This is a retrospective study, and the big question is: why were those people prescribed those drugs in the first place, and people of control group weren’t? This wasn’t a randomized study where you’d take people and randomly put one third of them on a drug, and the other two thirds on another one. No, in this study they took people that were prescribed the drugs and people that weren’t, and compared, without first investigating how different those two groups of people were.

My first guess would be that people who did get those drugs were much more severely ill, and doctors took chances with these drugs to save their lives. And there’s more mortality in that group not because of the drugs, but because those patients were more severe in the first place.

This is exactly why they teach basic statistics in medical schools, and yet you people fall for such papers.