Some Things John Ioannidis Was - and Still Is - Wrong About
Shielding COVID Heroes from criticism doesn't prevent the Human Rights Heist of 2020 from happening again.
John Ioannidis is wrong about a lot of things when it comes to COVID - and he knows it.
In closing remarks at the Stanford University Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past symposium held last month, he said,
I have published about a hundred peer-reviewed papers on COVID-19, and it's very likely that since I have also published a paper with the title ‘Why Most Published Research Findings are False,’ it's very likely that much of my work must be wrong. And, you know, certainly all of that can be improved. So please do try to improve it.
I’ve read only some of Ioannidis’s 100 papers on COVID-19,1 but I think there is a good chance time will prove nearly all of his work - and the work of many others - is wrong, because it assumes:
Death and other data reported by governing authorities during the COVID Era is reliable and trustworthy.2
SARS-CoV-2 is a spreading pathogen that adds risk of severe illness or death to some groups of people (and started doing so in late 2019/early 2020)
SARS-CoV-2 is the casual agent of unique disease called COVID-19.
The WHO's determination in February 2020 that COVID-19 was a unique disease and new cause of death was scientifically/medically demonstrated and therefore valid.
Because Ioannidis has accepted these things as true since early 2020, I was less surprised than others have been that his Stanford remarks included praise for the COVID shot, following acknowledgement that most scientific papers on COVID were of low-quality:
“Looking at COVID papers versus other papers, we know that the average paper in the scientific literature is horrible, but COVID papers were more horrible than horrible, and I say this with full respect for all the amazing work that happened during the pandemic.
We had major successes. We managed to develop pretty effective vaccines for severe outcomes in a very short time.3 I don't think that most of us thought that it could happen so quickly. We had randomized trials, large-scale randomized trials, adaptive trials that got us results within three months -- and showing that some interventions like dexamethasone are effective, most interventions are not effective, probably at least those that we thought might be."
If, like me, you’ve come to the unsettling conclusion that there is no evidence of a novel or dangerous coronavirus suddenly transmitting from person-to-person in late 2019 and early 2020, then you probably read what he said and thought,
Um, the COVID shot isn’t a vaccine….
“Effective for severe outcomes” resulting from what?
It’s now apparent Ioannidis’ comments were a preview of a paper he and his colleagues were getting ready to upload on 4 November, reporting their global estimates of lives and life-years saved by the COVID shot.
Norman Fenton and Martin Neil have written an excellent, easy-to-understand takedown of the study I recommended reading:
Whether peer reviewers will recognize the flaws - or simply give it a pass because it advances the government/public health narrative and is authored by a widely-published, non-censored scientist - remains to be seen.
Other Things Ioannidis Got Wrong
I can tell from reader comments on Norman and Martin’s critique that some people believe John Ioannidis has changed his views and was “right” about everything COVID at the beginning.
I’ve tracked the COVID Era pretty closely and don’t know of anyone who was right about everything. John Ioannidis is no exception. Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Ioannidis’s status as a Legend of COVID Dissent seems to have shielded his work from fair criticism and kept people from revisiting the past with the benefit of hindsight. That's not Ioannidis’ fault; it’s human nature to choose & cheer our Heroes and resist seeing their ideas as potentially flawed - probably because doing so may reveal some hard-to-handle things about ourselves.
I’m sure Ioannidis would agree it’s dangerous to lionize him or anyone, and that pointing out the some of things he was not - and still is not - right about isn’t a personal attack.
As someone who takes the study of COVID events seriously, and his fellow U.S. citizen, I’ll explain some of the things I believe John Ioannidis was wrong about and has not revisited, clarified, corrected, or responded to — in addition to the four beliefs I listed earlier.
The Diamond Princess IFR
Ioannidis’ estimates of SARS-CoV-2’s infection fatality ratio derived from testing conducted with passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship are often cited as proof that it was known the virus wasn’t deadly for most people. The implicit assumption of the DP fiasco has always been that something was spreading on the ship and resulted in the deaths of 7-14 passengers.
Two considerations Ioannidis did not make but should have made, given his credentials & level of expertise:
Passenger deaths cannot be divorced from their hospitalization and “treatments” received, which means the IFRs derived therefrom are sullied, at best.
The estimates were not calculated or contextualized through the lens of what’s normal. A certain number of passengers can be expected to die within 1-2 months of any cruise, especially when the age profile is heavily skewed toward average life expectancy.4 After all, it is older people who tend to go on cruises - especially on more expensive cruises. The question of expected mortality ex post facto of a cruise didn’t occur to me until January 2023, but I’m also not the world’s most-cited scientist. John Khademi’s (@ProfessorAkston) calculation suggested a dozen or so deaths wouldn’t be unusual.
