Even people like John P. A. Ioannidis were being throttled and dismissed.

Can you distinguish between political and scientific epidemiologists?

Ioannidis wrote some obviously absolute trash in March 2020. I can’t find the worst paper (google deindex?) but I copied a quote[1]: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.”. His analysis in that paper was some of the most biased bullshit I have read: the low range estimate was boldly incorrect. I absolutely love his previous papers on the replication crisis. Here[2] is a different paper of his from March 2020 showing his bias. He is a solid scientist, but he went off the deep end for a while there.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222

Ioannidis was obviously way off on the number of people to be infected, but his estimate on the fatality rate was actually fairly close. The CDC later calculated it as 0.6%.

https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyab010

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

100% difference in rate is fairly close? I get that these are small rates to begin with, but if your margin of error includes the entire range between 0 and your predication in the first place, does your prediction have any value?

Being within a factor of 2 is fairly close for being early in the pandemic with very limited data. At the time, some other researchers had estimated a fatality rate in the 2% range which was even farther off.

Versus the actual trash used by the Imperial College that was used to justify draconian measures?? Early in the pandemic as well? Hmm

Remind me again what were the deaths predicted?

I’m not sure what your point is. Does that somehow justify Ioannidis writing influential science papers that are bullshit science?

Here is a proper 20-20 hindsight analysis: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j... mostly about this paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...

The numbers he found were completely inconsistent with other well known numbers at the time. He didn’t shit-test his analysis against reality, instead he published bullshit science, ironically enough given his most cited paper.

This is the analysis I previously referred to that was shit: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

I recall he ignored conflicting information from other sources[1], he was jumping to conclusions based on the thin Diamond Princess information, and I felt he was politically advocating for more scientific delay. Resulting in articles like: https://www.dailywire.com/news/stanford-professor-data-indic...

He doubled down. Was badly wrong. Unfortunately it is still a political topic, especially in the US, so it is hard to have a sensible conversation about it.

[1] his article was on the 17th March and the WaPo article I referenced talked about Berano on the 23rd March - I haven’t checked whether he should have known the Berano facts publically. https://archive.ph/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/euro...

The point is that Ioannidis had a pattern of behaviour of writing obviously biased rubbish during that time.

His point wasn't about ANY authority figure though. It was about ones with directly relevant expertise.

In his example, firefights are authorities... In regards to smoke and fire. Yeah I'm gonna trust what they have to say, both over what Bob has to say about smoke being good for my aura, and over anything that an irrelevant authority, like the town mayor, has to say.

Likewise back in February 2020 I found really great authorities on virology, a podcast with a rotating panel of 5+ virologists and people with other relevant phds, plus a doctor who headed up a COVID ward in NYC and started giving weekly clinical updates.

Naturally this resulted in me being called a sheeple who just did whatever the mayor (in the example in question) told him rather than following Bob, who must be true in saying smoke is good for me because he's wearing a lab coat and YouTube is censoring him.

And in this case, we were supposed to listen to the same "doctor" that caused hundreds of thousands of AIDs deaths in the 80s by pushing known toxic and harmful "medication" while simultaneously blocking proven helpful medications. All because he gets kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies.

Why does that sound so familiar?

Whatever, guess I'll just defer to authority.

A panel of authority figures is no excuse to stop thinking. They can be misled and corrupt like any others. All people need to think for themselves and question authority now more than ever.

>And in this case, we were supposed to listen to the same "doctor" that caused hundreds of thousands of AIDs deaths in the 80s

No. Go to a podcast search engine and type in "virology". Go to duck duck go and look up "epidemiologist blog". Go to your library and search for books on immunology.

>A panel of authority figures is no excuse to stop thinking

Careful not to skip into straw man territory.

Thinking for yourself isn't mutually exclusive with educating yourself on a topic, which is best done by learning from people with relevant expertise. Doing something like a thesis defense requires a crazy amount of both thinking for yourself, AND years of studying from experts. I suspect that if you went to write a thesis on astrophysics, you'd put a lot of effort into studying from authorities. Though I would love to see someone go for a thesis defense with work based purely on "thinking for themselves".

>Whatever, guess I'll just defer to authority.

I cannot emphasize enough the difference between "authority" and "authority with expertise in a specific area." If your car engine needs fixing, I'm willing to bet money that you'll end up deferring to an authority one way or another. Unfortunately, when a topic becomes politicized, people quickly fall into black-and-white thinking and false dichotomies pretty quickly

They absolutely do. Especially now that two years later the veterinary was right and the epidemiologist wasn't.

A short video that sums up that last three years of scientism by the establishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE