> But in that same time there was $400bn in waste and fraud through Covid relief funds [1]. The cost of academic fraud should also include the indirect costs o

> But in that same time there was $400bn in waste and fraud through Covid relief funds [1]. The cost of academic fraud should also include the indirect costs of bad decision making. The Covid relief funds were only needed because politicians implemented extremely aggressive policies based on unproven epidemiological models built on fraudulent practices. I investigated all this extensively at the time and it was really sad/shocking how non-existent intellectual standards are in the field of epidemiology. The models were trash RNGs that couldn't have been validated even if they'd tried, which they never had because the field doesn't consider validation to be necessary to get a paper published. So the models made wildly wrong predictions based on untested, buggy, non-replicable models, which then led to lockdowns, which led to economic catastrophe, which led to the relief programme. All of the fraud in that programme - really the entire cost of it - should be laid at the feet of academic fraud.