Zelfs de BBC drinkt de Kool-Aid

Als er één omroep was waar je van op aankon was het de Engelse BBC. De BBC heeft altijd een uitstekende reputatie gehad, niet alleen journalistiek maar ook op wetenschappelijk gebied, het was een instituut waar je op kon bouwen. “In tijden van verwarring brengt de BBC ons terug in de realiteit met waarheid, objectiviteit en empirisch realisme”, dat is het beeld en dat is ook wat ze uitstralen, zeker als ze een "reality check" publiceren. Of beter gezegd: dat wás het beeld, want BBC is ook op de farma-gedreven anti-ivermectinewagen gesprongen. Dat blijkt uit het artikel "Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid 'miracle' drug, een reality check door Rachel Schraer & Jack Goodman".

Drinking the Kool-Aid

De uitdrukking "Drinking the Kool-Aid" is afkomstig van gebeurtenissen in Jonestown, Guyana, op 18 november 1978, waarbij meer dan 900 leden van de Peoples Temple-beweging zelfmoord pleegden. Gehersenspoeld door sekteleider Jim Jones namen zij een oplospoederdrankje (toevallig Kool-Aid) dat was vergiftigd met cyanide en andere drugs. De uitdrukking komt daar dus vandaan en betekent inmiddels: het accepteren van een idee of het veranderen van een voorkeur vanwege populariteit, groepsdruk of overtuigingskracht. Dat kan zelfs leiden tot zelfmoord, net zoals de BBC haar eigen reputatie hier ook om zeep helpt.

What is wrong with the IVM debunk due to the BBC article

If you have half an hour, be sure to check out Dr. John Campbell's video further down. Continue in this article

• Additional information on the video regarding the footnotes
• A little about Dr. John Campbell himself
• Beforehand: preparing for the video
• The video itself
• A textual summary of what he says in that video, for anyone who has difficulty with information via videos or simply does not have or does not take the time.

Additional: the footnotes

Unfortunately, what Campbell forgets in the video is to check the footnotes of an opinion piece in Nature. That piece is the basis of the BBC article. The references in that article are the following footnotes:

1. Elgazzar, A. et al. Withdrawn study in which student Jack Lawrence discovered methodological errors. The study no longer carries any weight in the assessment of ivermectin.
2. Andrew Bryant et al. A PRE-PRINT meta-study in which the withdrawn Elgazzar study was still included. It is expected that the pre-primt will be corrected for this during the peer review.
3. Andrew Hill et al. A temporarily withdrawn Oxford study which will be republished after exclusion from the Elgazzar study.
4. One article in the Guardian about the withdrawal of -again- the Elgazzar study. The article put forward as a scientific basis begins with "De werkzaamheid van een medicijn dat wordt gepromoot door rechtse figuren…"
5. AURL to yet another Elgazzar study.
6. A study in which the Twitter group suspects errors.
7. A wrong link, that should have been this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02958-2 which describes the problem that doing large studies on Covid-19 and ivermectin in Latin America is difficult. ivermectin is freely available there and is used there, which makes it difficult to compare with placebo, as also described in my VV article of 5 March 2021. This says nothing about effectiveness or safety.

All in all, very poor evidence. One study that is being revised and another study in which the authors suspect a minor inaccuracy (out of a total of 122 studies). Meta-studies that included these studies in their reviews in the past will re-weigh them after republication, or exclude them after withdrawal.

Beforehand

I have not yet heard Campbell talk about the rule that vaccines (especially under emergency conditions) may only be used in the absence of medication. It is also possible that this rule has been abolished at the request of the pharmaceutical companies or that the emergency conditions have expired and that everything is 100% approved because it has been proven effective and super safe. At least I don't hear much about it anymore, not even in relation to Molnupiravir, Merck's brand new Covid drug (more on that in a future article).

As an old-school physician, Campbell always first checks the stature of the authors. In this case the debunking is done by two 'journalists'. Also a comment about that.

You would expect that Campbell would also realize by now that stature no longer says much about the independent quality of a piece. (In the Netherlands, top virologists have been selling nonsense about virus spread for years - it remains a rewarding example.) Nevertheless, I agree with him that the term 'journalist' is a disqualification in this. MSM (science) journalists in particular must be seen as unreliable in terms of corona for the time being, notwithstanding the exceptions because they certainly exist.

Yet journalists can indeed do important work, provided they build an argument based on falsifiable sources. That is a scientific, critical way of working and something completely different from copying/pasting texts from news agencies and government institutions and then looking for some anecdotal evidence at best. Sources should generally be scientific studies with clear hypotheses, assessed in a way that can be verified. Preferably peer reviewed, preferably Ranomized Controlled Trials. In the Netherlands we have examples of excellent non-medical authors and researchers. Not that they are always right, but it is at least possible to find out where they stand and why. Important discoveries in a field also arise on the edges of that field, or even outside it.