Perhaps Ioannidis and colleagues can answer the question and let us know what they conclude. Regardless, I think it’s fair to say that the way his analysis was presented in mid-March 2020 gave the impression that SARS-CoV-2 added risk of death, however small - which I contend is not the case and has never been demonstrated.
Further, as I detailed in this thread, there was no illness outbreak on the Diamond Princess during the voyage. The first passenger to test positive for the New Thing was Hong Kong resident who disembarked at Hong Kong. there are no indications he did so because he was ill. In fact, he didn’t go to the doctor for his unremarkable symptoms until four days later. Suffice to say, all signs point to a contrived, if not staged, event. I don’t expect John Ioannidis to have grasped the event chronology and particulars in March 2020, but given how much notoriety his STAT essay gained - and how often people point to it - he is long overdue to revisit what occurred and why.
The U.S. Government’s Imposition of an Illegal Mass Quarantine
In his 6 May 2020 written testimony to the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Governmental Affairs, Ioannidis twice condoned the initial [illegal] mass quarantine decree as 'justified’ and did not cite his own IFR estimate.5
He wrote:
Shelter-in-place and lockdown orders were justified initially, when announcements declared a new, contagious virus with 3.4% fatality rate and no asymptomatic infections.
While lockdowns were justified initially, their perpetuation may risk many lives.
Laying aside the fact that there is no provision for anything called ‘lockdown’ in U.S. communicable disease codes - and never any evidence of a threat or emergency involving a spreading disease - Ioannidis was clearly giving the U.S. government a pass on its unprecedented six-week measures.
Does he still believe the initial ‘lockdown’ was justified? More importantly, does he think it’s justified if there were a disease with a 3.4% fatality rate? If so, I strongly disagree with his understanding of the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps John Ioannidis has clarified his May 2020 position and written or spoken to his general beliefs about when the state can tell restaurants and schools to close under the auspices of slowing “spread”. I would love to be directed to a presentation or interview he has given or article he’s written to that effect, if one exists.
Similar to the late-April 2020 version of Rand Paul, Ioannidis did not call for an end to closures in his testimony and exhibited no real conviction about the abrogation of fundamental liberties.6 He wrote, “Re-opening efforts require great caution, with continuous feedback to identify and limit any potential surge of hospitalizations and deaths upon re-opening” and “Re-opening should be gradual, with continuous feedback on epidemic activity.” [emphases mine]
As a mom with two kids home from locked out of public schools at the time, I can say that advocating re-opening on the basis of testing metrics and whether the local hospitals were ‘surging,’ was not the kind of brave or counter-narrative stance I would have expected from a conservative-leaning statistically-adept scholar at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. Nothing John Ioannidis has said since then leads me to believe that, given the specter of another deadly pathogen, he wouldn’t condone the same approach.
Overwhelmed Hospitals and Maltreatment of Nursing Homes Residents
In his May 2020 testimony, Ioannidis conveyed a belief that some hospitals were overrun with patients and harmful measures against patients and nursing home residents were necessary. He wrote,
COVID-19 overwhelmed a few dozen hospitals, while COVID-19 measures may jeopardize services and multiple health outcomes in thousands of hospitals. Moving forward, we need to defend hospitals and nursing homes with strict infection control and hygienic measures; universal and periodic testing of all personnel; and quarantine for infected and exposed personnel.
I’ve yet to find a hospital that was overwhelmed in spring 2020 by any reasonable definition of the term. That includes hospitals in New York City - and “epicenter of the epicenter” Elmhurst. We know from the COVID-19 inquiry in Scotland and much other documentation that the kinds of measures enacted in the settings Ioannidis mentioned were far deadlier than any respiratory illness could’ve been.
What patients and care home residents needed to be defended against - and still do - is being tested/re-tested for a novel virus, forcibly masked, separated from their loved ones, and presented as “clear & present dangers” to the healthcare workers who are supposed to be helping them.
Does John Ioannidis see now that he and the Great Barrington Declaration authors were very wrong in 2020 about what people needed to be protected from - and the harms of measures they may have considered beneficial?
Healthcare Workers as ‘Unsung’ COVID Heroes
In his remarks at the Stanford Conference, Ioannidis referred to healthcare workers as ‘unsung’ heroes.
And I want to pay attention specifically to one group of the population: people who are in healthcare.
They're the unsung heroes. They went through a double crisis and - you know, an exponentiated crisis - and I have amazing respect for them, for everything that they did.
I’m not sure if Ioannidis was watching television or saw any videos on social media in spring 2020, but Americans, at least, were encouraged to do nothing BUT sing the praises of healthcare workers. Between signage, banging pots and pans every night, a barrage of hashtags, “Stay Home, Save Lives” pleas, and much else, doctors & nurses were presented as soldiers going off to a battle. Anyone who dared question this motif was a grandma-killing COVID denier.
