Speculating about the shape of the potential energy surface of viral evolution is non-trivial.

I don't know enough (my retrovirus knowledge is out of date), but if you look at authoritative knowledge (IE, textbooks), you will see many non-harmless retroviruses:

- oncoretroviruses: as a side effect of how they integrate, they often cause cancer in patients. There is lots of time between infection and death for the virus to be transmitted.

- lentiviruses (this is also known as a "slow virus"). There is often lots of time between infection and death for the virus to be transmitted.

It's possible that scientists are avoiding directly attempting to argue with Deusberg's observations, but in general, the consensus seems to be that he brought nothing useful to the debate except irrational claims that were inconsistent with the evidence. We don't live in an ultrarational world where every fringe theory can be investigated.

As for Ioannidis... not sure what to say. I think his big mistake was going to the white house and trying to make Trump an ally and not shut down everything because he predicted the virus wouldn't spread and wouldn't be fatal at the rates that were later observed. Diseases like COVID are multidimensional problems with partial information and a high level of politics, corp, and media involvement. I think fauci and others have finally admitted that they may have made some mistakes in the specific details of the shutdowns, in particular, it took people a while to realize that the impact on children (who by and large are not at risk from COVID) was enormous.

If your goal is to affect public health policy, you have to be a truly 4D thinker, and even that's not enough dimensions.