Niets van dit alles in dit BBC-artikel. Deze BBC-journalisten denken dat het label 'BBC' genoeg autoriteit heeft om zonder onderbouwende referenties toch "debunks" en "reality checks" te kunnen doen. Er zitten enkele aanwijzingen in het artikel waaruit Campbell heeft kunnen opmaken wat de basis voor het artikel is geweest. Dat blijkt een opinion piece, published in Nature, again built around assumptions and claims based on meager evidence (see the footnotes discussed above).

In the BBC article itself it is not always clear what the journalists' interpretation is and what emerges from the 'study', so for the sake of readability we are not going to make a drama out of it. I highly recommend this thirty minute video just for its humor. He keeps himself neutral - but in the meantime. He doesn't often get so excited... Otherwise, read the most important points below the video in a few minutes.

Dr. John Campbell over BBC's "ivermectine debunk"

Campbell peels the 'debunk' like an onion, from the outside. He starts with the BBC. He sketches the reputation of the BBC in a sarcastic way. where he is normally happy when they speak out about something to put things right.

Campbell betwijfelt ten zeerste of een BBC-journalist zonder achtergrond als wetenschapper, academisch onderzoeker en/of arts wel in staat is om een medisch-technische reality check te geven. Hij geeft daar aardige voorbeelden bij ("Ik heb wat last van mijn maag de laatste tijd, ik ga maar eens een afspraak maken bij de journalist, kijken wat die ervan zegt" 🙂 .

Guideline for BBC journalists appears to be an opinion piece submitted to Nature. Lead author is Jack Lawrence, a student who has mobilized some academic supporters via Twitter. He has discovered methodological errors in one, possibly two studies and links them to an article about meta-studies in general, an article that should question all meta-studies on every medical subject, because they were conducted incorrectly. The article contains no further research data, it is an opinion article, signed by an "academic group" whose members found each other on Twitter.

The BBC can reveal that there is something seriously wrong with the studies that proponents of ivermectin rely on.

The arguments:

• The proponents of ivermectin are "mostly anti-vaxxers".
  Is that true or is that just an assumption? It is not only blackening by association but also an incorrect association. Campbell himself, as mentioned, is strongly pro-vax and he is definitely pro-ivermectin. [By the way, there are many indications that C19 vaccine hesitants are often not anti-vaxxers. That statement therefore needs proof.]
• It is a medicine for horses. On social media, tips are even exchanged about human use of the version for animals. This ignores the fact that 3.7 billion doses have been given to people. [The journalists also don't seem to know that medicines often started out as veterinary medicines. Of course, people exchange tips among themselves because doctors a) are not allowed to prescribe it and b) many doctors consider the drug a scam.]
• The BBC first reveals that the researchers found 26 studies of which "more than a third contain major errors or signs of potential fraud." No substantiation is given for this either: it does not say which studies are involved! Apparently, there is not much to criticize about two-thirds of the studies. The BBC does not talk about that further.
• Then the BBC reports again that the researchers have evaluated almost all studies. So not 26 after all? [On https://c19ivermectin.com/ you see that there are more than 100. On https://ivmmeta.com/ only the 63 large Randomized Controlled Trials.]
• BBC does not provide any references, based on an article by a united Twitter group with the student as the main author.
• Campbell checks some claims but cannot find the corresponding studies or encounters a scientific debate about less essential details.
• Criticism regarding the side effects of ivermectin ignores the fact that 3.7 billion human doses showed exceptionally few side effects compared to other medications, including over-the-counter ibuprofen. Once again, BBC refers to people who are forced to tamper with veterinary medicines themselves - which says nothing about the effect of the medicine itself.
• The controversy that ivermectin evokes is cited again to put ivermectin in a bad light.
• An anecdote about a deceased Covid patient who performed her own ivermectin treatment at home should serve as tragic evidence to reinforce this. However, generalizing from the anecdotal is non-scientific thinking (inductive vs deductive).

According to student author Jack Lawrence - and the BBC seems to agree - this leads to the conclusion that all overviews of major medical studies carried out so far (meta-analyses of RCTs) should be conducted again. This includes reviewing the individual patient data, also after peer review. This means: re-check every study involved, even if it is peer-reviewed, down to the individual patient data. The entire medical science must be turned upside down... Then you have to be prepared. However, no publication can be found in which

Conclusion: The BBC cites unpublished evidence and thus disqualifies itself.

Dr. John Campbell then makes a case for the pharmacists, doctors and hospitals who have set up studies with limited budgets to make their point and points out https://ivmmeta.com, where only accepted studies are reviewed.

The discoverer of ivermectin, Satoshi Ömura, has asked Merck to investigate its effect on COVID-19 in a large, thorough Randomized Controlled Trial. Merck refused.