I kind of take my interest and willingness to explore this stuff as a barometer of consensus consciousness and it does feel like it is finally breaching (I've kind of picked up that may have been the vibe amongst y'all committed skeptics over the summer). I've been piecing together your opinions on the basics as I've been perusing Unglossed for the past month, perhaps subconsciously briefing myself in anticipation of the larger cultural reconstruction that is hopefully underway.
It's interesting... OAS is in the WSJ... it seems like everything needs a clever take, when the truths of tolerance and exhaustion are too not like a funky computer thing --is everyone locked in to being in their early 20s forever christ-- I guess. Anyway a couple of quick questions:
1. PCR tests... blasphemous to Kary Mullis to use them to diagnose COVID or...? That may finally be breaking into the edge of the mainstream. You mention above (sorry this post is from nearly a year ago but it is related) that as a proxy it is valid as indicating a "biological event" and I've seen elsewhere that you think it is nihilistic to deny viruses exist... so I presume it's not a total wash. But going off of the above, I'm thinking the criticism that by cycling the test an unnecessary number of times you can end up with anything, is on the right path, but also just wrong and misses that part of that the time you're finding material without the presence of symptoms? And without the context of disease there doesn't seem to be much to it beyond concretizing a centralized medicine apparatus.
2. Oh Modern Discontent has a series on Hydroxychloroquine nevermind!
I could liken PCR to flying. We still can't show on paper that flying should work. But you can look in the sky and see planes. So imagine if flying was first invented in 2020 and you still, in 2023, had all these bloggers extremely committed to their initial take that it couldn't possibly work, here's on paper why, here's the charismatic mysteriously murdered inventor saying why, can't work, no way. But you can look in the sky and see planes.
Likewise, if someone is PCR+, regardless of symptoms, they are unlikely to PCR+ again later (vs. background rates, or at all). So the first PCR+ told you something about that person that you can use to predict later events. It's valid information. And it would be incredibly hard to explain if it wasn't because the first positive was reflective of encounter with the virus leading to immune response, which as far as we know implies some level of replication and probably acute transmission-capacity, ie infection.
Two stories from a hospital in my area, broadcasted on my local news- I followed their stories in real time, critical late stage patients (saved) by Ivermectin. If I or any of my family is sick, I reserve the right to try.
Regardless of IVM working or not, it's criminal, pathetic, etc that treatments were not pursued from day 1 by national health agencies. A "vaccine" agenda. Seriously how can one defend that?
This is true - but also built into the centralization / Flexner-report-ification of medicine. No matter what, doctors are human, so they will by and large be fallible and incompetent - by centralizing and standardizing them, you don't prevent universal mistreatment, you enable it (even if you reduce short term sporadic mistreatment). If you don't want 100k deaths from groupthink shunning of on-the-ground-experience from time to time, well, don't have national health agencies to begin with. So I acknowledge the crime in the withholding of treatment, but ivermectin itself, alone, is not what the "war" should be over.
As for the injections, that's simple first degree murder.
Agreed. There are too many variabmes here. The high risk definition is broad. Whether you were ever going to develop severe illness in the first place is uncertain. Viral load at exposure. How your body responded to the vaccine in antibody and memory cell production. And so on. The most important point to note is that they did not get Ivermectin until days 5-7. No wonder it did not work. The theory is similar to Tamiflu, it must be taken at exposure to the first sign of symptoms to be most effective. Anecdotally, I've seen Ivermectin work. Granted, none of us were likely to progress to severe illness in the first place.
This is esoteric but I need to point out that belief will always triumph. That's why there is a placebo effect. That is not to say that IVM works or doesn't work, it's just the nature of our reality which leads to sufficient drama to keep the gods engaged. (By the way, it isn't our beliefs that create our reality; it's our fears. That's why we're in this pickle in the first place.)
Agreed - we have to assume / accept that there will be illusions, but expect that some of those illusions will be functionally "valid" illusions due to the subjective nature of health. Is the severe efficacy of the Covid vaccines, as shown in "the numbers," all healthy user bias? Maybe, but if so, it also means that "people who haven't received the vaccine" are having severe outcomes more than "people who have received the vaccine," so the bias / illusion will effectually match real experience.
