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Comment by ravitation | Hacker News Reader

I want to add one other piece of information to this discussion, because Ioannidis is somewhat central to the point the original article is trying to make, and it is ignored by the article (because it significantly weakens some of their arguments).

Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."

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Will Happer should "know better" too, but as Sinclair said: "It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it"

Did those people criticise other epidemiologists for doing the same? Immediately holding press conferences appears to be standard behaviour during this outbreak; for example, Imperial and Oxford both did the same. In fact in the Oxford case the press published stories about the paper before it was even available anywhere, let alone in a journal.

I understand why at the moment peer review is being short circuited by everyone, regardless of political or epidemiological position. The world is hungry for news and journalists will interpret papers with or without the help of the authors. Might as well have their assistance, in these circumstances.

Your remark about "conservative news outlets" shows what's really going on here, I suspect - just another day in politically biased academia-land. If you talk to anything other than CNN then you're bad and wrong. The same has been seen with Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist turned novelist who has never really taken part in politics nor even really discussed it much in public. Once he started tweeting skeptically about the actions of governments and academics, all based on public data, he discovered only the conservative news outlets were willing to interview him. And then that mere fact alone was used by the left to attack him, although his points were all based on actual verifiable facts and had no pre-existing political bias.

Ioannidis made a lot of enemies by kickstarting the replication crisis. Now it looks like some see a chance to get back at him.

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