In March, when the COVID Hysteria was breaking out, we quoted Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor in Disease Prevention in the School of Medicine at Stanford University, who stated, “The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.”
Last week, Dr. Ioannidis published an analysis of 12 highly regarded COVID-19 scientific studies that the mainstream media avoid. Among his conclusions:
- “The infection fatality rate (IFR), the probability of dying for a person who is infected, is one of the most critical and most contested features of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
- Seven of the 12 inferred IFRs are in the range 07 to 0.20 which are similar to IFR values of seasonal influenza.
- Three values are modestly higher (corrected IFR of 0.25-0.40 in Gangelt, Geneva, and Wuhan) and two are modestly lower than this range (corrected IFR of 0.02-0.03 in Kobe and Oise).”
As reported previously in the Trends Journal, when governments around the world started closing down their countries, they were basing it on fatality rates of 3.4 percent and then recently lowered to one percent by the World Health Organization (WHO).
And while we still don’t have all the data needed for a conclusive IFR, the rate confirmed in this latest study is at least as low as 0.07 to 0.20, which, as Dr. Ioannidis points out, is similar to seasonal flu.
As noted in the Trends Journal, Dr. Ioannidis said, in different words, what we have been saying since the media and politicians started selling COVID Fear and Hysteria. In a an interview last month, he said the reason why political leaders and so many medical “experts” had this wrong and unnecessarily imposed draconian orders to shut down the global economy was because:
“There’s some 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. It’s attacking studies with data based on speculation and science fiction. But dismissing real data in favor of mathematical speculation is mind-boggling.”
He also commented on the WHO’s revised estimate of IFR at the much higher rate: “You know, 1 percent is, is probably like the disaster case, maybe in some places in Queens, [NY] for example, it may be 1 percent, because you have all that perfect storm of nursing homes, and nosocomial infection [an infection that originates in a hospital], and no hospital system functioning. In many other places, it’s much, much lower.”
Dr. Ioannidis has not been the only reputable source of more accurate data on COVID-19. On 17 March, the renowned Oxford University’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEMB) stated, “Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%.”
TRENDPOST: The 1957–58 influenza pandemic, also known as the Asian flu, was a global pandemic that killed some one million people worldwide.
At the time, with the world’s population at about three billion, one million dead out of three billion is 0.033 percent.
Today, COVID has killed some 400,000 out of a world population of 7.8 billion, or 0.0051 percent.
While the media and politicians keep selling fear and hysteria, they continue to not only compare it to more recent deadly viruses and flus, but, more importantly, they didn’t close down nations to fight the flu back then.
Indeed, if COVID-19 were as deadly as the Asian flu, with today’s total population of 7.8 billion, using the same percentage from 1957–58 of 0.0333 percent, it would equate to 2,600,000 dead instead of 400,000. This is also assuming the 400,000 number is correct, with the suspect over-reporting of cases that have not been confirmed with tests, as we have documented.