One of the distinctions of this virus has been the wide range of outcomes associated with a wide range of conditions. Further, the disease changes considerably as it progresses. So it acts like many different diseases, each responding best to tailored treatments. Enormously complex. Apparently there is no "magic" solution that works in all people, for all conditions, at all times during disease progression.
That single molecule quest is always the single-minded focus of medical orthodoxy. It only works for simple ailments, yet medical orthodoxy demands it. For example, we've spent trillions searching for a magic pill for Alzheimer's and so far have nothing. Doctors who successfully treat it are actively shunned, by other doctors as well as corrupt media.
Some doctors manage those complex variations with subtle indications better than others. But their skill becomes artificially restricted by arbitrary prohibitions. Ivermectin is not a one med fits all solution, but it works well in some situations. It's criminal to prohibit its use by competent doctors. Some docs are good enough that they can work around those criminal prohibitions. Dr Zelenko for example assembled a protocol not yet prohibited using over the counter pills and skilled supervision. He has had two years of nearly perfect success. Apparently the missing ingredient in Malaysia was competent doctors.
It's also criminal to withhold effective medicines from half your patients to prove a point to bored academics. The fetish of worshiping formal investigations during a lethal pandemic is a sickness unique to our pampered western society. Throughout history, we learned what worked from experience, and shared those experiences with others. Denying experience will be our undoing.
The lust for perfection, for precision to the last decimal point, for three sigma confidence, overwhelms the objective of "what works better?" Zelenko observed the standard practice for covid wasn't working, no one understood why, so he tried something different. It worked, so he did it again, and again, with consistent success. It wasn't a random idea, but one based on clearly understood biology principles that just hadn't been tried yet. Rational response by a competent medical industry would be to try it everywhere, and develop consensus through clinical success. Instead, the response was to attack what works to retrench academic pursuits of perfection while millions died painfully.
The flip side of that pathology is observing what doesn't work. It was known for a century that masks don't work. Evidence accumulated quickly that the new mandates were ineffective. It only entrenched their stubbornness. Clearly, other objectives than protecting people were driving it. Lockdowns produced climbing sickness and death. Medical tyrants twisted the math to first construct baseless catastrophic forecasts, then declare success when the forecasts failed, and credit the superstitions for the difference. Only a public entirely uneducated in math, biology, and human nature would allow those destructive demands to persist -- for two years!
Humanity would not have survived this long if we demanded perfection in every decision. We won't survive much longer at this rate.
This is something that I found particularly aggravating: our CHOs / health ministers / state premiers et al, all did the "he's / she's the hardest working X I know" circle jerk but in 2 years not a single response changed.
The only change was the punishments meted out if you refused their "voluntary" application to your person.
If I "worked so hard" for 2 years for no net effect I would be embarrassed af.
Honestly this study and the reaction to it has essentially added more noise to the already noisy arena surrounding IVM. There are a few things to point out here.
Remember that this study took place during Delta. I posted in Igor's comment section but Delta had a reduce viral replication period compared to Alpha or Beta, meaning that it's more imperative to provide earlier treatment.
And I'll reiterate it here; there is one drug about to hit the market that had tremendous initial results but had absolutely horrible results in the latter half of the study. That drug is Molnupiravir, and it should have been an indication that the way to properly treat COVID is to know what variant you are dealing with and the timing of the therapeutic.
As of now no other therapeutics are available. Even in the study the "standard of care" was to just provide stuff to relieve symptoms, not even providing anything antiviral.
When looking at studies it's important to always take into account that everything is relative, and everything always has to be assessed based on the reference or comparison group.
The m trial reversion is another interesting one. I am not sure I would chalk it up to change in the virus over change in the host / both. I think you could study any health intervention over months and discover that the humans showing up for the intervention are not in fact a "sample" of anything, they are just themselves, and change from one month to the next. Medical research should have a requirement that everyone works in customer service for a year, to see these kind of mysterious vagaries with their own eyes - "in my first two months, I was asked where the bathroom was every day; for the last ten months it was only ~ once a week, what changed?"
Right. This study is of no mathematical value to the other hundreds of similar studies out there. However - there are hundreds of studies on IVM out there, going back 50 years. Not for Covid but for other human uses. Zero issues unless you are an Aussie Shepherd or mix. Outside of that circle- all is well. Very annoying this off-label cheap drug (off patent!!) is misconstrued in the media. But its not about heath is it.....
