Professor Colleen Aldous interviewed by Dr. John Campbell about our ivermectin research

This is a riveting one-hour exchange fully loaded with important insights, twists, and turns all the way to the end.

My colleague and friend, Professor Colleen Aldous was invited to give an interview with Dr. John Campbell, a former academic scientist and well-respected youtuber with several million followers, about our recently published papers on ivermectin-based combination therapies against COVID-19. The interview was one-hour long and was mostly focused on the second part of the two-part series of articles.

I was in the middle of grading exams when I got a text message from one of my University colleagues that there's some people on YouTube talking about me, so I put it on to listen to while grading exams, and it was so engaging and riveting that I wasn't able to get that much work done. Although not a substitute for actually reading the papers themselves, there were a lot of excellent points raised during the interview that were not in the papers.

You can watch the full interview, dated April 14, 2025, by following this link

In the interview, Professor Aldous also connected this work with her previous paper on the "wheel" as an alternative to the infamous evidence-based medicine pyramid of evidence. You can have a peek at her previous interview with Dr. John Campbell, from June 6, 2024, about the wheel paper by following this link.

In the event that YouTube censors these interviews, backup copies will be made available.

The interview didn't say much about Part 1 of the paper series, so I would like to highlight a couple of things about that.

First, Part 1 includes the description of the treatment protocols used and, more importantly, it contains the complete description of the protocol used by Dr. Jackie Stone in Zimbabwe. This is the first time the complete protocol has been reported in the peer-reviewed literature with this level of detail. We were very fortunate that we were able to correspond with Jackie about it to clarify some important details about the protocol before we lost her.

Second, the overall idea behind the mathematical technique is that we compared the three case series against population-level controls of hospitalized patients in their respective locations. To ensure that the case series can be compared conservatively with hospitalized patients, we applied risk stratification to the case series by selecting patients with baseline SpO2 less or equal than 90%. This established statistically significant mortality rate reduction by the preponderance of the evidence when combining both the Stone and Hazan case series. "Preponderance of the evidence" in this context means that it is more likely than not that the entire apparent benefit cannot be attributed exclusively to random selection bias. With a self-controlled argument, we have further argued that hospitalization rate reduction is clear and convincing.

For non-specialists, it will definitely be easier to begin with reading Part 2, which will paint the entire lay of the land, then take on reading Part 1. Even though Part 1 is the most important part of the paper series, there's no denying that Part 2 is a lot more fun. However, it would also be a good idea to at least read the description of the treatment protocols detailed in Part 1 upon first reading.

References

1. E. Gkioulekas, P.A. McCullough, C. Aldous: "Critical appraisal of multi-drug therapy in the ambulatory management of patients with COVID-19 and hypoxemia. Part I. Evidence supporting the strength of association", The Japanese Journal of Antibiotics 78(1) (2025), 2-34

2. E. Gkioulekas, P.A. McCullough, C. Aldous: "Critical appraisal of multi-drug therapy in the ambulatory management of patients with COVID-19 and hypoxemia. Part II: Causal inference using the Bradford Hill criteria", The Japanese Journal of Antibiotics 78(1) (2025), 35-68

3. C. Aldous, B.M. Dancis, J. Dancis, P.R. Oldfield, "Wheel Replacing Pyramid: Better Paradigm Representing Totality of Evidence-Based Medicine", Annals of Global Health 90 (1) (2024), 17