Mexico City ivermectin updates

We posted our decision to withdraw the paper, “Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19″, here. Since then there have been new developments. I will update this page if needed. -Philip Cohen

As of February 5.

Statements

The lead author on the paper, José Merino, tweeted a link to a letter to me over the names of six of the original seven authors. The letter called the decision to withdraw their paper “unethical, colonialist, and authoritarian,” and demanded my resignation. You can read the statement here.

Sobre la decisión de @familyunequal de eliminar del sitio que dirige el análisis sobre Ivermectina y Covid en la CDMX. Le enviamos la siguiente respuesta. https://t.co/RCsi7h7efs

Agradecemos su lectura y divulgación.

Muchas gracias pic.twitter.com/KVPPI6FpZz
— José Merino (@PPmerino) February 4, 2022

The Secretaría de Salud de la Ciudad de México posted a statement (in Spanish; English translation here), arguing that the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 was “supported by the scientific evidence available worldwide in 2020,” before the availability of vaccines, due its documented effectiveness, low cost, and lack of harmful effects. Distributing the medicine was not an experiment, they wrote. In addition, about SocArXiv, they wrote: “This study was kept on the SocArxiv portal for almost a year, it always had code and data available for replication, and its conclusions are very similar to other works (Ascencio-Montiel et al. 2022).” (Note, that study, which used the same data from the Mexico City COVID-19 health kit distribution, acknowledged that the kids “included, besides an information brochure and a pulse oxymeter, medications such as azithromycin, ivermecin, acetaminophen and aspirin” — and the study made no claims about the effects of ivermectin itself, and the data doesn’t indicate who took which medicines.)

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