This article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology innovation. Is John Ioannidis’ controversial study a ‘black mark’ on scientific integrity?
By many measures, John Ioannidis is a lion of medical science. The Stanford University professor is the author of some of the most cited journal articles in medical history. His research in statistics and biomedicine has arguably changed the practice of medicine. A 2010 article in The Atlantic said “Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive.” And you would never know any of this from reading comments about him today.
It started on March 17, when Ioannidis published an opinion essay in STAT saying that the data on Covid-19 were not sufficient to know the disease’s true prevalence and fatality rate. He also argued that scientists were in the dark with respect to which distancing and lockdown measures work, which don’t, and what the measures’ downstream harms might be. All of which was true — even if his very early estimate that as few as 10,000 might die in the U.S. turned out to be wrong. Ioannidis went on to say that preventing people from working or leaving their homes could cause more harm than the virus itself.
It was this last bit that set off the firestorm of criticism. A typical comment on Twitter came from Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, who called the essay “content-free, logic-free drivel.” For detractors, Ioannidis’ argument that the data on both the virus and lockdowns were insufficient was tantamount to saying, “Do nothing.”............. the attacks on Ioannidis from the medical community and the popular press are different. They are tinged with partisanship..........On the left, The Nation published an article calling Ioannidis’ work a “black mark” on Stanford University. ........
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