John Ioannidis is wrong about the Bergamo and New York City spring 2020 death spikes
Nothing suggests they were "massively hit"
We can add the Bergamo and New York City spring 2020 death spikes to the list of things that John Ioannidis, one of the most-cited scientists in the world, is wrong about when it comes to “COVID”.
(For other things he is wrong about, see article below.)
German journalist Bastian Barucker asked Ioannidis about the Bergamo and New York events specifically in a recent interview.
Transcription of the relevant segment is followed by commentary.
[36:10] Barucker: So, one thing that people – I talk to people, saying, “Yeah, [I have an] interview with John Ioannidis,” and they had some questions. One thing that comes up again and again, and it also comes up in our [German] media - is that we had, like, pictures of, it was called Bergamo, like where this - picture wasn't quite right, as we know now, but it's not very important.1
But people are confused or interested in -- we had a peak of excess mortality in New York, I think, and in Bergamo or Northern Italy, basically a region. Do we know now why just at these spots there was such a high peak of death? Was this just related to COVID? Or was there anything else? Because it seems strange that just in one place, there's such a high peak.
Ioannidis: So, some of the early experiences were devastating. And I think that it was a combination of multiple factors. We knew very little at that time.
I think that we did not manage to protect people who had to be protected. It was even inverse protection. I think that those who were vulnerable were even more heavily affected.
In these settings, for example, in New York, we were sending infected people to nursing homes. So we did our best to maximize the impact of that wave in New York.
And in Bergamo, again, early times, and no knowledge about what to do, how to treat this, no effective treatments available, perhaps some overreaction, unprepared health systems, management, probably suboptimal.
I have been attacked about this claim that, you know, you say that physicians killed people. I think physicians were heroes in these circumstances. I'm not interested to blame anyone.
But in every situation, if you deal with a new condition, with a new process, with a new set of interventions that you need to do, you have a learning curve. So your first results will not be very good. You know, think of this like a surgeon who is trying their hands to do an operation for the first time.
Their likelihood of something going wrong is pretty high. And then the second time is a little better, the third time is even better, and so forth. And I think that probably in the first wave, in these places that were so massively hit, we just didn't have good results.
We just didn't use our technology and our medical infrastructure in a way that would make a positive difference. Perhaps we even made a negative difference. And again, I don't say that to blame people who were in the front line.
I'm an infectious disease person. I saw many people with COVID during the pandemic. I know how heroic my colleagues were who work with COVID-19 patients. My wife was a front line physician also in infectious disease. So I think that our outcomes were very poor
Commentary
There are at least two reasons Bergamo and New York “come up again and again” (as Barucker put it), which are also reasons why those harbouring any skepticism at all about the pandemic narrative should focus on these locations.
Pandemic-launch propaganda from one or both events is etched in many people’s memories.
The death curves are extraordinary to the point they defy credulity.
Very few researchers from any discipline have shown interest in examining and understanding these events; most remain oddly incurious or apathetic.
No analyst can be expected to possess in-depth knowledge of “all things COVID,” of course, but it now appears one of the most highly esteemed epidemiologists in the world is ignorant about the most basic features of the preposterous “Twin Peaks”.
Referring to Bergamo and New York, Ioannidis said, “some of the early experiences were devastating”. This is both an understatement and an overstatement.
An understatement because the Bergamo and New York curves are unlike any death event in modern death statistics recording. Does Ioannidis grasp the speed and magnitude relative to (for example) the 1918 ‘pandemic’?
An overstatement because the evidence of ‘devastation’ matching the official spreadsheet numbers for either location is very thin and (we contend) based on an exaggerated presentation of reality.
Ioannidis’s explanation for the high number of deaths is this:
Little was known about a “new condition” called COVID-19.
Bergamo and New York were “massively hit” in the first wave of death.
People who needed to be protected from COVID-19 weren’t protected, i.e., there was “inverse protection.”
Bergamo’s health systems was struck by the virus in “early times,”unprepared, didn’t know how to treat the new disease, overreacted to an extent.
In New York, nursing homes were struck hard by the virus due to infected people being sent in to facilities.
“Frontline” healthcare workers did the best they could and were “heroes” under the circumstances and had to adjust to a “new process” and “new set of interventions.”
Technology and “medical infrastructure” weren’t used to make a positive difference and instead made a negative difference, but people on the “front line” are not to blame.
We reject any claims by Ioannidis—or anyone else—asserting the presence and spread of a novel coronavirus causing a new disease, as we find no evidence that such a spread occurred or that a new disease emerged. No one needed to be protected from something called “COVID”; everyone needed protection from being tested for SARS-CoV-2 and subjected to maltreatment.
Because the Bergamo and NYC curves appear engineered and need to be substantiated with the release of basic death records, it’s difficult to say to what extent either place was “hit” by the measures taken. Ioannidis’s sense that Bergamo and New York were “caught off guard” is consistent with the propaganda, controlled messaging, and elevated voices of the timeframe yet inconsistent with verifiable facts and data. Hospitals were not overrun with patients, trucks (military, refrigerated) & field hospitals were underused, and large-scale body management commensurate with the disaster toll isn’t documented through expected mediums.
