“Tess Lawrie did exactly what WHO should have done,” says Dr. Kory. “She made a thorough, open, and transparent review of all the scientific evidence.”
During the daylong conference, the conferees reviewed each study in Dr. Lawrie’s rapid meta-review, agreeing that the evidence supported an immediate rollout. Before adjourning, Dr. Lawrie and the scientific panel committed to conducting a full-scale Cochrane-style meta-review of all the scientific literature. Due to the mortal urgencies, they pledged to reconvene in a much larger group on January 14.
In the meantime, Dr. Lawrie managed to reach Andrew Hill by phone on January 6, two days after the Daily Mail leaked his meta-review. She informed him that some of the leading lights of science had agreed to collaborate on the Cochrane-style meta-review, and she proposed that Hill should join the effort as a collaborator. She offered to share her data with Hill and, after the call, she sent him her spreadsheets. Dr. Lawrie had coordinated many Cochrane Reviews for WHO and was indisputably among the world’s ranking experts in systematically reviewing study data. Dr. Lawrie invited Hill to co-author the Cochrane Review and to attend the next BIRD meeting on January 13.59 It was an exciting opportunity. Under normal circumstances, Hill should have pounced on this chance to serve as lead author with some of the world’s most prestigious researchers in creating a professional, bulletproof Evidence-to-Decision framework for the WHO. He was nevertheless noncommittal. He did agree to review Dr. Lawrie’s spreadsheet.
Dr. Lawrie and her colleagues launched a marathon effort to conduct a brand new review of all published studies in the medical literature from scratch, assessing each for power and bias. She presented her draft to the exclusive BIRD group in mid-January. All agreed that the common-sense approach was to release ivermectin. She submitted the protocol to Cochrane for external scientific review.
British and Scandinavian scientists founded the Cochrane Collaboration in 1993 to address pharmaceutical industry corruption that had become pervasive in clinical trials for new drugs. Today, the Cochrane Collaboration is a coalition of 30,000 independent scientists and 53 large research institutions who volunteer to routinely review industry data using evidence-based science to advise regulatory agencies.60 Cochrane seeks to restore integrity and standardized scientific methodologies to the crooked realm of drug development trials. Cochrane uses standardized parameters and rigorous methodologies for evaluating evidence. Cochrane reviewers systematically assess the power of each individual study within the meta-review, interpreting data to identify and discount for bias, and to score each study as “high,” “moderate,” or “low” certainty evidence and to determine whether it’s acceptable to pool the data in a single meta-review.
Dr. Lawrie knew that to make its ivermectin determination, WHO would rely on Hill’s study and another study from McMaster University known as the “Together Trial.” McMaster was hopelessly and irredeemably conflicted. NIH gave McMaster $1,081,541 in 2020 and 2021.61 A separate group of McMaster University scientists was, at that time, engaged in developing their own COVID vaccine—an effort that would never pay dividends if WHO recommended ivermectin as Standard of Care. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was funding the massive “Together Trial” testing ivermectin, HCQ, and other potential drugs against COVID, in Brazil and other locations. Critics accused Gates and the McMaster researchers of designing that study to make ivermectin fail. Among other factors, the study targeted a population that was already heavily utilizing ivermectin, creating a confounding variable (placebo recipients could obtain over the counter ivermectin) that would clearly hide efficacy. McMaster University researchers would certainly know that a positive recommendation for IVM would cost their university hundreds of millions. The Together Trial organizer was Gates’ trial designer, Ed Mills, a scientist with heavy conflicts with Pharma and a reputation as a notorious industry biostitute.
Dr. Lawrie knew that the only way to salvage the WHO Guidelines and produce a high-quality scientific study was to persuade Mills to do a full-scale Cochrane Collaboration meta-analysis. The following week, she spoke to Hill again, this time by Zoom.
The Zoom call was recorded.
During her first conversation with Hill, Dr. Lawrie had concluded that the techniques that Hill employed throughout his meta-review were “deeply flawed,” and that Hill lacked the experience to perform a systematic review or a meta-analysis: “I was surprised he had been given the job.”
In fact, the transcript of her January 13 conversation suggests that Hill was completely unfamiliar with the requirements of a systematic review, which requires researchers to evaluate and score each study using uniform criteria to assess power and the risk of bias, and to conduct a “sensitivity analysis” to exclude studies with high risk of bias. This kind of review necessarily judges the reliability of the authors of each participating study. The Cochrane reviewers must be prepared to make harsh judgments about the work quality, integrity, and potential prejudices of each listed co-author of all the studies included in their review, based in part on their individual competence, and the financial conflicts of interest potentially affecting each researcher. But Hill, bizarrely, had included the names of all the authors of all of his seven accumulated studies on the list of the co-authors of his meta-review. “That’s the equivalent of asking the catcher in a baseball team to also play the umpire,” says Dr. Kory. “No one with any familiarity with the game would make that mistake. Hill was supposed to be judging these authors. Instead, he treated them as his collaborators.”
Dr. Lawrie gently informed Hill that that was “irregular for a meta-analysis,” adding, “When you do a systematic review, you usually don’t include the authors of the studies because that inherently biases your conclusions. It’s got to be independent.”
Dr. Lawrie explained that Hill’s paper, in addition to listing as co-authors the researchers whose work he was supposed to be evaluating, makes no pretense of systematically grading evidence according to standardized protocols. Those deficiencies make it utterly useless, she explained, for providing “clinical guidelines to the WHO.” Furthermore, Hill’s meta-review looked at only one outcome, the deaths of COVID patients, which was only a small subset of the criteria and endpoints in the studies he had analyzed. She told Hill: “You don’t just do a meta-analysis . . . when there’s all those other outcomes that you didn’t even meta-analyze. You just meta-analyzed the death outcome [using only a fraction of the available evidence], and then [said], ‘Oh, we need more studies.’”