academics in general are a special breedā¦
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Ioannidis predicted 10,000 deaths tops in the US based on no restrictions. To say heās āby no means infallibleā is extremely kind. It would be akin to saying that people who believe in flat earth theory have āunconventionalā or āmaverickā opinions.
And as for your assertion of āmore right than wrongā, Iād say that somebody who predicted 10,000 deaths in the US based on a no restriction environment has got it so spectacularly wrong that they have pretty much lost the right to be taken seriously on anything ever again.
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Welcome back Sid.
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Are you any relation to Tom?
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Thatād be a long list.
Iām assuming the same logic would hold for the likes of Neil Ferguson and San McKonkey and co who predicted many multiples of the actual death toll too?
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Ioannidis did not predict 10,000 deaths, in March 2020 he gave an effective range of 1K to 1.6 million for the US and urged caution making decisions on what was known at the time.
This is the problem with debates on the INTERNET. A lie was spread to further an agenda, you prove it was bullshit, but the person who wrote it continues on as if it never happened. A return of the well clamped rating is badly needed.
Itās the problem of being blinded by ideology, on both sides. We had a congresswoman here call for the police to be abolished and no more incarceration this week. Which means of course that Officer Chauvin could not be sentenced, and all psychopaths and serial killers set free. Mad stuff altogether, yet people get away with it.
Ferguson has become a sort of boogie man for the crackpots for seemingly no reason at all, I suppose they need somebody to lash out irrationally at. There are a lot of lies about Ferguson and what he āpredictedā. His model came up with around 510k deaths for the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the US in a situation where there were no government interventions and no behaviour modifications among the population, ie. an absolute worst case scenario where the entirety of the population behaved as if there were no pandemic. The UK has had 127k Covid deaths within a 28 day cut off, in reality their real amount of Covid deaths is much higher, probably more than 150k, while the US has had 578k deaths so far. Thatās with wide scale government intervention to restrict movement and severe behaviour modification among the populations.
That seems pretty reasonable to me and broadly correct - as it was obvious that it wasnāt going to be a case of no government intervention and no behaviour modification among the population, thatās not how human nature works in the face of a pandemic like this.
Iāve no vested interest in defending Ferguson, I just think itās funny how somebody who put forward what seems to me to be a fairly reasonable model of what could happen has become such a figure of hate for the deniers. This hatred makes no sense.
As regards McConkey, sure he comes across a bit of a doomsayer, but Iād take somebody who spells out the worst case scenario any day over a chancer like Ioannidis who demanded that the US government be totally cavalier with the lives of many millions of people.
The worst McConkey can be accused of is of being too dystopian, but he definitely canāt be accused of not taking the pandemic seriously. The dividing line about who is worth listening to and who isnāt is who took the pandemic seriously and who didnāt. Ioannidis didnāt. McConkey did, he warned accordingly, and if his worst case scenarios didnāt or donāt come to pass and his warnings help to prevent worst case scenarios, well, thatās a significant gain for society over the alternative, isnāt it? Why? Because lives have been saved that would otherwise have been lost. Again, the hatred for McConkey makes no sense. Itās like having hatred for somebody who warns somebody staggering out of a pub drunk not to drink drive home.
The genuinely dangerous people throughout this pandemic have been the idiots who constantly played it down, because playing it down played with peopleās lives, and many people lost their lives because of people in the public eye who constantly played it down. Funnily enough Stanford, not least its āHoover Institutionā pushing out far right propaganda dressed up as science, has been a haven for these know nothings. Ioannidis, Michael Levitt, Scott Atlas, Richard Epstein, all constantly told the public to underestimate the pandemic. Their words had as much value as Toby Youngās, their words cost lives, and they should all hang their heads in shame.
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Quote:
If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population ā a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis ā and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.
No. You can take a pandemic seriously and not upend everything else in the world because of it at the same time.
Yes, but read the whole article, rather than quote mining. His pessimistic case later in the article is 40 million dead. The thrust of his article, which is in keeping with what a good scientist should do, is that decisions should not be made on unreliable data. It was written on March 17th, 2020. He also proposed extensive antibody testing, which would have been a wonderful help if it had been pursued.
But he wasnāt setting government policy. Fauci was, and he was (at the time) telling people to go on cruises.
Know nothings 
Where did you get your PhD yourself?
Ferguson took the pandemic so seriously he ignored the rules that he insisted others should follow. You donāt think that had an influence on how seriously the general public took government advice? How many lives did that cost I wonder, if he can break the rules why canāt I? Or Gavin Newsome in California telling the public not to eat at restaurants, and then breaking his own rules, or Nancy Pelosi going to a hair salon that was legally closed, etc. Great role models. Plenty other examples across the political spectrum.
Regarding Ireland, if the HSE and NPHET were interested in saving lives they would have made care homes secure and worked on infectious disease control in Irish hospitals. That would have saved approx 50% of the deaths right there. But they were too busy dreaming up restrictions like 5km and stopping people going to the park.
Only a far left nutter would label the Hoover Institution far right. Youāre not doing a good job of camouflage Sid.
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Neil Ferguson is a total hypocrite and smug, slimy, arrogant nomark late onset hipster cunt of the very highest order. The kind of man whoās natural level is vice president sales of a small brand of generic paracetamol (now with added caffeine)
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Ffs are the FBI going to get called again
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Stanford are in his sights now. Those no mark bastards.
Of all the lads to go to bat for, Ferguson is a strange choice.
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After reading that post flatty, I reckon you might not agree with him but would ride anyway
Fuck off Sid