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Causality inference with the Bradford Hill Criteria: The case of the Stone/Gill treatment protocol for COVID-19Abstract: The Bradford Hill criteria were originally introduced by Sir Austin Bradford Hill to provide and evidentiary rational for supporting a causal association between smoking and lung cancer. In 2009, Dr. Jeremy Howick proposed a refinement of the Bradford Hill criteria that reorganized it into three categories of direct, mechanistic, and parallel evidence. This talk reviews this early work which is then applied to an adaptive ivermectin-based multidrug protocol that was introduced by Dr. Jacqueline Stone for the treatment of high-risk COVID-19 patients in Zimbabwe. We review briefly the evidence supporting a causal association between Stone's intervention and reduction in mortality and hospitalizations. We argue that this causal association is supported by the Bradford Hill criteria of temporality, strength of association, biological gradient, biological plausibility, coherence, consistency, and analogy, as an inference to the best explanation. References 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", submitted
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", submitted
E. Gkioulekas: "Data and materials: Critical appraisal of multi-drug therapy in the ambulatory management of patients with COVID-19 and hypoxemia". figshare. Online resource. (2024), https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24329611
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