Astral Codex Ten

Brazilian government

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Brazilian government

Article

Brazilian government is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 13, 2022 and February 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “he was accused of poorly-fleshed-out ‘crimes against humanity’ by the Brazilian government”; “he was involved in a weird scandal where the Brazilian government tried to create a COVID recommendation app”; “the Brazilian government was considering accusing Cadegiani of crimes against humanity”. It most often appears alongside Alexandros Marinos, 2006 Ioannidis paper, ACTIV-6.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 13, 2022
  • Last seen: February 01, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Open Thread 228
June 13, 2022 · Original source
First, I noted that he was accused of poorly-fleshed-out “crimes against humanity” by the Brazilian government, and speculated that they might think he was killing his patients (although I said I personally thought this was false). A new source that hadn’t been published at the time I wrote the piece time explains that the “crimes against humanity” accusation is because he didn’t stop a trial when it showed the experimental drug was much more effective than the placebo drug (which is a nonsensical accusation, since the accusers don’t believe this is true anyway), although it also describes other aspects of the trial as “an ethical cesspool”. Second, although I said Cadegiani was “involved in a scandal” where the Brazilian government made a defective app, his only “involvement” was that the app used data he produced; he was not responsible for its scandalous defects. I cannot remember why I made this mistake, but I assume I saw someone else say something about this and didn’t dig deep enough to be fair to him. I regret both errors.
Inline links: new source
Response To Alexandros Contra Me On Ivermectin
February 01, 2023 · Original source
Gideon (correctly) phrased this as a non-sinister albeit potentially weird misstep by the study authors, but in trying to summarize Gideon, I (incorrectly) phrased it as a sinister attempt to inflate results. After looking into it, I think Alexandros is completely right and I was completely wrong. Although I sometimes get details wrong, this one was especially disappointing because I incorrectly tarnished the reputation of Biber et al and implicitly accused them of bad scientific practices, which they were not doing. I believed I was relaying an accusation by Gideon (who I trust), but I was wrong and he was not accusing them of that. I apologize to Biber et al, my readers, and everyone else involved in this. My only reservation is that I don’t want to say too strongly that Gideon’s critique is wrong: I haven’t looked through the study documents enough to say with certainty that Alexandros’ reanalysis of the protocol issues is correct (though the superficial check I’ve done looks that way). But my mistakes are completely separate from anything Gideon did and definitely real and egregious. Cadegiani et al (Alexandros 50% right) Flavio Cadegiani did several studies on ivermectin in Brazil; I edited this section in response to criticism by Marinos and others, but the earliest version I can find on archive.is (I can’t guarantee it was the first I wrote) said: A crazy person decided to put his patients on every weird medication he could think of, and 585 subjects ended up on a combination of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and nitazoxanide, with dutasteride and spironolactone "optionally offered" and vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, apixaban, rivaraxoban, enoxaparin, and glucocorticoids "added according to clinical judgment". There was no control group, but the author helpfully designated some random patients in his area as a sort-of-control, and then synthetically generated a second control group based on “a precise estimative based on a thorough and structured review of articles indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE and statements by official government agencies and specific medical societies”. Patients in the experimental group were twice as likely to recover (p < 0.0001), had negative PCR after 14 vs. 21 days, and had 0 vs. 27 hospitalizations. Speaking of low p-values, some people did fraud-detection tests on another of Cadegiani’s COVID-19 studies and got values like p < 8.24E-11 in favor of it being fraudulent. Also in Cadegiani news: he apparently has the record for completing one of the fastest PhDs in Brazilian history (7 months), he was involved in a weird scandal where the Brazilian government tried to create a COVID recommendation app but it just recommended ivermectin to everybody regardless of what input it got, and he describes himself as: …the only author of the sole book in Overtraining Syndrome, the prevailing sport-related disease among amateur and professional athletes. He is also responsible for approximately 70% of the articles published in the field in the world in the last 05 years, and reviewer for more than 90% of the manuscripts in the field. And, uh, he’s also studied whether ultra-high-dose antiandrogens treated COVID, and found that they did, cutting mortality by 92% . Which sounds great, except that it looks like most of this is that the control group had a shockingly high mortality rate, much higher than makes sense even in the context of severe COVID. I think the charitable explanation here is that he made this data up too. But the Brazilian Parliament seems to be going with an uncharitable explanation, seeing as they have recommended that Cadegiani be charged with crimes against humanity. Anyway, let’s not base anything important on the results of this study. You can find Alexandros’ full critique here, but again I’ll try to summarize it as best I can. Alexandros is unhappy with my portrayal of Cadegiani’s background. I cite details that make him look strange and maybe fake, but there are other details that make him seem more impressive, like that he won gold medals at a Brazilian Scientific Olympiad.
Inline links: the earliest version I can find on archive.is, involved in a weird scandal, describes himself as, recommended that Cadegiani be charged with crimes against humanity, here
