Haha!!! I just liked Lucifer’s post in green about moderating the forum, but thought that for Joe’s sake I should say that I liked it because of its sarcasm. I’m so thoughtful. 

Since Peter appears to be heavy with TDS, I wonder who he is supporting as his candidate of choice?

I don’t think we are going to vote our way out of this folks.

Best I hope for is a relatively peaceful secession or a convention of the states working (which has it’s risks but likely should be tried at this point).

I think one of these happens when the Federal government defaults. I don’t think those people in DC will ever be able to stop spending like drunken sailors. 

I hope TX secedes soon as it will encourage other states.

Thanks for the kind words.

I have to agree that wokeness has certainly started to infiltrate peer-review. I had a paper on the neural effects of the race of a perceived face. We spent two years getting it through peer-review at the Proceedings at the National Academy of Sciences. At the end of that process it was sent to a new special political correctness review and rejected. We spent another year shopping it down the chain and and finally got it published at a non-indexed, though peer-reviewed, journal. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4087/3/3/31.

From this I think we can conclude that no matter how politically incorrect your result, you can likely publish it in some peer-reviewed journal if it is a sound study. It may take a while and be frustrating. And if you are a young investigator, that may actually make your career very difficult or impossible.

In terms of Covid-19, I think the site Jim mentioned shows that actually there are a lot of published studies showing an effect of ivermectin on treating Covid-19. You can publish them. It is just that when one examines the papers carefully, as was done in the Cochrane review, the randomized controlled trials do not show a case for that use. So I don't think one can argue that it is strongly biased in this case by some malign political motive.

I do understand that for the average person, it is difficult to know who to trust on this. Unless you are an expert, you can't really well judge the quality of the studies. That is why I say lay people should rely on peer-reviewed reviews.

Thus I would not simply blanket say one should disregard properly performed randomized controlled trials. Biomedical science is harder than say the social sciences or probably even climate science.

OTOH, I would not recommend trusting any government employed health official or politician on these subjects. They either have no real training to judge, as in the latter case, or their paycheck literally depends on what the government wants. Note this does not mean that everything such people say is wrong, just that I would verify rather than trust. And if you are a lay person, you essentially have to trust.

In terms of the limitations of these studies. Firstly, I believe a number of them have looked at use outside the hospital and in reasonably early timeframes. I am not aware of any good evidence that earlier use somehow works. Of course, one can always argue that if one had just looked earlier, or in a different dose regime, or with some other agent added, then perhaps that would provide evidence of efficacy. Literally one can always do that. But research resources are limited and need to be focused on the likely productive questions. I think the evidence is strong enough that ivermectin does not work to treat Covid-19 to not bother with further investigation at this point. But if those who strongly believe to the contrary want to privately fund or perform a proper study, I certainly have no objection!

Given what happened at PoA  I privately contacted Brian over on thepilotsplace.com last night to ask if it would be Ok to announce our forum there. I got a long detailed response that I need to reply to sometime this afternoon but the bottom line is that such a post would not be welcome. Fair enough.