Do we have a study showing these (second dose within 30 minutes or paracetamol + phenylephrine) performing better than placebo?
Note that Figure 3 also mentions the Tylenol combination effect and even shows how 10mg Phenylephrine + Tylenol performs somewhere between 10mg and 45mg of phenylephrine.
The article author just cherry-picked the one study where phenylephrine performed the worst. Cherry-picking a single study to support a conclusion and ignoring meta-analyses would normally get someone torn apart in the HN comments but apparently everyone loves pseudoephedrine so it gets a pass.
This is a huge red flag - I've read too many of Derek Lowe's blog posts to take that kind of study very seriously as medical advice. Much more promising leads than this have utterly bombed in clinical trials, it happens all the time.
You could just read those studies and ignore the meta-analyses if you want.
I honestly don't understand this current trend of assuming meta-analyses are inherently incorrect and cherry-picking the worst study as the source of the truth.