John Ioannadis on The Wider Consequences of Viral BS

See Journeyman Pictures Three-part Series on The Pandemic and John Ioannadis (Stanford) On Data Analysis and Mass Media Overreaction.


At 22 minutes 10 seconds, the death statistics in NYC may be exaggerrated because they include cases where there is merely a possibility of COVID-19 being implicated, but no actual clinical evidence. See this March 24th CDC/NCHS advisory, supposedly made to increase the accuracy of statistics: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/alert-2-New-ICD-code-introduced-for-COVID-19-deaths.pdf


This was certainly a contributing factor to reports by Voice of America of mortuaries overflowing like this one and mass graves like this one.

At 25 minutes 50 seconds people under 65 account for less than 1% of COVID-19 deaths in European cities. But the figures in New York are different and it is not clear why. For most people under 65, the risk of dying after being infected by COVID-19 is about the same as the risk of dying in a road accident whilst driving to work.

At 26 minutes 50 seconds on PCR testing, see Richard Kauffman on The Chinese Wuhan Virus Tests.

At 36 minutes 33 seconds on dangers of some vaccines against coronavirus causing hyper-sensitivity and an exagerrated immune response which is more lethal than the virus itself would have been without the vaccine. There is already positive evidence of this in the case of COVID-19 CoV2. See Britt Glaunsinger on the Genomics of SARS-CoV2 in particular this, at 56 Minutes 20 seconds. See The Systemic Cause of Pandemics and Viruses May Be Better Than Antibiotics at Curing Bacterial Infection.

At 43 minutes 30 seconds there is a discussion of the projected death statistics published by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, and their subsequent dramatic revision one day after the UK National lock-down was instigated. See First Vaguely Sensible Government Response I've Heard on COVID-19 and Interview With Hannah Fry on the Mathematics of Pandemics. See also Coronavirus A War Against Humanity? for some more strange things Hannah was saying around that time.

Here are two articles on antibody testing. The first is from The Lancet: Developing antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2. The second is not so useful, from Nature: Will antibody tests for the coronavirus really change everything?

Here's a story to think about:


This is not a joke, because it applies to any decision-making apparatus that has a limited reference frame and is goal-driven without needing to take into account any of the additional consequences of the methods by which it reaches the given goal:

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