Feb 19, 2022·edited Feb 19, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
I'm going to be cheap and kinda regurgitate my comment from Alexandros' IVM article:
If the side effects of IVM are non-existent and/or manageable (which is what appears to be the case from this study), and the only effect is placebo, it would be worth it for that effect alone, IMO.
The lack of large-scale IVM or HCQ trial by the many governments willing to spend $Bs on (at the time, IMO) unproven vaccines flies in the face of ... well, sanity, to be honest. IVM being cheap as chips and safe as houses = ban and threaten $10,000 fines / deregistration for prescribing for COVID (here in Australia), but mRNA vaccines being novel and expensive (due to cost + mandates etc) and provably damaging for some = pay billions and absolve Pharma of all responsibility for injury. WTAF?
There would be more than enough volunteers, that much is obvious.
It is not in the interest of the state nor the medical industry for citizens to be healthier, so neither pursues that aim. It *is* in the interest of both to know more about citizens, have a list of names of people starting at childhood, whether to hunt down prophesied future deposers or to market excess interventions, and so both support vaccination, or rather contend with each other over the "territory." That's all "public health" is.
Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me the majority of the people in the study were vaccinated, and who knows for how long since? This study is utterly useless, as you say. The only people you could reasonably compare on testing Ivermectin would be those who were totally unvaxxed--the 75 and 84 (wherein 1 death vs 4 might mean something, but probably not enough power). Throwing vaccination in the mix, when we know it has powerful impacts on both short and mid-term immunity, negates any other results.
What Maria Romana said. Plus the 3 who dropped out of the study after getting the first dose of IVM. This is not a good example of a study. Please review the data: https://c19ivermectin.com/. These are mostly peer reviewed. Disgusting these people give a dang and are instantly marginalized.
I am going to pose a challenge (as we had in debate class 30 years ago) and should be on the curriculum today. PLEASE argue from the counter-opinion. Make believe you believe in Ivermectin. Build your argument and put it down in your very methodical and persuasive way. Prove the opposite. No ambivalence please. And absolutely put a disclaimer on the header. Many folks want to hear both sides, but without politics and prejudice.
This wouldn't change what I think about the ability of studies to provide evidence for the belief. Essentially my pro-ambivalence argument is "to believe in ivermectin requires anecdotal and biological-mechanism arguments" and so doctors who have experience with it, and observe a positive effect, should believe in it. They should not look to studies to confirm their belief, because the studies will fail them.
Science cannot be a "belief". Science should be based upon action and reaction (in my lay terms!). Someone somewhere noticed IVM had a profound effect on the transmission and severity of Covid, and others tried it and agreed. The very fact that information on IVM, HCQ and other OTC treatments were immediately censored and their authors (MD's!) deplatformed and tagged as misinformers was a big red flag. The immune system we as humans are born with (there are exceptions) which is the front line against infection was purposely ignored. No boosting of that! All the grannies who would have served up spoons of cod liver oil are long gone. And the common sense (not beliefs!) of those days are heading south also.
Agreed - and I would say, part of that suppression was that the terms of the battle were pre-defined as "studies" instead of experience and crowd-sourced consensus to begin with. So, I say don't wage the battle there. It's a fight intentionally rigged in advance, in favor of new patents whose developers can afford to make an RCT "show" effects that they actually can't.
I was never in the Scott Alexander loop to begin with (before his NYT standoff), and still don't know what to make of him. He seems to idiotically support being mRNA-transfected, so I don't read him unless someone else links to him, and the ivermectin review is good. I like the Siri's Scissor post a lot, that's all I really know...
I forget the quote about two things being infinite and one of them is something like human stupidity or whatever, but anyway, it should say "capacity to shrug off cognitive dissonance" instead.
It might be related to the standard care. I was working really fast on this one so I didn't have time to drill into whether rem. was used for the control arm, as it wouldn't have altered my "take" much (it would only have added to the argument that ivermectin did not show efficacy, since it was "vs poison")
Ha - who knows. And the same place could have gotten the severe-progressing treatment patients. In the end the furniture all gets packed up and no one ever finds the sled.
As zero hedge points out the wall street journal ran an editorial yesterday critical of boosters:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/wsj-shreds-vaccine-makers-biden-admin-over-deceptive-booster-campaign
I kind of take my interest and willingness to explore this stuff as a barometer of consensus consciousness and it does feel like it is finally breaching (I've kind of picked up that may have been the vibe amongst y'all committed skeptics over the summer). I've been piecing together your opinions on the basics as I've been perusing Unglossed for the past month, perhaps subconsciously briefing myself in anticipation of the larger cultural reconstruction that is hopefully underway.
