Coronavirus week 98B: Ioannidis takes himself out to the trash

John Ioannidis finished the process of taking himself out to the COVID dumpster with total bullshit in which he talks about Freedom House talking about America's decline in liberties over the past few years and attributes it ALL to COVID, and can't even mention Jan. 6, 2021. One will also noted that Ioannidis doesn't actually link to the Freedom House report. I did. It has two main areas of concern with the US briefly mentioned in a graphic near the top. One was public violence, almost entirely, of course, by antimaskers.

Further down, in the section specifically about the US, it mentions the Trump administration's "fog of misinformation." As I emailed Ioannidis (he responded when I called him out 8 months ago), that would go beyond direct fog to what Trump abetted, like the herd immunity etc. that Ioannidis touts. I told him he was a cherry-picker at best. I also said I'd alerted the likes of Massimo Pigliucci and Dorit Reuss to just how far he had fallen. ("Shockingly," Ioannidis hasn't responded to my second email. He did within 48 hours, if not 24, on our first exchange.)

Showing just how wankers Ioannidis is, he also, in a paper in the BMJ, cited the Kardashian Index (and non-satirically, it seems) for saying that John Snow Memorandum signatories are trumped in the world of actual non-celebrity science by Great Barrington signers. No, really.

I know John Horgan told me months ago, when I first blogged about Ioannidis' slipggage, that, based on Ioannidis' past reputation, he just couldn't throw him under the bus. Throw away, John. Orac blogged about the stuff in the paragraph above, and from there, directly takes look at Ioannidis' skeptics-lauded past to see if there weren't warning signs to be noticed sooner, pending what quack train Ioannidis might jump on. (I was reasonably charitable to Ioannidis in the original, but he will get none of that now or in the future.)

It is an ad hominem writ large, no doubt. But, Orac has his own history of ad hominems, including on COVID with his continuing to call the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory.

And, what IS it with Tablet? Multiple COVID contrarian pieces by Vinay Prasad as well. Like this nuttery. He also doesn't note that correlation doesn't NECESSARILY imply causation, but can, and that in social science work in general, including public health, multi-faceted correlation and causation can intertwine.