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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

You are making it out as some sort of gatekeeping. A veterinary tech has absolutely no business publicly contradicting an epidemiologist during a pandemic.

When the building is on fire and the firefighters are yelling at you to get out, but Bill from the copy room is like "wait nooooo smoke is good for your personal aura," it is perfectly fine to question someone based on credentials alone.

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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.

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

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