The Competing Interests of those who discredited Ivermectin

Ivermectin Part 3: The People Behind the Curtain

1. Ivermectin Part 1: The Very Unusual Paper

2. Ivermectin Part 2: A Very Unusual Business

3. Ivermectin Part 3: The People Behind the Curtain

   1. Part 1: An Unacknowledged Influence

   2. Part 2: The Conflicts of Interest of those who discredited Ivermectin

   3. Part 3: Who is Andrew Owen?

4. Ivermectin Part 4: Censorship, Controversy and attacks

There’s this trend in scientific publishing where everyone puts their name at the top of the paper underneath the title. The lead publisher usually goes first, sometimes last, but if your name is up there under the title, that’s your credit. And who doesn’t want to take credit?! No one, of course.! So put the names right up at the top of the page thank you please! Get my name up there in shining lights…

Sometimes, though not often enough, at the end of the papers you’ll find a ‘funding’ section. Sometimes it's called the ‘Conflicts of Interest’ section, or perhaps it’s the ‘Competing Interests’ section. 

The point is, if we want to obscure ‘compromising influences’, we must poorly define this section of the paper and not make it a standard. And while we’re at it, let’s make sure it’s right at the bottom, and ideally not there at all… Hmmm, still not good enough. OK, let’s not put our actual names into the section, we’ll instead just put our initials. That should do it! 

Why? Well, my name appears in Google you see…. and I’d like my name to be associated with my citations and papers, but not my competing interests. You can be sure no one is Googling me via my initials, so if we must report competing interests, let’s do so in a way that can't be linked back to me with a clever algorithm…

But we can link those competing interests back to someone with an unclever algorithm, and I encourage you to try this yourself…  Go to Google Scholar, type in the name of the person whose ‘interests’ you’d like to find and combine it with a search like this:

Dominique Costagliola OR D Costagliola AND Funding OR Declaration of Interests OR Competing Interests AND dc

You can even pump it right into Google and you’ll get good results. You’ll find papers where journal editors decided to publish ‘relevant’ competing interests. They don’t always publish them so you’ll need to find multiple papers. Looking across them all, you can build a picture of relationships that might compromise their involvement.

So what about Dominique? She was a contributor to this study on Remdesivir, a $2,200 drug for COVID patients. It’s owned by pharma giant Gilead. The study found no significant difference between Remdesivir and the ‘standard of care’ control group. The trial did make one interesting finding: ‘Three deaths were considered related to Remdesivir by the investigators.’ That’s three deaths out of 406 patients, just to be clear. Remdesivir didn’t save any lives, but it did contribute to the death of three people. Interesting.

Buried at the bottom of the study is the ‘Declaration of Interests’ section we’re looking for. In it, we can see that Dominique Costagliola receives ‘lecture fees’ from Janssen and Gilead. Gilead, as in, the very company that manufactures….Remdesivir!

Dominique receives money from the company who own the drug she’s studying in this ‘objective’ study. This drug, despite these terrible findings, is currently approved in the USA and the UK. How can such a thing happen?