Item — HN Reader

A lot of it is just straight-up fraud. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has documented this in some detail.

Also, ivnmeta itself is just weird. It can only be characterized as a propaganda site. It's well done, but scientifically invalid. They're far, far better at science communication than, say, the CDC (low bar, I know). We don't know who they are or who funds them, though there are certainly correlations with other, generally right-wing or libertarian, flavored groups. Given the number of times it's posted unironically here, it looks like a large number of people have been taken in by it.

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> Also, ivnmeta itself is just weird. It can only be characterized as a propaganda site. It's well done, but scientifically invalid.

Ivnmeta and the network of related sites are some of the weirdest propaganda I've seen.

But what's even stranger is how the visual format seems to short-circuit right past people's usual suspicions on sites like HN. Normally if you posted up site where some unnamed author had crossed out the conclusions of various research studies and inserted his own statistical analysis, everyone here would roll their eyes. There's something about this site that seems to short-circuit past people's usual complaints (small sample size, inclusion of retracted studies, substituting statistical analyses that disagree even with the papers it cites) and make people think there's a conspiracy going on.

Ivmmeta:

1. Communicates clearly.

2. Has a simple pitch (look at all this evidence! here are links and all the details we can find!).

If you are evidence based you have to admit ivmmeta.com is interesting (it compares extremely well to the usual tripe for ordinary people which typically just reports "studies show..." with no links or sources - or like this article, one study in a sea of conflicting and complicated studies). If only the governments of the world had the resource of Big Ivermectin and could summarise data effectively and present it as one would to an adult. Might even work better than mandates and threats, what do I know.

The counterarguments tend to be vague. When this post says "various research studies" - links. Specifics. Names. This is something ivmmeta has that the post doesn't. And that is why ivmmeta is more persuasive communication.

And as far as I can tell, based on the geographic distributions, ivmmeta probably is reporting on a real effect. That helps the argument that they are just good communicators rather than malicious.

PS - fun anecdote, a close family member of mine was diagnosed with threadworms around the time they got their 3rd vaccine shot. Ironically, assuming Ivermectin works on threadworms, they might have had better chances with COVID if they'd taken Ivermectin at the same time as their shot.

PPS - If there is an ivmmeta equivalent for vaccines people should throw it around more. It is difficult to figure out how effective they actually are given the waning of shots and complexity of cross-country policy comparisons.

they literally strip out the paper's conclusions and substitute their own?

is there a long form write up on what ivnmeta did wrong? I couldn't find any, just comments here and there that, and instead of picking who to trust, it might be better if there is a long form going over what exactly and how they did wrong/incorrectly/deceptively.

I assumed they were just cherry-picking studies, but not faking conclusions.

https://twitter.com/gidmk/status/1422044335076306947 is probably the best source on this. GidMK has made something of a name for himself debunking this stuff, for better or for worse. If you want a source that's not associated with him but still critical, though not as detailed, you can check:

https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...

There's also Scott Alexander's detailed writeup, which I found good reading.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

It has been criticized for relying too heavily on GidMK, but in my opinion that's reasonable - he is in fact the expert who has studied this in detail.

> A lot of it is just straight-up fraud. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz has documented this in some detail.

Alexandros Marinos provides a counterpoint [1]

> Reading the article, I was surprised (but not really) by the central role Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz (henceforth GidMK as is his much shorter Twitter handle) had played in the analysis. The man has a way to apparate wherever a person of influence takes a position on ivermectin. This is at least the third time I’ve observed the same sequence of events.

> ...

> I wanted to avoid focusing on GidMK himself, but the way the analysis comes out, this won’t be possible. I’ll try to keep things as dispassionate as possible without being fake, but I beseech the reader to understand that this isn’t your standard “Ad Hominem” argument. If Scott’s analysis depends on his trust on GidMK, it is paramount that I demonstrate that GidMK’s track record is not one deserving of that trust.

> ...

> I have to also note that GidMK is highly conscious of his feed, and is probably applying some automated means of blocking anyone supporting opposing views to his. Not only has he blocked me on Twitter, he seems to have blocked a double-digit percentage of my followers, many of which were not aware of the block until I asked them to check. My best hypothesis is that anyone “liking” anything I posted opposing his positions would automatically get blocked.

There is more I could excerpt, but probably better to read the whole thing.

1. https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/a-conflict-of-blurr...

This is not a counter-point, this is an ad hominem attack (despite its protestation to the contrary) that doesn’t address any of the serious problems that Meyerowitz-Katz found with those studies. Problems severe enough to force retractions from the relevant journals.

The credibility of Meyerowitz-Katz (and others like him) rests on the quality of his claims and analyses, not on whether he blocks people on Twitter.