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Frontiers Removes Controversial Ivermectin Paper Pre-Publication

A review article containing contested claims about the tropical medicine drug as a COVID-19 treatment was listed as “provisionally accepted” on the journal’s website before being removed this week.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/frontiers-removes-controversial-ivermectin-paper-pre-publication-68505

This isn’t the first time that Kory and his colleagues at FLCCC have been accused of making unsubstantiated claims about ivermectin.

In December, Kory gave a statement at a US Senate hearing on COVID-19 treatments in which he called ivermectin “effectively a ‘miracle drug’” that could obliterate disease transmission and prevent illness—claims that Associated Press fact-checkers labelled “False” at the time. Kory, who formerly oversaw critical care at the UW Health in Wisconsin, tells The Scientist that he now regrets using “miracle” and other hyperbolic terminology.

Later in December, FLCCC founder Paul Marik, the first author on the now-rejected Frontiers manuscript and a professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School, wrote a paper reviewing ivermectin that included references to debunked papers, including an observational study of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients led by now-discredited Surgisphere Corporation. That study, which had been posted on the preprint server SSRN, was taken down at the request of one of the authors back in May after concerns were raised about the provenance of the company’s data.

There have been a number of trials of ivermectin in COVID-19 patients, although they haven’t met all the criteria that scientists typically deem necessary to generate strong evidence—that is, being randomized, well-controlled trials with hundreds or thousands of patients and findings published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The NIH, which last updated its advice on ivermectin in COVID-19 patients on February 11, 2021, states that most of the studies claiming to show benefits of ivermectin contain “incomplete information and significant methodological limitations, which make it difficult to exclude common causes of bias.”

The agency concludes that “there are insufficient data . . . to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19,” and calls for “adequately powered, well-designed, and well-conducted clinical trials.”