Sebastian Rushworth, a Swedish physician, writes about medical evidence, Covid-19, ivermectin, and statins.
Commenters cite him as a doctor who tries to be rational, linking his posts on ivermectin trials and years of life lost to Covid.
> "every intervention that successfully lowers LDL has shown a reduction in CVD morbidity and mortality: by inhibiting synthesis (statins)"
That's not what I'm reading; published in the British Medical Journal[1] "Drug treatment to reduce cholesterol to new target levels is now recommended [...] Achieving these cholesterol target levels did not confer any additional benefit in a systematic review of 35 randomised controlled trials. [...] The negative results of numerous cholesterol lowering randomised controlled trials call into question the validity of using low density lipoprotein cholesterol as a surrogate target for the prevention of cardiovascular disease."
Or[2] "One problem with all the trials of statins is that they look at the probability of still being alive after x years. But [...] Patients want to know how much longer they can expect to live if they take a statin every day for the rest of their lives. Is it weeks? months? years? decades? [...] In 2015, a group of researchers looked at the data from the statin trials and re-calculated the effect in terms of increased longevity. The study was published in the British Medical Journal [...] So what were the results? Life was prolonged by between -5 and 19 days in the primary prevention trials (yes, that’s -5, as in minus five. In one of the studies people taking a statin lived five days shorter than people taking a placebo). [...] When everything is averaged out, people taking a statin for primary prevention lived…
Ivermectin has been know about since April 2020 when the Caly paper showed in-vitro that at high doses, ivermectin had anti-viral properties (sars-cov-2 sends proteins into the cell nucleus to turn off your immune response (interferon)). However, western scientists thought this anti-viral effect was implausible (https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-599/) - they were mostly correct as the effect is most likely immunomodulatory (Melo et al). Thus, NO clinicial trials of Ivermectin have been completed in the West (apart from a tiny 20 person trial in Barcelona).
In contrast, the developing world has completed 30 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and 60 trials in total - https://ivmmeta.com/. Ivermectin is safe (a WHO approved essential medicine), so we only care about efficacy. It is safer than paracetamol and has been taken billions of times.
No trial completed to date has shown that it does not have a positive effect. Most trials have shown statistically significance on the most important clinical outcomes - hospitalization and death.
Ivermectin works best when given early. It is transforming treatment and having incredible success in places like Uttar Pradesh (200+ million inhabitants, with only 38 new cases and 1 death yesterday - https://www.covid19india.org/).
So, Ivermectin is an enormous threat to the Pharma industry. Merck (who discovered Ivermectin and help cure river blindness by donating it) are down-talking it, so they can bring Molpuvanir to market (they got a…
"I'm more concerned about the unknowns of Long Covid than I am about the unknowns of the vaccine."
Unless you are in a high-risk group, this should not be a serious concern. There is almost no evidence for "long covid". The vast majority of the evidence is anecdotal, self-reported clusters of symptoms that resemble other common illnesses:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/17/what-is-long-covid/
When you look for higher-quality evidence for the syndrome, you find studies like this one, from the CDC, which defined "long-term" as "symptoms lasting longer than two weeks", where "symptoms" mostly resemble the aftermath of any mild respiratory illness -- fatigue, cough and headache were the most common:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm
As for more specific studies, there have been a few papers about heart inflammation that have been widely circulated, but nearly all of these have been shown to have serious statistical flaws:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1298514453642739712
The narrative about athletes with heart damage have been shown to be exaggerated, at best, and physicians no longer MRI recommend screening of athletes without outward…
The moment you go down that road, every academic epidemiologist and COVID expert will immediately be prosecuted because they have repeatedly made claims that were totally false and which have led directly to many deaths. For example, the claim that lockdowns work (they don't and this was known before COVID times), has led directly to people dying due to delayed medical treatment. Poverty also kills of course and their demands/misinformation has led to that too.
The same is also true of more or less the entire field of nutrition, none of which has yielded anything useful, and has resulted in governments themselves spreading misinformation:
https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/11/27/is-saturated-fat-unhealthy/
Incidentally, Berenson has written a long rebuttal to this kind of thing which you can find here:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-english-data-on-vaccines-and/comments
There is no science showing antibody prevalence is required for herd immunity either; you need to cite something ..... (but you might want to look at: [0]).
Everywhere except Sweden implemented legally mandated strategies -- often with police and military enforcement - that were designed to limit virus spread, including places that had just-as-bad-or-worse death outcomes such as NYC, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and France.
Really, almost nothing can be said for certain, and it's definitely possible for Sweden to experience a second wave soon, but it won't if this virus' dynamics is similar to other viruses - which, by all studies, it very much is.
[0] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/28/herd-immunity-without-antibodies/
One of the unfortunate things about SARS2 is that there is reasonable evidence of some asymptomatic spread. Particularly the recent Japanese study[0]
"When taken together, I think these two studies show that people with asymptomatic covid-19 can and do spread the disease, and the best estimate from both studies is that those with symptomatic disease are about three to four times more infectious than those with asymptomatic disease. That is not a huge difference. Even though people with symptoms are a couple of times more infectious than people without symptoms, those without symptoms could still be causing more infections overall."
[0] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/06/06/can-asymptomatic-people-spread-covid-19/