9th April 2022
Prof. John Ioannidis has personally confirmed that covid is 50-500 times less lethal than the Spanish flu
ADDENDUM 5 MAY 2022
See additional note on Telegram / Twitter / Facebook.
====ORIGINAL POST===
Here’s my recent corro with Prof. Ioannidis . For those who’ve not heard of him, he is perhaps the most cited epidemiologist of all time – with with an h-index of 222 (Nobel Prize winners usually rank between 30 and 60) – here’s his Wikipedia page.
I chanced upon this 2020 article by Prof. Ioannidis : Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed. It said that the Spanish flu had caused >50 million deaths. I’ve been harping on this for quite a while now – and clearly the figure should be 220+ million.
So I wrote to Prof. Ioannidis yesterday:
Dear Prof Ionnidis, I’m a great fan of your work but just a quick comment re: the following sentence.
Early on, experienced modelers drew parallels between COVID-19 and the Spanish flu (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease- analysis/covid-19/report-9- impact-of-npis-on-covid-19/. (Accessed 2 June 2020)) that caused >50 million deaths with mean age of death being 28. This is incorrect. The 50 million figure of 1918 has to be standardised. It should be 220 million people – calculations are available at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ 1Z12go0iqw8zwylzxvkSV4RKGJ4MOL WJy7ujIo-OHojo/edit?usp= sharing (I had discussed this issue in my book, The Great Hysteria and The Broken State).
Unless your later papers have fixed this issue, could you please clarify this to the world, since it is obviously wrong to use the 50 million figure.
I’m copying xxx and a few others – in case they can help spread this information on social media – that the Spanish flu did not kill 50 million but 220 million people. The media, for instance, gets it wrong 100 per cent of the time.
He has kindly replied:
Dear Sanjeev
thank you for your kind message. You are correct, the 1918 flu was 50-500 times worse than COVID-19 once you adjust for population size and for age distribution. I have highlighted this recently in a paper on the end of the pandemic that includes a detailed table comparing the impact of pandemics versus the seasonal flu. Deaths from SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 was just 1.5-4 times the equivalent of three seasons of seasonal flu (most likely closer to the 1.5 number actually). Spanish flu was 100-1000 times bigger than 3 seasons of seasonal flu.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13782
Please feel free to circulate this as you see fit, as I don’t have social media.
Best wishes
John
This is the most important piece of information regarding the covid pandemic – which has been missed out by the huffing and puffing politicians and “health officers” who can’t do the most elementary arithmetic The lies of Scamo (who has called covid a “once in a hundred year type event”) have been caught out once again.
This is the Table from his March 2022 paper [paper copy on my server], which fixes the error:
Recall that John Ioannidis had shown in September 2020 that the IFR of COVID is 0.27% – up to three times that of seasonal flu. But recent data are far more conclusive – it is even lower. And the UK government confirms that the IFR is 0.096% – the SAME as that of seasonal flu.
CAN EVERYONE PLEASE WIDELY SHARE THIS INFORMATION? THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW THAT THEY HAVE BEEN MISLED FOR OVER 2 YEARS BY VIRTUALLY EVERYONE WHO HOLDS A POSITION OF AUTHORITY.