The overseers of the preprint server SocArXiv have withdrawn a paper which claims that treating Covid patients with ivermectin dramatically reduces their odds of hospitalization, calling the work “misleading” and “part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19.”  

“Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19: evidence from a quasi-experimental analysis based on a public intervention in Mexico City,” has been a source of controversy for SocArXiv since it was accepted for the site in May 2021. 

The paper was written by José Merino, head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), along with co-authors DAPI, the Mexican Social Security Institute and the Mexico City Ministry of Health. They claimed to find that: 

We found a significant reduction in hospitalizations among patients who received the ivermectin-based medical kit; the range of the effect is 52%- 76% depending on model specification.

The controversial article, which has been downloaded more than 11,000 times, has been used to justify expenditures on ivermectin by the Mexican government to the tune of “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to SocArXiv, which cites this article in Animal Politico.

Merino did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch, but we understand he and his colleagues did not agree to the retraction.

In December, the server published a blog post about the paper and explaining its handling of the manuscript and distancing itself from the research:  

Depending on which critique you prefer, the paper is either very poor quality or else deliberately false and misleading. PolitiFact debunked it here, partly based on this factcheck in Portuguese. We do not believe it provides reliable or useful information, and we are disappointed that it has been very popular (downloaded almost 10,000 times so far).

This has prompted us to clarify that our moderation process does not involve peer review, or substantive evaluation, of the research papers that we host. …

Earlier this month,  Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a sociologist at the University of California-San Diego, pleaded with the site to remove the article – and impose a “lifetime” ban on the authors – on the grounds that it