I just saw that #Metascience 2025 has John Ioannides as a featured speaker and I have to say I‘m surprised by that choice
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in case this needs more spelling out… regardless of his prior contributions to metascience, open science and the science reform movement:
1. John Ioannidis was a co-author on the scientifically appallingly bad Santa Clara seroprevalence study that minimised Covid risk and became a go to reference for Great Barrington Declaration fans.
Here is a discussion of it from the time -
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2/ though he was never a signatory of the GBD, he together with signatories such as Bhattacharya and Kulldorf provided advice to Scott Atlas, Trump’s Covid advisor
“Dr Atlas published a memoir, called “A Plague Upon Our House,” which praises Professor Ioannidis and the GBD authors multiple times throughout the book [9]. For example, in Atlas’s attack on Deborah Birx, President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, Atlas writes:
“she [Dr Birx] insisted that all experts agreed with her. I shook my head, thinking of some of the world-class epidemiologists who agreed with me—John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—and wondered if she or Fauci had ever read a single publication by them” [9].
Atlas is stating that Professor Ioannidis “agreed with him,” and did so specifically during the period in which Atlas was dueling with Dr Birx on how to manage the US pandemic response following the GBD’s online publication.
Further, in January 2021, on an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, Atlas specifically thanked Professor Ioannidis [10]. Atlas said:
“I just want to say, I have a shout out to my friend and colleague John Ioannidis at Stanford who kept reassuring me during that time, ‘Scott, the truth will prevail. Everything you're saying is exactly right,’””
3/ he promoted wild claims about Covid intubation, vaccination and death certificates
4/ all of this is ongoing in as much he is on the editorial board of the controversial new “members only journal”
Journal of the Academy of Public Health
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-journal-co-founded-nih-nominee-raises-eyebrows-misinformation-fears
5/ in all this he remains close to Bhattacharya and Makary - individuals actively involved in dismantling US public health and science in the Trump administration
6/ much of this scientific endeavour has been funded by US “conservative” donors and it remains the case that Covid disproportionally affected marginalised communities
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