Overall the article is nowhere as bad as his initial IFR estimates or fox news appearances, and I believe it is a good thing to keep communication open with people on the fringe, and this may be a worthwhile opportunity.
Developing and producing the vaccine all went more or less according to the plan, but the estimates along the way were almost worthless.
You are presumably flaming him over his IFR estimates. Those estimates come from a meta-study of serosurveys, thus can at least theoretically measure mild cases where the infected person didn't get tested. And it's a meta-study, so hopefully captures plenty of real world data. Do you know what Professor Ferguson's team at Imperial College London use as their own IFR estimate? They're still citing their own Verity et al paper, whose IFR estimate of 1% only used data from January/February 2020 and which was based on media reports coming out of China, along with a few flights of Wuhan evacuees. That's it. That's all it's based on. Despite this, many other epidemiologists are also still citing the ICL numbers despite them being long since obsolete and using a tiny sample size.
If you're so convinced Ioannidis is such a terrible scientist, please explain:
1. Why his approach is unacceptable but ICL's is OK?
2. Why was his reputation pre-COVID just fine? He's actually quite famous for pointing out low standards in other scientific work, isn't he?
I've only reviewed Ionnaddis's paper, with a quick literature search, found it to be hilariously fraudulent. I haven't investigated ICL's analysis, but if you can be more specific about what to look for, I might.
For 2., his work was about the supposed "low standards" of others, but IMHO it was always coming from the place that every paper in the literature has to represent pure truth, and every study should have huge numbers before getting published. Though I disagree with that sentiment (I think the literature should publish early and often, like open source), it's a fair enough one to have, which is what garnered him fame and respect. To see his own research have such openly low standards, when trying to contradict consensus, shows an arrogance and lack of self-skepticism of the sort that means I would never be able to trust him as a collaborator, and that I won't trust his judgement and even honesty in the future.
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...
The same site has a lot of paper reviews, especially focusing on that team (because they are influential). Look at the sidebar section under "How reliable is the modelling".
What you may be doing here is reading Ioannidis' papers and saying, wow, these are total crap. Therefore, he is a bad scientist. This would be an easy mistake to make if you aren't familiar with the low quality of the scientific literature. I'm here to tell you that his papers are not that great, but his competition is far worse. It's not that JPI is a bad scientist, it's that "good scientists" that meet the basic thresholds we've all been socially conditioned to accept hardly seem to exist in the wild.
This does not necessarily make Ioannidis a hypocrite or fraud. It kind of does, but the problems he identified are all structural and to do with bad academic incentives. Yet, Ioannidis is himself an academic. He is working within the system that creates those bad incentives, and he is not immune to them either. It probably isn't possible to do great science in academia in fields like epidemiology, where experiments aren't possible, but at least he gives the impression he's trying. Other teams are full blown political activists pretending to be scientists, like the paper I linked to above, where the first sentence is a lie about publicly available statistics and the entire goal of the paper is to tell policymakers what to do.
Science has always worked by allowing diverging opinions, not vague accusations of "bad conduct" (the modern version of counterrevolutionary activities) and behavior.
Meanwhile, Sweden and Finland aren't doing worse than many ideologically sound countries.
Oh please, it's about his bad science. If he was doing bad science in the service of politics, as you suggest, that might make it seem worse, but it's no worse. The scientific crime is the cherry picking to deceive. Any halfway honest person familiar with the studies could tell that he was doing really bad science.
Why? I still don't know why he did that. But since you seem to understand the politics, maybe you could explain.