Alexandros doesn’t dispute that one of Cadegiani’s trial had some impossible-seeming statistics, but says we shouldn’t jump to allegations of fraud, shouldn’t let this unduly influence our opinion of Cadegiani’s other trials, and also accuses Kyle Sheldrick, the person who discovered the discrepancy, of doing other bad things. My responses: Alexandros’ Point 1 is fair-ish. Since this person appears to be commiting pretty substantial fraud and doing some strange things, I thought it was useful to highlight the ways in which he is weird and suspicious, rather than the ways he is prestigious and impressive. But probably I went too far in this. His Point 2/3 is completely fair, and I’m sorry for getting this wrong. I may have unthinkingly copied it from forbetterscience.com, which made this mistake before me, or I might have just failed at reading comprehension on this translated Portugese-language article I linked. In either case, I apologize to Cadegiani. This is already on my Mistakes page as of June 2022 when Alexandros wrote his original article. His Point 4 is correct, although based on information that came out after I wrote my article. All that was available in English when I wrote was that the Brazilian government was considering accusing Cadegiani of crimes against humanity. I think I did an okay job noting that I was guessing at their reasoning (rather than reporting a known fact), and as written I did make clear that I thought he was innocent of the specific charge. Still, I appreciate the clarification. His Point 5 is - I do feel like Alexandros is having a sort of missing mood on the fact that one of Cadegiani’s big pro-ivermectin studies contains impossible data. While this is not proof of fraud or incompetence, it is some Bayesian evidence for both. And while fraud or incompetence in one of your studies supporting ivermectin is not proof that your other studies supporting ivermectin are also fraudulent/incompetent, it is, again, Bayesian evidence. Alexandros makes a big deal of there being four corrections in the BMJ article attacking Cadegiani, as if now the BMJ has admitted they were wrong all along, whereas these were mostly on unrelated details and the BMJ definitely did not correct the quotes about how his study was “an ethical cesspool of violations” or how “in the entire history of the National Health Council, there has never been such disrespect for ethical standards and research participants in the country”1. I feel like if his Science Olympiad medals are an important part of the story, these kinds of things are an important part too. Still, several of Alexandros’ points were entirely correct, and I appreciate the corrections. Babalola et al (still disagree with Alexandros) OE Babalola (I incorrectly wrote this name as “Babaloba” in the original) did a Nigerian study which found that ivermectin decreased the amount of time it took before people tested negative for COVID. I described this study as: This was a Nigerian RCT comparing 21 patients on low-dose ivermectin, 21 patients on high-dose ivermectin, and 20 patients on a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, a combination antiviral which later studies found not to work for COVID and which might as well be considered a placebo. Primary outcome, as usual, was days until a negative PCR test. High dose ivermectin was 4.65 days, low dose was 6 days, control was 9.15, p = 0.035. Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, part of the team that detects fraud in ivermectin papers, is not a fan of this one. He doesn’t say there what means, but elsewhere he tweets [this figure highlighting how the study has “Numerous impossible numbers”] I think his point is that if you have 21 people, it’s impossible to have 50% of them have headache, because that would be 10.5. If 10 people have a headache, it would be 47.6%; if 11, 52%. So something is clearly wrong here. Seems like a relatively minor mistake, and Meyerowitz-Katz stops short of calling fraud, but it’s not a good look. I’m going to be slightly uncomfortable with this study without rejecting it entirely, and move on. Alexandros calls this The Sullying Of Babalola Et Al, and says I “followed Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz off a cliff” by unfairly “lambasting” the innocent Babalola. I “[made] a mountain out of a molehill”. Alexandros quotes a commenter who found that the most likely explanation for the “impossible numbers” in Babaloba was missing data, and notes that usually-anti-ivermectin researcher Kyle Sheldrick had evaluated the raw data and found no fraud. Alexandros concludes: As far as I can tell, Scott discarded a good study here, and besmirched the reputation of the researchers by amplifying flimsy allegations that were known to be off-base at the time that the article was written. I don’t think I did anything especially wrong here. There was a chart that didn’t make sense. It turned out not to make sense because some data was missing. I said “[this] seems like a relatively minor mistake, and Meyerowitz-Katz stops short of calling fraud, but it’s not a good look. I’m going to be slightly uncomfortable with this study without rejecting it entirely, and move on.” I was right that it was a minor mistake, I was right that it wasn’t fraud, and I was right not to reject the study. I didn’t have the exact explanation (missing data), so I did not mention it, but I think I made the correct guess about the sort of explanation it was. I don’t understand why Alexandros acts like I said the study wasn’t worth keeping, or that there was no innocent explanation, or that I was accusing the researchers of fraud, when in fact I said the opposite of all those things, pretty explicitly.2 Carvallo et al (Alexandros 25% right) This was an Argentine study. I described it as: This one has all the disadvantages of Espitia-Hernandez, plus it’s completely unreadable. It’s hard to figure out how many patients there were, whether it was an RCT or not, etc. It looks like maybe there were 42 experimentals and 14 controls, and the controls were about 10x more likely to die than the experimentals. Seems pretty bad. On the other hand, another Carvallo paper was retracted because of fraud: apparently the hospital where the study supposedly took place said it never happened there. I can’t tell if this is a different version of that study, a pilot study for that study, or a different study by the same guy. Anyway, it’s too confusing to interpret, shows implausible results, and is by a known fraudster, so I feel okay about ignoring this one. Alexandros responds here. Attempting to summarize his points: He agrees this study is extremely confusing.
Inline links: forbetterscience.com, this translated Portugese-language article, 1, not a fan of this one, this figure, The Sullying Of Babalola Et Al, 2, another Carvallo paper was retracted, here