By late March, COVID had killed thousands. Many experts urged the US to shut down.

But Ioannidis wanted to warn Trump against “shutting down the country for very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this.”

His ideas were “scientifically untenable,” @mlipsitch says.
Ioannidis's recruits:

-Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford)
-Michael Levitt (Stanford)
-David Katz (True Health Initiative)
-Jeff Klausner (UCLA)
-James Fowler (UCSD)

And two who told me they did NOT agree w/the rest re: lockdowns:
-Sten Vermund (Yale)
-Art Reingold (Berkeley)
Ioannidis went on to show in studies that COVID wasn’t risky for most people. You may recall THE antibody study.

In May, when I reported the JetBlue founder had funded that study, Ioannidis claimed to not know who his funders were.

So I found this March email interesting...
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