It's interesting... OAS is in the WSJ... it seems like everything needs a clever take, when the truths of tolerance and exhaustion are too not like a funky computer thing --is everyone locked in to being in their early 20s forever christ-- I guess. Anyway a couple of quick questions:
1. PCR tests... blasphemous to Kary Mullis to use them to diagnose COVID or...? That may finally be breaking into the edge of the mainstream. You mention above (sorry this post is from nearly a year ago but it is related) that as a proxy it is valid as indicating a "biological event" and I've seen elsewhere that you think it is nihilistic to deny viruses exist... so I presume it's not a total wash. But going off of the above, I'm thinking the criticism that by cycling the test an unnecessary number of times you can end up with anything, is on the right path, but also just wrong and misses that part of that the time you're finding material without the presence of symptoms? And without the context of disease there doesn't seem to be much to it beyond concretizing a centralized medicine apparatus.
2. Oh Modern Discontent has a series on Hydroxychloroquine nevermind!
I could liken PCR to flying. We still can't show on paper that flying should work. But you can look in the sky and see planes. So imagine if flying was first invented in 2020 and you still, in 2023, had all these bloggers extremely committed to their initial take that it couldn't possibly work, here's on paper why, here's the charismatic mysteriously murdered inventor saying why, can't work, no way. But you can look in the sky and see planes.
Likewise, if someone is PCR+, regardless of symptoms, they are unlikely to PCR+ again later (vs. background rates, or at all). So the first PCR+ told you something about that person that you can use to predict later events. It's valid information. And it would be incredibly hard to explain if it wasn't because the first positive was reflective of encounter with the virus leading to immune response, which as far as we know implies some level of replication and probably acute transmission-capacity, ie infection.
Two stories from a hospital in my area, broadcasted on my local news- I followed their stories in real time, critical late stage patients (saved) by Ivermectin. If I or any of my family is sick, I reserve the right to try.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/judge-stands-up-hospital-step-aside-give-dying-man-des-benjamin
Seeing 10 deaths in the control arm and only three in the treatment arm sure as heck isn't going to dissuade me from taking IVM. :)
Who are you going to believe: me, or your lying eyes!?
Regardless of IVM working or not, it's criminal, pathetic, etc that treatments were not pursued from day 1 by national health agencies. A "vaccine" agenda. Seriously how can one defend that?
This is true - but also built into the centralization / Flexner-report-ification of medicine. No matter what, doctors are human, so they will by and large be fallible and incompetent - by centralizing and standardizing them, you don't prevent universal mistreatment, you enable it (even if you reduce short term sporadic mistreatment). If you don't want 100k deaths from groupthink shunning of on-the-ground-experience from time to time, well, don't have national health agencies to begin with. So I acknowledge the crime in the withholding of treatment, but ivermectin itself, alone, is not what the "war" should be over.
As for the injections, that's simple first degree murder.
I was never a fan of centralised control but these past 2 years have made me a vociferous enemy of it.
Agreed. There are too many variabmes here. The high risk definition is broad. Whether you were ever going to develop severe illness in the first place is uncertain. Viral load at exposure. How your body responded to the vaccine in antibody and memory cell production. And so on. The most important point to note is that they did not get Ivermectin until days 5-7. No wonder it did not work. The theory is similar to Tamiflu, it must be taken at exposure to the first sign of symptoms to be most effective. Anecdotally, I've seen Ivermectin work. Granted, none of us were likely to progress to severe illness in the first place.
This is esoteric but I need to point out that belief will always triumph. That's why there is a placebo effect. That is not to say that IVM works or doesn't work, it's just the nature of our reality which leads to sufficient drama to keep the gods engaged. (By the way, it isn't our beliefs that create our reality; it's our fears. That's why we're in this pickle in the first place.)
Agreed - we have to assume / accept that there will be illusions, but expect that some of those illusions will be functionally "valid" illusions due to the subjective nature of health. Is the severe efficacy of the Covid vaccines, as shown in "the numbers," all healthy user bias? Maybe, but if so, it also means that "people who haven't received the vaccine" are having severe outcomes more than "people who have received the vaccine," so the bias / illusion will effectually match real experience.
