---
title: "John Ioannidis"
chunk: 4/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:42:37.127948+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== COVID-19 ==
In an editorial on STAT published March 17, 2020, Ioannidis wondered whether the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic may be a "once-in-a-century evidence fiasco" and asked for obtaining more reliable data to deal with the pandemic. He made a rough estimation that the coronavirus could cause 10,000 U.S. deaths if it infected 1% of the U.S. population, but argued that more data was needed to determine how widely the virus would spread. The virus in fact eventually became widely disseminated, and would cause more than one million deaths in the U.S. Ioannidis expressed doubt that vaccines or treatments would be developed and tested in time to affect how the pandemic would unfold. Marc Lipsitch, Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, objected to Ioannidis's characterization of the global response in a reply that was published on STAT the next day after Ioannidis's.
In March 2020, Ioannidis tried to organize a meeting at the White House where he and colleagues would caution President Donald Trump against "shutting down the country for [a] very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this", according to a proposal he submitted. The meeting did not come to pass, but on March 28, after Trump said he wanted the country reopened by Easter, Ioannidis wrote to his colleagues, "I think our ideas have inflitrated [sic] the White House regardless".
Ioannidis widely promoted a study of which he had been co-author, "COVID-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California", released as a preprint on April 17, 2020. It asserted that Santa Clara County's number of infections was between 50 and 85 times higher than the official count, putting the virus's fatality rate as low as 0.1% to 0.2%. Ioannidis concluded from the study that the coronavirus is "not the apocalyptic problem we thought". The message found favor with right-wing media outlets, but the paper drew criticism from a number of epidemiologists who said its testing was inaccurate and its methods were sloppy. Writing for Wired, David H. Freedman said that the Santa Clara study compromised Ioannidis's previously excellent reputation and meant that future generations of scientists may remember him as "the fringe scientist who pumped up a bad study that supported a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory in the middle of a massive health crisis".  Ioannidis has also promoted the idea that there were financial incentives to put COVID-19 on death certificates and as such, they were unreliable during the pandemic, as well as the idea that doctors killed COVID-19 patients through premature intubations.  Both of these beliefs contradict the available evidence.
It was later reported that the study received $5,000 in funding from the founder of the JetBlue airline, which led to criticism over a potential conflict of interest. In a guest opinion article in Scientific American, former colleagues of Ioannidis wrote that a legal firm had determined he had no financial conflict. A review by the Stanford School of Medicine faulted the study for shortcomings including a public perception of a conflict of interest, but found "no evidence that any of the study funders influenced the design, execution, or reporting of the study".
Amid controversy over his COVID-19 work and his frequent televised interviews, Ioannidis was harassed in memes and emails, including one falsely claiming his mother died of COVID-19. Some scientists and commentators voiced concerns over the backlash and the highly politicized scientific dispute in general.
In March 2021 Ioannidis estimated the global infection fatality rate from COVID-19 at 0.15%, in an article in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation (EJCI). In an article in Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski said that the EJCI article included ad hominem criticisms against a co-author of a higher estimate who had criticized his work on Twitter.
In February 2022 Ioannidis co-authored a paper examining the role of indoor and outdoor air quality in the spread of SARS-CoV-2, which concluded that environmental health may be a crucial component in the prevention of COVID-19 and suggested preventive measures such as indoor CO2 monitoring and mechanical ventilation.
In 2022, Ioannidis authored a paper in BMJ Open arguing that signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were shunned as a fringe minority by those in favor of the John Snow Memorandum. According to him, the latter used their large numbers of followers on Twitter and other social media and op-eds to shape a scientific groupthink against the former, who had less influence as measured by the Kardashian Index. The BMJ published responses to his paper, including a comment by Gavin Yamey, David Gorski, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which argued that Ioannidis's paper featured "factual errors, statistical shortcomings, failure to protect the named research subjects from harm, and potentially undeclared conflicts of interest that entirely undermine the analysis presented". In the same exchange of comments on The BMJ, Ioannidis addressed the concerns of Yamey, Gorski and Meyerovitz-Katz in his "Fourth set of replies", additionally stating that his "COVID-19 papers have been cited about 5 thousand times in the scientific literature by tens of thousands of scientists and were discussed by millions of people," and dismissed conflict of interest by asserting that he did not sign the Great Barrington Declaration or any other petition or signature collection on COVID-19, as he is against the notion that scientific matters and evidence could be decided by signature collections and prefers these matters be handled by heavily moderated public debates.