What the Heck Happened to John Ioannidis?

So we have a person who likes to be contrary, and gets famous doing it. It comes as no surprise that he would put contrariness over research, and do shoddy work in the process. Then he can claim that he's "outside the orthodoxy", a favorite tactic of cranks and quacks, and appealing to everybody who doesn't know science and enjoys imagining that the scientists are bad at their jobs.

But with COVID deaths are concentrated among the frail elderly. Young children are losing grand-parents, but not the ones that take them to the swing park. It is the frail old ones, or even the great-grandparents. Rather than using a plain count of deaths, we should be looking at Quality Adjusted Life Years lost.

There is perhaps a factor of ten at issue here, between a pandemic like the flu that followed the Great War and which killed healthy young people, and our own pandemic. When a healthy young person dies from a cytokine storm perhaps 50 QALYs are lost. When a frail old person dies at 80 instead of 85, perhaps 5 QALYs are lost, or fewer.

The article goes with a plain count of deaths. But the article is accusing John Ioannidis of "minimize the dangers of the coronavirus". If the article were accusing Ioannidis of exaggerating the dangers of the corona virus it would hardly matter that the authors own crude approximation over-stated the danger. We would reason transitively. The author over-states the danger, the author says that Ioannidis puts the danger higher than the author does; as readers, we are persuaded that Ioannidis puts the danger higher than he should.

But the logic here is the wrong way round. The author is taking a crude, approximate approach, that over-states the danger of the coronavirus by perhaps a factor of ten. Of course he will accuse others of minimizing the dangers. And as readers, we are disappointed that sciencebasedmedicine.org is so careless with the quantitative aspects of mortality.

So of course he is evil for daring to counter the liers.

Now everyone should know that they lied, and Ioannidis was right. But politics are afraid of a right wing takeover. Rightly so, they should. We are at an IFR of 0.17% currently. We have an absurdly high percentage of asymptotic cases, and we don't know the rate of false-positives of PCR tests. The EMA lies, AZ lies, who knows who else. You can only read scientific papers or medical journals, the press and politics are far off. With 3 mill dead over 2 seasons it's still in the range of a normal strong flu season. A strong flu season has 0.650 - 2 mill deaths (per year, we have 2 seasons now, a 3rd expected), a normal season has 290.000 - 650.000.