One of the distinctions of this virus has been the wide range of outcomes associated with a wide range of conditions. Further, the disease changes considerably as it progresses. So it acts like many different diseases, each responding best to tailored treatments. Enormously complex. Apparently there is no "magic" solution that works in all people, for all conditions, at all times during disease progression.
That single molecule quest is always the single-minded focus of medical orthodoxy. It only works for simple ailments, yet medical orthodoxy demands it. For example, we've spent trillions searching for a magic pill for Alzheimer's and so far have nothing. Doctors who successfully treat it are actively shunned, by other doctors as well as corrupt media.
Some doctors manage those complex variations with subtle indications better than others. But their skill becomes artificially restricted by arbitrary prohibitions. Ivermectin is not a one med fits all solution, but it works well in some situations. It's criminal to prohibit its use by competent doctors. Some docs are good enough that they can work around those criminal prohibitions. Dr Zelenko for example assembled a protocol not yet prohibited using over the counter pills and skilled supervision. He has had two years of nearly perfect success. Apparently the missing ingredient in Malaysia was competent doctors.
It's also criminal to withhold effective medicines from half your patients to prove a point to bored academics. The fetish of worshiping formal investigations during a lethal pandemic is a sickness unique to our pampered western society. Throughout history, we learned what worked from experience, and shared those experiences with others. Denying experience will be our undoing.
Yes - word-for-word perfectly put.
The lust for perfection, for precision to the last decimal point, for three sigma confidence, overwhelms the objective of "what works better?" Zelenko observed the standard practice for covid wasn't working, no one understood why, so he tried something different. It worked, so he did it again, and again, with consistent success. It wasn't a random idea, but one based on clearly understood biology principles that just hadn't been tried yet. Rational response by a competent medical industry would be to try it everywhere, and develop consensus through clinical success. Instead, the response was to attack what works to retrench academic pursuits of perfection while millions died painfully.
The flip side of that pathology is observing what doesn't work. It was known for a century that masks don't work. Evidence accumulated quickly that the new mandates were ineffective. It only entrenched their stubbornness. Clearly, other objectives than protecting people were driving it. Lockdowns produced climbing sickness and death. Medical tyrants twisted the math to first construct baseless catastrophic forecasts, then declare success when the forecasts failed, and credit the superstitions for the difference. Only a public entirely uneducated in math, biology, and human nature would allow those destructive demands to persist -- for two years!
Humanity would not have survived this long if we demanded perfection in every decision. We won't survive much longer at this rate.
This is something that I found particularly aggravating: our CHOs / health ministers / state premiers et al, all did the "he's / she's the hardest working X I know" circle jerk but in 2 years not a single response changed.
The only change was the punishments meted out if you refused their "voluntary" application to your person.
If I "worked so hard" for 2 years for no net effect I would be embarrassed af.
Honestly this study and the reaction to it has essentially added more noise to the already noisy arena surrounding IVM. There are a few things to point out here.
Remember that this study took place during Delta. I posted in Igor's comment section but Delta had a reduce viral replication period compared to Alpha or Beta, meaning that it's more imperative to provide earlier treatment.
And I'll reiterate it here; there is one drug about to hit the market that had tremendous initial results but had absolutely horrible results in the latter half of the study. That drug is Molnupiravir, and it should have been an indication that the way to properly treat COVID is to know what variant you are dealing with and the timing of the therapeutic.
As of now no other therapeutics are available. Even in the study the "standard of care" was to just provide stuff to relieve symptoms, not even providing anything antiviral.
When looking at studies it's important to always take into account that everything is relative, and everything always has to be assessed based on the reference or comparison group.
The m trial reversion is another interesting one. I am not sure I would chalk it up to change in the virus over change in the host / both. I think you could study any health intervention over months and discover that the humans showing up for the intervention are not in fact a "sample" of anything, they are just themselves, and change from one month to the next. Medical research should have a requirement that everyone works in customer service for a year, to see these kind of mysterious vagaries with their own eyes - "in my first two months, I was asked where the bathroom was every day; for the last ten months it was only ~ once a week, what changed?"
Right. This study is of no mathematical value to the other hundreds of similar studies out there. However - there are hundreds of studies on IVM out there, going back 50 years. Not for Covid but for other human uses. Zero issues unless you are an Aussie Shepherd or mix. Outside of that circle- all is well. Very annoying this off-label cheap drug (off patent!!) is misconstrued in the media. But its not about heath is it.....