Readers may disagree, but I am of the mind that no one is a hero for doing the job he or she signed up to do. There are acts of heroism within a job that are above and beyond the call of duty, but (for example) if you’re a medical doctor and you save someone’s life, and/or put yourself at risk of catching a deadly disease, nothing about doing so makes you a hero per se. It’s part of your job description.
I’m reminded of an interview Katie Couric did with Captain “Sully” Sullenberger in which he maintained he wasn’t a hero for landing the plane the Hudson River, because he was simply doing to job he was trained to do, as a professional. This is the right attitude and nothing like we observed with the Healthcare Heroes/Dancing Nurses nonsense launched by governments around the world in 2020 - which was a coordinated propaganda campaign against the general public and healthcare workers alike.
I agree with Ioannidis that healthcare workers were placed under ‘tremendous stress.’ The difference is I believe the government launched and maintained psychological warfare against the profession and (among other things) made them believe there was a new disease against which they had to protect themselves first and foremost.
As I mentioned on a podcast yesterday, I’ve spoken to a number of doctors and nurses about their spring 2020 experiences and not one has said “yes” to my questions about whether they were observing anything unusual in patients presentation before mass testing was launched in their hospitals. Moreover, they are very hard-pressed to counter the possibility that they could’ve thought they were seeing a new disease because they were told to equate a whatever symptoms or conditions a patient had with a new illness if the patient tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
Ioannidis says he spent time treating COVID patients himself. I find his brief description of that experience rather troubling and would love to speak further with him about it:
I did have engagement pro bono for consultation for infectious diseases with hundreds of COVID-19 patients, ranging from those who had lethal outcomes and spent very difficult times in the ICU, to those who were completely asymptomatic and healthy, and they got a positive test and it was seen as a death sentence. You know, they were thinking of euthanasia or, you know, very very weird type of thoughts.
Where and when this consultation took place isn’t clear, nor is whether seeing such a range of patients in the hospital “with” COVID changed his mind about what exactly this illness is, and how it’s related (if it is) to something called SARS-CoV-2. I assume Ioannidis means patients with “they were thinking of euthanasia,” but given the midazolam shortages reported worldwide in 2020 and directives issued to hospitals and care homes, “they” may as well apply to healthcare workers.
Needless to say, if patients are thinking COVID is a death sentence and want to be euthanized, it raises questions about what the patient has heard not only from public health officials and media, but from doctors themselves.
While John Ioannidis might not be ‘wrong’ about healthcare workers’ COVID experiences, he seems either unaware of or resistant to the idea that many patients were killed or greatly harmed at the hands of healthcare workers in the COVID Era - and that government has done nothing to initiate inquiries into what occurred.
Ignoring Inquiry About Data
Finally, on a somewhat personal note, John Ioannidis is ‘wrong’ to have not responded to my email inquiry about a data discrepancy involving a study associated with the center he co-directs.
I believe I described the issue well and communicated earnestly and respectfully. Ioannidis never acknowledged receiving the email, which is disappointing because I think he could help resolve a question related to the bigger issue of an unsubstantiated and potentially fraudulent all-cause death curve for New York City in 2020.
I felt Dr. Ioannidis was sincere when he said at the Stanford Conference he doesn’t sign manifestos and declarations in part because he wants to be able to change his perspective if he had something wrong.
If I knew him at all, or thought he’d reply, my next email would say,
Dear John,
I think you’ve got some things wrong…
Related article (6 April 2025)
I don’t hear too many people claim that John Ioannidis was censored or suppressed per se, but for anyone who might think he was, I humbly submit that 100 published papers in four years on one topic is about as far from censorship as anyone can get.
I’m referring here only to the government data that Ioannidis and colleagues accept and characterize in their papers as reliable and trustworthy - not to data reported by every government in the world.
This is consistent with the optimistic view Ioannidis has espoused for awhile regarding the technological achievement of the COVID shots, e.g., https://greekreporter.com/2021/02/19/stanfords-professor-ioannidis-analyzes-current-coronavirus-vaccines/
The ships have morgues, so a certain number could be expected to die on the ships, regardless of cause.
Two other people whose views I written about did as well: Scott Atlas and Pierre Kory. All written testimonies can be accessed here: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/covid-19-how-new-information-should-drive-policy/
For my review of early 2020 Rand Paul, see https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/rand-paul-was-not-very-resistant
“I’ve tracked the COVID Era pretty closely and don’t know of anyone who was right about everything. ”
You don’t know me, but I was actually right about everything. It wasn’t hard. All you needed was common sense and respect for human rights.
I don’t see how Ioannides can discuss vaccines without mentioning adverse effects. There are over 19,000 deaths associated with them in VAERS, some are coincidences but most occurred the day of the shot. Some very large number was due directly to the shot, reading the detailed descriptions of how they died is not easy.
As far as effectiveness, I have not seen any place in the world that had infections or deaths decline with more shots, then not rise again soon after, and then again.
I know Dr I is famous and I’m not, but I do know when something doesn’t make sense.