Mary Talley Bowden on covid: what the evidence says · JRE #2335
SUBJECT: COVID
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
And Dr. Verone had much better success than most other doctors. His overall success rate was 4.4 percent of his patients died, whereas in other hospitals, average
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The 4.4 percent figure is Dr. Joseph Varon's own self-reported mortality for his Houston hospital in 2020, not an independently audited or peer-reviewed result, and it is presented here as evidence that his ivermectin-based protocol saved lives. Published US data do show much higher averages: a study of 104,590 patients across 21 US health systems found hospital mortality near 18.6 percent early in the pandemic, falling to 7.3 percent by mid-2021 (PMC9518859), and a meta-analysis put pooled ICU mortality around 35.5 percent (PMC8013495), so a roughly 20 percent hospital average is plausible for 2020. The comparison is still misleading because a single hospital's self-reported death rate cannot be set against national averages without adjusting for patient age, illness severity at admission, and pandemic timing, all of which strongly affect outcomes. The implied cause, ivermectin, is not supported: large randomized trials such as the NIH ACTIV-6 higher-dose study found ivermectin did not reduce recovery time, hospitalization, or death (PMC9941969). Comparing an unadjusted, self-reported single-center rate to national averages to credit an unproven treatment makes this claim misleading.