I'm going to be cheap and kinda regurgitate my comment from Alexandros' IVM article:
If the side effects of IVM are non-existent and/or manageable (which is what appears to be the case from this study), and the only effect is placebo, it would be worth it for that effect alone, IMO.
The lack of large-scale IVM or HCQ trial by the many governments willing to spend $Bs on (at the time, IMO) unproven vaccines flies in the face of ... well, sanity, to be honest. IVM being cheap as chips and safe as houses = ban and threaten $10,000 fines / deregistration for prescribing for COVID (here in Australia), but mRNA vaccines being novel and expensive (due to cost + mandates etc) and provably damaging for some = pay billions and absolve Pharma of all responsibility for injury. WTAF?
There would be more than enough volunteers, that much is obvious.
It is not in the interest of the state nor the medical industry for citizens to be healthier, so neither pursues that aim. It *is* in the interest of both to know more about citizens, have a list of names of people starting at childhood, whether to hunt down prophesied future deposers or to market excess interventions, and so both support vaccination, or rather contend with each other over the "territory." That's all "public health" is.
Wait, wait, wait. You're telling me the majority of the people in the study were vaccinated, and who knows for how long since? This study is utterly useless, as you say. The only people you could reasonably compare on testing Ivermectin would be those who were totally unvaxxed--the 75 and 84 (wherein 1 death vs 4 might mean something, but probably not enough power). Throwing vaccination in the mix, when we know it has powerful impacts on both short and mid-term immunity, negates any other results.
What Maria Romana said. Plus the 3 who dropped out of the study after getting the first dose of IVM. This is not a good example of a study. Please review the data: https://c19ivermectin.com/. These are mostly peer reviewed. Disgusting these people give a dang and are instantly marginalized.
I am going to pose a challenge (as we had in debate class 30 years ago) and should be on the curriculum today. PLEASE argue from the counter-opinion. Make believe you believe in Ivermectin. Build your argument and put it down in your very methodical and persuasive way. Prove the opposite. No ambivalence please. And absolutely put a disclaimer on the header. Many folks want to hear both sides, but without politics and prejudice.
This wouldn't change what I think about the ability of studies to provide evidence for the belief. Essentially my pro-ambivalence argument is "to believe in ivermectin requires anecdotal and biological-mechanism arguments" and so doctors who have experience with it, and observe a positive effect, should believe in it. They should not look to studies to confirm their belief, because the studies will fail them.
Science cannot be a "belief". Science should be based upon action and reaction (in my lay terms!). Someone somewhere noticed IVM had a profound effect on the transmission and severity of Covid, and others tried it and agreed. The very fact that information on IVM, HCQ and other OTC treatments were immediately censored and their authors (MD's!) deplatformed and tagged as misinformers was a big red flag. The immune system we as humans are born with (there are exceptions) which is the front line against infection was purposely ignored. No boosting of that! All the grannies who would have served up spoons of cod liver oil are long gone. And the common sense (not beliefs!) of those days are heading south also.
Agreed - and I would say, part of that suppression was that the terms of the battle were pre-defined as "studies" instead of experience and crowd-sourced consensus to begin with. So, I say don't wage the battle there. It's a fight intentionally rigged in advance, in favor of new patents whose developers can afford to make an RCT "show" effects that they actually can't.
Very good points Brian. I agree and it is a sad time for Science.
Cheers Unacceptable Deb!
I was never in the Scott Alexander loop to begin with (before his NYT standoff), and still don't know what to make of him. He seems to idiotically support being mRNA-transfected, so I don't read him unless someone else links to him, and the ivermectin review is good. I like the Siri's Scissor post a lot, that's all I really know...
I forget the quote about two things being infinite and one of them is something like human stupidity or whatever, but anyway, it should say "capacity to shrug off cognitive dissonance" instead.
It might be related to the standard care. I was working really fast on this one so I didn't have time to drill into whether rem. was used for the control arm, as it wouldn't have altered my "take" much (it would only have added to the argument that ivermectin did not show efficacy, since it was "vs poison")
Ha - who knows. And the same place could have gotten the severe-progressing treatment patients. In the end the furniture all gets packed up and no one ever finds the sled.