New study confirms COVID was not very dangerous for 94% of the population
John Ioannidis and his team strike again
A team from Stanford has released a review of COVID-19 national seroprevalence studies showing that the infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 was around 0.09% for ages 0-70. The review is a pre-print and has not undergone peer-review.
You may recognize some of the authors’ names. That’s because the group is headed by world-renowned scientist John Ioannidis. Professor Ioannidis has taken heat over the past couple years for daring to review seroprevalence studies and determine that COVID-19 was never very dangerous for the overwhelming majority of people on Earth. Previously, he published a review showing that across 51 locations, the median IFR was about 0.23%, which is 2-3 times as dangerous as influenza. He also claimed that for the age group 0-70, the IFR was around 0.05%, though this was highly criticized by the healthcare establishment.
In the new study, he and his team dug into some more data and found the IFR for the 0-70 age group was around .09%. Breaking down the numbers by age confirmed what we have known since March of 2020, namely that COVID is practically harmless for the very young and becomes progressively more dangerous with increased age. For most of the world population, the disease was comparable to influenza or even milder.
The scientists looked at studies from various countries performed before February 2021, prior to the COVID shots becoming widely available. There is of course variability between the different countries, but for most of them the IFR was quite low.
These results don‘t align with many of the purported experiences of many health care professionals. Many medical professionals were frustrated by claims that COVID was not much worse than the yearly flu because they saw their places of work overflowing with COVID patients. I heard one anecdote from a hospital worker who said she had never seen so many body bags. This frustration was passed down to the public, thus leading to the endless calls to sacrifice our freedoms in order to keep hospitals from overflowing.
So who is right? Is it the scientists looking at the seroprevalence data? Or is it the medical professionals who were in the trenches? I have already written about how during the COVID years in the United States, pneumonia deaths skyrocketed. There is also evidence that the medical establishment withheld potential treatments from sick patients that would have kept them from going to the hospital.
In a future post, I am going to do some digging into the issue of overflowing hospitals and overworked medical professionals. Was it all due to COVID-19, or was there something else going on?
Stay tuned.