[allturtles]

I don't think it's necessary to invoke 'corruption', just the same cognitive biases that plague everyone. Ioaniddis committed early (at least by March 2020) to the position that COVID is probably not that big a deal and everyone was likely overreacting. Once you do that it's hard to back down and natural to keep looking for evidence that you're right (and to try to discount evidence that you're wrong).

[xxxxxxx12]

But you're trying to say that's he's downplaying the pandemic, when clearly he isn't. He's doing research that suggests some lower numbers than others. He's not the authority, and this is how science happens. An array of work is synthesized to come to conclusions.

I don't believe he's invested in disproving the pandemic or something. It is clear to me that the reactions to him are disproportionate to things he's saying.

His suggestions don't threaten anyone - clearly policy makers and the political class largely haven't listened to him. That people are threatened by him enough to start offhandedly discrediting him, suggests to me there's something deeper going on.

I think society has invested so much into lockdown and all the related measure that any evidence that's critical causes cognitive dissonance. People would be unable to bear the thought that what we did was unfounded or misguided.

The tell for me is that people are unable to allow for the existence of opposing arguments. Not only is Ioannidis wrong, he's obviously evil or dangerous, and must be discredited.

[allturtles]

I don't think he's evil or dangerous, just plain old wrong.

What you've posited about 'society' is a mirror-image of what I've posited about Ionnaidis. It's very hard to back down from public commitments to a certain point of view. Ionnaidis has invested all his credibility at this point in the consensus view on the pandemic being wrong.

[xxxxxxx12]

> Ionnaidis has invested all his credibility at this point in the consensus view on the pandemic being wrong.

Honestly given that the consensus view is very much based in (almost boundless) fear, and in lots of ways a sense of moral superiority - and compounded with the inability for experts around the world to effectively combat the virus, I think he's closer to reality than people seem to believe.

And again, I'd put forward the notion that people react so much to Ioaniddis because he threatens the coherent, highly-personalized worldview they've built up over the past year.