It’s no surprise Ioannidis points to New York City nursing homes, given how much energy has gone into blaming the death spike on “spread” in those facilities.2 A novel disease isn’t needed to push people in fragile health over the edge. Covered faces, separation from loved ones, neglect, inappropriate transfers to and from the hospitals - these measures alone are sufficient to increase the risk of death in care homes. As explained in Eleven serious problems with the New York City mass casualty event (problem 8), the total number of facility residents that died during the spring 2020 event is undisclosed, there are reasons to suspect many died in hospitals, and the hospital death toll is too fast and high to be accepted at face value.
What Ioannidis calls “negative protection,” is better thought of as government-directed euthanasia or democide. If this is what he means by technology and medical infrastructure making a “negative difference,” we agree. We cannot agree that all doctors and nurses on the “frontline” - or administrators - can possibly be blameless or heroic since, ultimately, they were the operators of these technologies and the decision-makers overseeing individual facilities and systems.
Notably, Ioannidis did not address the heart of Barucker’s question, which was why at just these spots? Why Bergamo, not nearby Venice or population-dense Rome? Why New York metro and not Los Angeles metro?
Whatever one believes about SARS-CoV-2, it cannot possibly have “started” in one country, traveled to others via human-to-human transmission or jet stream/air masses, and strike like a bomb in some places while leaving others alone.
Having investigated and written much about these “anomalies,” we have thus far concluded that government-directed protocols, iatrogenic policies, and data manipulation are to blame for the timing, speed, and magnitude of the spikes. This is a very different message from the one John Ioannidis is sending - i.e., Underprepared Bergamo and New York were hit early and hard and did the best they could.
Of course, we disagree with John Ioannidis’s premise that the world was facing a “major crisis” in early 2020 involving a new viral threat and new disease that required a response and contend the opposite: there was no crisis or viral threat requiring any kind of response. Ioannidis accepts that pandemics are biological phenomena humankind should anticipate and plan for.3 We disagree and regard pandemics as socio-political creatures enabled by human behavior and economics. The only “plan” needed is a plan to denounce and defund all preparedness efforts.
Differences aside, we would expect John Ioannidis to revisit studies such as this one he co-authored with two Italian colleagues, and challenge his own assumptions - especially having admitted “it is very likely much of my [COVID] work must be wrong.”
That he - a scientist who has been consistently positioned as 'contrary' to the official narrative, and has published more than a hundred Covid-related studies in five years - readily repeats establishment-approved excuses is disappointing.
The bigger disappointment, perhaps, is in what John Ioannidis didn’t say about Bergamo and New York:
I am not sure what happened and we need to find out.
Barucker confirmed on X that in saying “the picture wasn't quite right” he was referring to the death curve itself.
For more on why Andrew Cuomo’s “nursing home policy” is not explicative of the death toll, see https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/cuomo-and-the-select-committee-nothing
See also transcript of remarks at Stanford University in October 2024.
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We were definitely fed lies from the very beginning, which unbelievably was over 5 years ago. Subjects of some of the obvious lies included:
1. Magnified case fatality rate, reported daily from Hopkins and others in "emergency red" on every MSM channel; this ignored what we have known for decades about respiratory illnesses, that there is always a spectrum of clinical illness, from asymptomatic (usually the majority) to mild, moderate, and severe (in vulnerable)
2. Nothing about a "novel" coronavirus or any other respiratory virus should have caused much concern; putting "novel" in the official name was marketing, not science
3. Immune systems of healthy people work well against virtually every type of infectious disease, including "novel" versions of similar classes of viruses; no, you don't have to be first exposed to a new antigen before your immune system works, it's much more effective and complex than that
4. Masks were then, and remain, a ludicrous solution to transmission of respiratory viruses; virtually no scientific support existed before 2020 (although many studies had been done), then a few severely flawed studies were hurried out to justify "doing something, even if partially protective"
5. The gene injections were deemed "safe and effective," for virtually everyone, even pregnant women(!) was perhaps the most egregious and unforgivable lie, along with the mandates; if you weren't skeptical about what you were told to do and believe before this, surely telling pregnant women "nothing to worry about" should have awakened you
There were many others. But now 5 years later, and illustrated by Professor Ioannidis among many others, it is interesting that intelligent people still hold so many vastly different and irreconcilable positions about what really happened. Keep asking the right questions Jessica.
It seems to me that Ioannidis’ problem is a classic illustration of the problem of beginning with the answer and working backwards. He begins with the accepted answer - extreme excess mortality in Bergamo and NYC - an answer created and offered up to him and others, which he does not sufficiently question. He then proceeds to look for “facts” which support that answer. He may very well be acting in good faith, seeking out plausible explanations for the given answer, but his failure is not seriously considering that the “answer” he seeks to explain is itself implausible and incorrect. He seems to have forgotten the first rule of all good science, which is to question everything and give serious consideration to alternative, even seemingly unlikely answers. Good science always demands such questioning. As Feynman observed, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
If you begin with the facts apart from a predetermined conclusion, however compelling the presumed conclusion may initially seem, you become free to consider other, more compelling conclusions. Serious examination of the facts leads to better answers and often exposes the outright absurdity of previously presumed and accepted answers. In this case, serious examination of the facts points to the conclusion that the Bergamo and NYC excess mortality could not have happened. The facts dictate that such a conclusion must be nonsensical. Rather than working backward to search for explanations of impossible answers, he would be better served reexamining the facts to arrive at more the much more plausible conclusion that the pandemic and extreme excess mortality purported to have occurred in Bergamo and NYC could not have occurred. That path leads a much different, if uncomfortable, direction.