Free Republic

I offer this not to encourage complacency, of which there’s already been far too much, but as a purgative after feeding you a horse-sized dose of hopelessness this morning.John Ioannidis is a respected epidemiologist at Stanford. His specialty is “metascience,” i.e. calling BS on shoddy medical research. The point of this new piece isn’t to declare that the data on coronavirus is shoddy; the point is to declare that we just don’t have enough of it yet to feel confident about how dangerous the disease is. And that matters a lot when you’re implementing policies with massive social repercussions...

The co-director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, John P.A. Ioannidis, wrote in an opinion piece this week a warning to Americans that participating in voluntary shutdowns and allowing the government to set curfews and manipulate the free market before dependable data collected could be a mistake. The professor of medicine, population health, statistics, biomedical data science, and epidemiology described the the current collection of data as “utterly unreliable” due to the inability to test everyone who had potentially been infected. Ioannidis said that coronavirus may be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco”.