ArticleOpen forum infectious diseases2022
Ivermectin for COVID-19: Addressing Potential Bias and Medical Fraud.
Article in Open forum infectious diseases, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the effect of exercise on the development of cancer-related lymphedema.JNCI cancer spectrum · 2026Pooled it
- The Impact of Study Size on COVID-19 Treatment Outcomes: A Meta-Epidemiological Study Comparing Large and Small Randomized Controlled Trials: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses.Reviews in medical virology · 2026Pooled it
- Quality of clinical evidence and political justifications of ivermectin mass distribution of COVID-19 kits in eight Latin American countries.BMJ global health · 2023Pooled it
- Ivermectin under scrutiny: a systematic review and meta-analysis of efficacy and possible sources of controversies in COVID-19 patients.Virology journal · 2022Pooled it
- Ivermectin for the prevention of COVID-19: addressing potential bias and medical fraud.The Journal of antimicrobial chemotherapy · 2022Pooled it
- Trial
- The effect of ivermectin on the viral load and culture viability in early treatment of nonhospitalized patients with mild COVID-19 - a double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial.International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2022Trial
- The impact of ivermectin on COVID-19 outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2025Article
- Trustworthiness assessment of published clinical trials: Literature review of domains and questions.Cochrane evidence synthesis and methods · 2024Review
- Why Certain Repurposed Drugs Are Unlikely to Be Effective Antivirals to Treat SARS-CoV-2 Infections.Viruses · 2024Article
- Article
- Dissemination of Registered COVID-19 Clinical Trials (DIRECCT): a cross-sectional study.BMC medicine · 2023Article
- Protocol for the development of a tool (INSPECT-SR) to identify problematic randomised controlled trials in systematic reviews of health interventions.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2023Article
- Off-label drug use during the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa: topic modelling and sentiment analysis of ivermectin in South Africa and Nigeria as a case study.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Assessing the Integrity of Clinical Trials Included in Evidence Syntheses.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Review
- Identifying and managing problematic trials: A research integrity assessment tool for randomized controlled trials in evidence synthesis.Research synthesis methods · 2023Article
- Efficacy and safety of single-dose ivermectin in mild-to-moderate COVID-19: the double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled CORVETTE-01 trial.Frontiers in medicine · 2023Article
- Characteristics of retracted research papers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in medicine · 2023Article
- Association between ivermectin treatment and mortality in COVID-19: A hospital-based case-control study.Journal of family medicine and primary care · 2023Article
- Death from COVID-19 of a 57-year-old man refusing medical care and self-medicating with ivermectin.Central European journal of public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Ivermectin has become a controversial potential medicine for coronavirus disease 2019. Some early studies suggested clinical benefits in treatment of infection. However, the body of evidence includes studies of varying quality. Furthermore, some trials have now been identified as potentially fraudulent. We present a subgroup meta-analysis to assess the effects of stratifying by trial quality on the overall results. The stratification is based on the Cochrane Risk of Bias measures and raw data analysis where possible. The results suggest that the significant effect of ivermectin on survival was dependent on largely poor-quality studies. According to the potentially fraudulent study (risk ratio [RR], 0.08; 95% CI, 0.02-0.35), ivermectin improved survival ~12 times more in comparison with low-risk studies (RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.56-1.66). This highlights the need for rigorous quality assessments, for authors to share patient-level data, and for efforts to avoid publication bias for registered studies. These steps are vital to facilitate accurate conclusions on clinical treatments.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.