uh authors um we recognize that by recommending uh independent patient data review by default for metro analysis of potential therapeutic occasions of conflict 19 we are calling for a change nearly universally accepted to nearly universally accepted practice over many decades so the universal accepted practice over many decades they're not happy with that they want to change it so presumably that means we need to rip up every meta-analysis that's been done over the last 20 or 30 years in fact since i've started reading meta-analyses because it should be considered high risk of bias this is clearly talking about an idealized world that simply doesn't exist as far as i can see so there we are now i could carry on with a lot of the things it's always hard to know where to stop on these i'll give you one more thing um the part a large part of the problem is that yes a lot of the studies that have been done on ivermectin are led by clinicians yes there's been some deliberate fraud it would appear in in some cases um but most of the research has been done by clinicians by the doctors and staff pharmacists and things themselves and of course they're not full-time researchers of course they're busy with the day job anyway so um and they're not professional researchers necessarily so it's very hard for these people to do that as they go along um whereas perfect clinic well near perfect randomized controlled clinical trials like we had for the vaccines that they're conducted by big pharma in collaboration with multi-million dollar budgets so really to compare one with the other is simply not fair we have to take the evidence and put it together as we can find it and that is what we see on this group here now this group is a bit mysterious we don't know who they are but they're a group of interesting academics but what they probably seems to make sense so this is the the sort of real-time metro analysis of our 64 studies here slightly more 64 studies they've obviously taken out the el gaza study so what happened is when studies approved dodgy this group here now i don't know whether it's daily or weekly i think i think it might be weekly but every week they like re-run their analysis which isn't that i just click the button on the computer these days and if there's a dodger study they simply delete it then the computer just reruns it and they get a different analysis so the results i'm about to show you do not show the fraudulent elgazar study from egypt they simply don't have it so this is this is a basically a lifetime meta-analysis which is i've given you a reference for unlike the 26 studies by this other group which is not referenced and as far as we know completely unpublished um so this is a really interesting site i put the links there do do have a look at it of course um whilst while many treatments have some level of effort they do not replace vaccines and other measures to avoid infection of course not we uh this is exactly what we are saying so let's just look at roughly what they're saying here so they give all these meta analyses now this line in the middle here is is no difference this would indicate that the treatment has a good effect this would indicate that the treatment has a bad effect basically on that side there so this is ivormectin early treatment and prophylaxis studies and there they come up with a 66 improvement from their analysis um is that yeah that's right yeah uh i know that's a yeah that's right so if it's given uh yeah i've met and this is this is basically early treatment and prophylaxis so if it's given early in the course of an illness 66 improvement is the result of their meta-analysis which is least published and we can go and read all of those for ourselves unlike the mysterious 26 that we're not told about by the bbc at least prophylaxis um seems to be 86 percent improvement there with iphone on those studies all analyses 75 improvement and it gives you huge amounts of meta-analysis results data so definitely showing um positive results from that meta analysis whether that's right or wrong or not that doesn't really tell us but it tells us the result of this meta analysis is this particular meta-analysis is positive at least that's published for us to have a look at um so we mentioned the problem this problem with clinical trials now this is this is a quote from the japanese journal of antibiotics uh now excuse my pronunciation japanese listeners tasho kitasho university said this this is direct quote from their article based on the judgment that it is necessary to examine the clinical effect of iom action to prevent the spread of uh uh of uncertain covert 19 this university chateau university asked mercanco to conduct clinical trials of ivankatin for covered 19 in japan now we should understand that the university chateau casato university was going to give them their facilities and infrastructure and we understand that they're linked with a lot of national bodies in japan so they could have facilitated a clinical trial there which makes perfect sense why did they go to merck about this well this company has uh prioritises an application for an expansion of immigrants indication since the original approval for the manufacturer and sale of affirmative was conferred to it and we know that merck very generously indeed has given millions and millions of doses to help eradicate scourges of parasitic disease in the um in the developing world so full marks to merck for its track record on ivormectin in terms of uh facilitating its availability as an anti-parasitic medication so you would imagine that merc would jump for this chance wouldn't you you would have thought anyway they said however the company said it had no intention of conducting clinical trials now um cynic might say that's because ivamectin is out of patent and you can't sell it and make a profit for it because any generic manufacturer can make it but what do i know i don't know so that's the paper from the american journal of therapeutics and these are the authors now it looks like this is the lead author here looks like that's the second author that's the third author it looks like this is the third author the third author is a doctor uh satoshi amura and satoshi amura works at turkishato university or is associated with it it says there in fact he works at the amuro satoshi institute memorial institute because this is the man who won the nobel prize with uh dr campbell in 2000 and uh 2015 for his discovery of ivan mekten along with william campbell jointly won the nobel prize so fairly reputable authors there really but merc didn't want to play ball with the nobel prize winning university it would appear which is a great pity because that would have given us a really high quality pharmacological industry led clinical trial we'll leave that there for now thank you for watching

Channel: Dr. John Campbell

Views: 1,476,721

Keywords: physiology, nursing, NCLEX, health, disease, biology, medicine, nurse education, medical education, pathophysiology, campbell, human biology, human body

Id: zy7c_FHiEac

Length: 27min 12sec (1632 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021

Reddit Comments

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Comments:

Correction: "The BBC used to have a really good reputation" Sadly, after seeing their hyperbole and disinformation in regards to material that falls within my scope of expertise I believe they are no longer a credible source of objective reporting.

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Good job Dr. Campbell. As a scientist who has written several research papers, I am appalled By what the BBC has presented as scientific research. We’re down to lowly opinions now, that is what the BBC calls science? They have been horrible for decades and they are getting worse.

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Thank you for the lesson in reading critically. Many people don’t know how to read critically, looking for references, links to studies, background info on the authors, context for information given, etc. This video could be used in a class or seminar.

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Truly amazing talk; thank you doctor, for fairly and objectively pulling the threads on the BBC article with the sharpest of wit and the best of manners. For viewers, sit through the entire chat - aside from being informative and witty, the threads pulled led to the unraveling of the credibility of the BBC article; and arguably, for any thinking person, the BBC as well.