4 ms·

Can you point to his statemetns that were conspiracy theory? I know about Barrington and many of his other claims, but I don't recall him actually saying anyth

by dekhn 2y ago

Can you point to his statemetns that were conspiracy theory? I know about Barrington and many of his other claims, but I don't recall him actually saying anything that I would classify as conspiracy theory. Certainly in my world, a credentialled epidemiologist questioning the accuracy of government statistics during a world health crisis, and suggestion that perhaps our strategy could be different, is not conspiracy theory.

ants_everywhere 2y ago
> Certainly in my world, a credentialled epidemiologist questioning the accuracy of government statistics during a world health crisis, and suggestion that perhaps our strategy could be different, is not conspiracy theory. I fully agree. (Well, with some caveats. I think credentials matters less than facts. And I think epidemiology is still in its infancy, so I personally don't put much faith in any single epidemiologist.) Maybe conspiracy theorist is the wrong term. What he did was show a very political concern with public policy (especially IIUC his opposition to lockdowns) and very little concern about the quality of his research or the people it affected. This article seems pretty decent at containing details: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis... You mention Barrington, from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration > The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies stated that the strategy would be dangerous and lacked a sound scientific basis. So I guess maybe less "conspiracy theory" and more "recklessly dangerous" or "abandonment of the Hippocratic oath".
- dekhn 2y ago
  I don't think anything he did or said was recklessly dangerous. In fact I think he believes he was acting in the US's best interest. I would be curious what the outcome would be if we had followed his approaches (which evolved during the course of the epidemic). I think he would have been much more succcessful if he worked the back channels and never been so public in twitter. I saw a lot of "epidemiological immune system" activity during COVID- if you didn't toe a specific line, the larger community would attack you, right or wrong. My guess is that this is mainly from historical experience with vaccines and large-scale disease outbreaks, where having a simple, consistent message that did not freak out the population is considered more importantly than being absolutely technically correct.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    We essentially did follow his policy and we have a sense of the impact. The Lancet estimated that about 40% of US covid deaths could have been avoided if the administration had better policies. That's a bit over 400,000 deaths. That's about the same number of Americans lost during WWII. Not all of that can be directly attributed to John Ioannidis's advocacy against lockdowns, but it at least gives us a sense of how big a blunder it was.
EnigmaFlare 2y ago
During covid, people got so hyped up about trusting authorities, they threw science out the window. Well I guess they never understood science in the first place but wanted to shame anyone who disagreed with or even questioned whatever arbitrary ideas their government proposed. It was disgusting, and those people are still walking around among us ready to damage society next time some emergency happens.
tripletao 2y ago
He published an estimate of SARS-CoV-2 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara county, claiming a signal from a positivity rate that was within the 95% CI for the false-positive rate for the test. Recruitment was also highly non-random. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw... Such careless use of statistics is hardly uncommon; but it's funny to see that he succumbed too, perhaps blinded by the same factors he identifies in this paper. Beyond that, he sometimes advocated for a less restrictive response on the basis of predictions (of deaths, infections, etc.) that turned out to be incorrect. I don't think that's a conspiracy theory, though. Are the scientists who advocated for school closures now "conspiracy theorists" too, because they failed to predict the learning loss and social harm we now observe in those children? Any pandemic response comes with immense harms, which are near-impossible to predict or even articulate fully, let alone trade off in an unquestionably optimal way.

by dekhn 2y ago

ants_everywhere 2y ago

> Certainly in my world, a credentialled epidemiologist questioning the accuracy of government statistics during a world health crisis, and suggestion that perhaps our strategy could be different, is not conspiracy theory. I fully agree. (Well, with some caveats. I think credentials matters less than facts. And I think epidemiology is still in its infancy, so I personally don't put much faith in any single epidemiologist.) Maybe conspiracy theorist is the wrong term. What he did was show a very political concern with public policy (especially IIUC his opposition to lockdowns) and very little concern about the quality of his research or the people it affected. This article seems pretty decent at containing details: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis-trump-white-house-coronavirus-lockdowns https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/ioannidis... You mention Barrington, from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration > The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies stated that the strategy would be dangerous and lacked a sound scientific basis. So I guess maybe less "conspiracy theory" and more "recklessly dangerous" or "abandonment of the Hippocratic oath".

dekhn 2y ago
I don't think anything he did or said was recklessly dangerous. In fact I think he believes he was acting in the US's best interest. I would be curious what the outcome would be if we had followed his approaches (which evolved during the course of the epidemic). I think he would have been much more succcessful if he worked the back channels and never been so public in twitter. I saw a lot of "epidemiological immune system" activity during COVID- if you didn't toe a specific line, the larger community would attack you, right or wrong. My guess is that this is mainly from historical experience with vaccines and large-scale disease outbreaks, where having a simple, consistent message that did not freak out the population is considered more importantly than being absolutely technically correct.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  We essentially did follow his policy and we have a sense of the impact. The Lancet estimated that about 40% of US covid deaths could have been avoided if the administration had better policies. That's a bit over 400,000 deaths. That's about the same number of Americans lost during WWII. Not all of that can be directly attributed to John Ioannidis's advocacy against lockdowns, but it at least gives us a sense of how big a blunder it was.

EnigmaFlare 2y ago

During covid, people got so hyped up about trusting authorities, they threw science out the window. Well I guess they never understood science in the first place but wanted to shame anyone who disagreed with or even questioned whatever arbitrary ideas their government proposed. It was disgusting, and those people are still walking around among us ready to damage society next time some emergency happens.

tripletao 2y ago

He published an estimate of SARS-CoV-2 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara county, claiming a signal from a positivity rate that was within the 95% CI for the false-positive rate for the test. Recruitment was also highly non-random. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw... Such careless use of statistics is hardly uncommon; but it's funny to see that he succumbed too, perhaps blinded by the same factors he identifies in this paper. Beyond that, he sometimes advocated for a less restrictive response on the basis of predictions (of deaths, infections, etc.) that turned out to be incorrect. I don't think that's a conspiracy theory, though. Are the scientists who advocated for school closures now "conspiracy theorists" too, because they failed to predict the learning loss and social harm we now observe in those children? Any pandemic response comes with immense harms, which are near-impossible to predict or even articulate fully, let alone trade off in an unquestionably optimal way.