Evidence Man

"Let's play another game."
--Frank Dulaney (Body of Evidence)

Nice follow-up piece with Stanford MD and prof John Ioannidis. These pages discussed Ioannidis' mid-March warning of the 'evidence fiasco' surrounding COVID policymaking.

Not surprisingly, he was chastised by the public health establishment for breaking ranks from the party line. Fortunately, Dr Ioannidis did not bow to institutional pressures for compliance and remained on course. Since then, he has authored multiple academic articles on early COVID data analysis and need for better evidence-based policymaking. He has also collaborated with several Stanford colleagues to perform one of the early antibody studies on COVID infection prevalence.

One of the things I find most interesting is that most of Ioannidis' early conclusions--many drawn from analysis of the unique Diamond Princess cruise ship population sample--still hold today.

In the WSJ follow-up piece, Ioannidis notes that, although he enjoys models, "they're very, very low in terms of how much weight we can place on them and how much we can trust them." While models might offer some intuition about situation's early shape, "depending on models for evidence, I think that's a very bad recipe."

He laments that "there's a sort of mob mentality here operating that they just insist that this has to be the end of the world, and it has to be that the sky is falling." Rather than focusing on data and evidence, the mob favors "speculation and science fiction."

Well said, Dr Ioannidis. However, these pages have argued that games of COVID dissonance should be expected. We might also expect that such dissonance will dissipate as the body of evidence continues to grow.