26 Aug 2021 7:30 am
No it doesn't.
Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies
****...fraud.The paper’s irregularities came to light when Jack Lawrence, a master’s student at the University of London, was reading it for a class assignment and noticed that some phrases were identical to those in other published work. When he contacted researchers who specialize in detecting fraud in scientific publications, the group found other causes for concern, including dozens of patient records that seemed to be duplicates, inconsistencies between the raw data and the information in the paper, patients whose records indicate they died before the study’s start date, and numbers that seemed to be too consistent to have occurred by chance.
In an editorial note, Research Square said that it has launched a formal investigation into the concerns raised by Lawrence and his colleagues. According to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Shorouk, Egypt’s minister of higher education and scientific research is also examining the allegations. The paper was “withdrawn from the Research Square platform without informing or asking me”, Elgazzar wrote in an e-mail to Nature. He defended the paper, and said of the plagiarism allegations that “often phrases or sentences are commonly used and referenced” when researchers read one another’s papers.Although dozens of ivermectin clinical trials have been launched over the past year3, the Elgazzar paper was notable for announcing one of the first positive results, as well as for its size — it included 400 people with symptoms of COVID-19 — and the magnitude of the drug’s effect. Few therapies can claim such an impressive reduction in death rates. “It was a significant difference, and that stood out,” says Andrew Hill, who studies repurposed drugs at the University of Liverpool, UK. “It should have raised red flags even then.”