This is not easy,warns Mr Meyerowitz-Katz. The pandemic has led to a dip in general research standards,with low-quality evidence published in what should be high-quality journals. And ivermectin,for some reason,seems to attract fraudulent research. Multiple important ivermectin studies have beenwithdrawn after concerns about data manipulation and plagiarismwere raised.

“There’s this issue in science that everything is based on trust,everything. Without trust the whole system falls apart. If a paper is published,you assume it at least happened.”

This is the reason science needs people like Mr Meyerowitz-Katz running a fine eye over the evidence - because some problems are hard to spot.

However,as laypeople,there are a few basic things we can do to test the quality of information.

The easiest clue:look at where the evidence is published.

Scientists publish their work in academic journals. To get published,your work generally needs to passpeer review:a panel of experts will check it over to make sure it’s solid.

As a general rule of thumb,the bigger the journal the harder it is for a paper to pass peer review.Nature,probably the world’s leading scientific journal,rejects many times more papers than it publishes. At the other end of the spectrum,small journals might only do a cursory peer review (or no peer review at all).

You can look up the quality of a journalhere. Look for a journal’s ‘quartile’. Anything below 2 should be treated with serious scepticism.

Let’s pick the first study on c19early.com.It’s a preprint. That means it hasn’t passed rigorous peer review yet. While that does not automatically mean it’s of low quality,we should beverysceptical.

Now,let’s think about what good scientific evidence looks like. To know if ivermectin works,you’d need two large groups (they need to be big to eliminate the role of luck) of people who are almost exactly the same. Same age,same underlying risk factors. Half get ivermectin,half get a placebo. Known as a randomised controlled trial,this is the highest form of scientific evidence. Scientistsused this technique to discover the cheap steroid dexamethasone can help save the lives of people seriously ill with COVID-19 (ivermectin’s pundits are quick to claim drug companies are covering up its benefits… but never mention the big pharma’s failure to cover up dexamethasone).

Compare that to the top study on c19early.com. It claims it shows a 19.6 per cent reduction in the risk of death if a patient is taking ivermectin. Wow! But thestudy itself barely mentions ivermectin. And it does not tell us who the patients who got ivermectin were. How old were they? What underlying conditions did they have? Why did the doctors give them ivermectin,and not to other patients? How do they compare to the patients who died?

We can learn almost nothing from this study. Sadly,this is the problem with websites that purport to pull together heaps and heaps of studies and claim to make a conclusion - we,as laypeople,don’t have time to check each one. This is why I,as a science journalist,turn to groups like the Evidence Taskforce,who are paid to read these papers.

Let’s turn,now,to a study that is actually quite good.

It’s called the TOGETHER trial. It’s a randomised controlled trial,and it’s very large. It publishes all its trial methodology online for everyone to read. Mr Meyerowitz-Katz describes it as a “masterpiece of science”.

The full findings haven’t been published yet,so we should treat them with a grain of salt. But the conclusions are available via a PowerPoint slide.They found essentially no benefit to ivermectin.

(If you’d like to read more about ivermectin and understanding scientific evidence in more depth,I highly recommend Mr Meyerowitz-Katz’s website).

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