A terrific piece - but an important note to add concerning the Great Barrington Declaration is that it was NOT a spontaneous expression of legitimate scientific opinion but a heavily subsidized, deliberate effort by fossil fuel interests (particularly the Koch brothers) to minimize concern about COVID for both financial and ideological reasons. Whether they hand picked bad scientists before or after those scientists came to their erroneous conclusions is less clear but maybe not so important.
Good point. I left out the details on a lot of this just to limit the piece, but the role of vested interests in both the GBD and the Santa Clara study is an important piece of the story and the way pushed self serving narratives.
Thank you for featuring the dreadful Clara County pseudo-research, which should have destroyed John Ioannidis's reputation forever. And in any case, as a researcher with >70 articles as first author I think his famous "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is a lousy paper, based on trivial and/or obvious statements.
I couldn’t agree more. I find his role in this particularly unctuous because he was the only “epidemiologist” on the team and gave it credibility. In fact he had never before done original epidemiology that I can find and no on the team had ever done a seroprevalence study. It shows.
Thanks for the "like." Yeah, I know his name on the paper was intended to give this stupid study credibility. Thank you for doing the research showing he had no history of original epidemiological research. Maybe I should have done it. I see that you're The Skeptical Scientist, which I follow though without supporting you financially. I have my own Substack too, Stethoscope On Rome, which for years was COVID-19 only but lately has become entirely political.
A terrific piece - but an important note to add concerning the Great Barrington Declaration is that it was NOT a spontaneous expression of legitimate scientific opinion but a heavily subsidized, deliberate effort by fossil fuel interests (particularly the Koch brothers) to minimize concern about COVID for both financial and ideological reasons. Whether they hand picked bad scientists before or after those scientists came to their erroneous conclusions is less clear but maybe not so important.
Good point. I left out the details on a lot of this just to limit the piece, but the role of vested interests in both the GBD and the Santa Clara study is an important piece of the story and the way pushed self serving narratives.
Thank you for featuring the dreadful Clara County pseudo-research, which should have destroyed John Ioannidis's reputation forever. And in any case, as a researcher with >70 articles as first author I think his famous "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is a lousy paper, based on trivial and/or obvious statements.
I couldn’t agree more. I find his role in this particularly unctuous because he was the only “epidemiologist” on the team and gave it credibility. In fact he had never before done original epidemiology that I can find and no on the team had ever done a seroprevalence study. It shows.
Thanks for the "like." Yeah, I know his name on the paper was intended to give this stupid study credibility. Thank you for doing the research showing he had no history of original epidemiological research. Maybe I should have done it. I see that you're The Skeptical Scientist, which I follow though without supporting you financially. I have my own Substack too, Stethoscope On Rome, which for years was COVID-19 only but lately has become entirely political.