> And it turns out celebrating in the streets is basically completely safe.

You wouldn't know it walking around the well-to-do section of the liberal city I live in.

I live in NYC and the streets and parks have been packed every nice day since last May.

> that doesn't make the research itself irresponsible

This seems like an absurd conclusion. If research isn't done responsibly in practice, and results in disaster, then the risks aren't worth it.

Not only is it absurd, there has been no documented value that we derived from this research. Totally useless and totally destructive.

That’s an absurd conclusion.

We’ve had nuclear accidents before. Should we abandon all nuclear research, since in practice there are accidents?

> The author is a Professor at the Stanford school of medicine and also a professor of statistics.

Most people don't care. They selectively pick the academics that put out the most alarmist and pessimistic predictions (often predicated on the same assumption-packed models that generate results in line with those assumptions, then present the results as evidence of the original assumptions).

Ioaniddis is smeared with allegations about funding, etc. Meanwhile people like vaccine manufacturers, big pharma, etc. are never critically examined as potentially conflict-ridden organizations funding their own trials with scientists on their payroll. Same goes to the epidemiologists and others that stand to benefit from producing the most emotion-provoking results in order to secure their grants.

You see it with the censoring of the panels hosted by Gov. DeSantis. These aren't conspiracy theorists. They're credentialed academics and researchers with established careers.

The idea that those recordings of academics, discussing their subject matter, hosted on YouTube or wherever, are dangerous is patently absurd.

> Ioaniddis is smeared with allegations about funding

I mean, pretty fairly, to be honest. I <3 Ioaniddis until this pandemic, but I think he's been dead wrong on it, and should go back to giving out about the quality of published papers (where he's been very, very right).

> I realize that could come off as accusatory, but I've seen this said a bunch. And it seems like it never occurs to people that maybe they're so invested in a certain viewpoint that they've given up the meta-cognition to consider something they've convinced themselves to be wrong.

He ignores the standard methods of collection and analysis of systematic reviews and meta-anlyses (some of which were authored by him) and uses ridiculous numbers like those in the OP of this thread to make it seem like Covid is less dangerous than it is.

Don't get me wrong, I've been estimating 0.5-1.5% IFR for this for well over a year now (all the CFR's last year were so misleading), and the general meta-scientific point that we didn't know enough to be locking down was entirely true.

But his sampling study was hot garbage, and he's gotten himself into a bunch of trouble for no good reason.

> Do you ever consider that he hasn't changed and you have during the pandemic?

Honestly, probably not. But that's an interesting suggestion, and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this. Because maybe I have, and don't notice (to be fair, the birth of my first child has had a much greater impact on my life than the pandemic).

I don't think it's necessary to invoke 'corruption', just the same cognitive biases that plague everyone. Ioaniddis committed early (at least by March 2020) to the position that COVID is probably not that big a deal and everyone was likely overreacting. Once you do that it's hard to back down and natural to keep looking for evidence that you're right (and to try to discount evidence that you're wrong).

But you're trying to say that's he's downplaying the pandemic, when clearly he isn't. He's doing research that suggests some lower numbers than others. He's not the authority, and this is how science happens. An array of work is synthesized to come to conclusions.

I don't believe he's invested in disproving the pandemic or something. It is clear to me that the reactions to him are disproportionate to things he's saying.

His suggestions don't threaten anyone - clearly policy makers and the political class largely haven't listened to him. That people are threatened by him enough to start offhandedly discrediting him, suggests to me there's something deeper going on.

I think society has invested so much into lockdown and all the related measure that any evidence that's critical causes cognitive dissonance. People would be unable to bear the thought that what we did was unfounded or misguided.

The tell for me is that people are unable to allow for the existence of opposing arguments. Not only is Ioannidis wrong, he's obviously evil or dangerous, and must be discredited.

I don't think he's evil or dangerous, just plain old wrong.

What you've posited about 'society' is a mirror-image of what I've posited about Ionnaidis. It's very hard to back down from public commitments to a certain point of view. Ionnaidis has invested all his credibility at this point in the consensus view on the pandemic being wrong.

Lockdown policy as it played out around the world (clearly it seems some were lucky enough to enact it before mass spread, but after that it seems near useless and medieval) has the effect of pushing all disease burden equally instead of allowing the least threatened to build immunity.

So sadly if you choose to prevent young people from getting infected, you automatically push disease burden to older people that will suffer more.

It's not far-fetched that there's a pervasive combo of conformity, virtual signalling and outrage.

> how do we address issues where there's implicit bias being applied to our work?

my experience is that most workplaces and social spaces I'm in are systemically liberal, "reality has a liberal bias" abounds

Do we even have one piece of thorough, plain journalism that examines how much money these pharma companies are making from vaccines, testing, therapies, drugs, care, etc.?

You realize Vivaldi is essentially the modern replacement for Opera.

Look up Hope-Simpson's work on influenza epidemiology, he observed seasonality like you say, but there are certain regimes that correspond to latitudes.