Maybe that will happen and then that would be the first event that someone would just drop dead on the floor
At the start of the pandemic Dr. John Ioannidis predicted COVID would kill 40,000 Americans this “season”. As the death toll blasted past this number, Dr. Ioannidis gave an interview titled The Bearer of Good Coronavirus News, in which he bemoaned the “panic-driven, horror-driven, death-reality-show type of situation” with regards to the virus.
He felt very differently about measures to limit the virus. He warned mitigation measures could lead to “financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric“. As COVID was overflowing morgues and hospitals, Dr. Ioannidis worried about theoretical harms from measures to contain it.
A pattern was established.
In 2022, Dr. Ioannidis starred in a documentary titled Out to See, where he shared his thoughts on the pandemic. At one point, Dr. Ioannidis mused on vaccine side effects and how they are more common than we think. “Side effects are always under reported,” he said. Neglecting surveillance systems such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink and data from outside the US, he falsely said, “it’s up to people and physicians and practitioners to report the events.” He also said this:
If you have, for example, myocarditis, but you don’t have some symptoms, even though you may have a problem with your heart muscle, then you don’t really report it because you never felt it. And could that person die at some point? Yes. One in, who knows, a million or 100,000. Maybe that will happen and then that would be the first event that someone would just drop dead on the floor. So the rest will not be captured.
YIKES! That’s sounds really scary. Echoing themes from the anti-vaccine propaganda documentary Died Suddenly, Dr. Ioannidis suggests the vaccine might cause people, even those who felt totally fine after getting it, “to just drop dead on the floor” and that such events would not be “captured”. The producer of Died Suddenly voiced similar sentiments. He said:
We absolutely know 100% what is going on. They want to cover it up. The doctors are dying, and they’re dying from these stupid shots.
Fortunately, the prognosis of vaccine myocarditis is almost always favorable- patients with vaccine‐related myocarditis had prompt resolution of symptoms and improvement of cardiac function– and this was known when Dr. Ioannidis made his movie. It’s possible there may be long term consequences, but presently, this is all theoretical. There is no evidence people are dropping dead from it, as the article from 2024 COVID Vax Not Linked to Sudden Deaths in Young Adults explained.
Of course, this won’t stop anti-vaccine advocates from blaming the vaccine for sudden cardiac deaths moving forward. That seed has been planted already and several “pro-vaccine” doctors acted as gardeners by openly treating theoretical harms from the vaccine as more concerning than actual death from COVID.
Don’t fear the thing that may kill you, respect the thing that certainly won’t
For someone who is less than 65 and has no underlying conditions, the risk of completely negligible.
Indeed, Dr. Ioannidis wasn’t always so concerned about rare events, including literal death. In an interview from April 17th, 2020, he said this about the virus:
The risk for people who are less than 65 and have no underlying conditions is extremely, extremely tiny. These people account for less than 1%….for someone who is less than 65 and has no underlying diseases, the risk is completely negligible…It seems that these deaths are extremely exceptional, very unlikely.
Elsewhere, Dr. Ioannidis claimed that “For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%”.
Dr. Ioannidis did not consider adverse COVID outcomes other than death, nor did he worry that COVID-myocarditis, which is more common and severe than vaccine-myocarditis, might one day cause people to “just drop dead on the floor.” In fact, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Ioannidis felt there might be a cost to preventing COVID in young people, and it had nothing to do with education. He said:
School closures may also diminish the chances of developing herd immunity in an age group that is spared serious disease.
To my knowledge, this was the first time anyone suggested mass infection as a means of ushering in herd immunity. This would later become policy in many places.
Just because they are young doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable
Even by this early point in the pandemic, however, it was known that COVID posed some risk to healthy young people. Most famously, the heroic doctor who tried to warn the world of COVID, Li Wenliang, died from it age 34. News reports soon began to report more tragedies. The article Hundreds of Young Americans Have Now Been Killed by the Coronavirus, Data Shows was published on April 8, 2020, the week before Dr. Ioannidis gave his interview. It began by saying:
Two weeks after her husband died alone in an intensive care unit in Fort Myers, Fla., Nicole Buchanan is quarantined at the home they shared with their 12-year-old daughter, wrestling not only with grief but also with why and how the coronavirus could steal someone so young and healthy.
“My husband didn’t have diabetes, he didn’t have asthma, he didn’t have high cholesterol. He didn’t have anything,” Buchanan said. “There’s just so much I’ll never know, that I’ll never get the answers to.”
Conrad Buchanan, who died at 39 on March 26 after battling the infection for nearly two weeks, was creative and goofy.
The article extensively quoted a doctor who actually treated COVID patients, unlike Dr. Ioannidis.
Shawn Evans, attending emergency physician and director of resuscitation at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, said he and other doctors on the front lines of the epidemic have been “humbled” by how many young people have been hospitalized and ended up in the ICU during the outbreak. “
This is nothing like we had predicted based on the data from these other countries,” Evans, who estimated roughly half the covid-19 patients in his ICU have been under 50, said in an interview… “Young people who are otherwise fit can tolerate this longer, but at the expense of their heart and their pulmonary functions,” said Evans… He said younger patients he has seen tend to come in later, after battling the disease at home for longer. But for those who take a tragic turn, it often happens quickly. “When they do deteriorate, they do so much more dramatically,” he said.
What has profoundly struck Evans and his colleagues is the seeming randomness of the type of young people who are unable to fight off the disease. “A very fit 30-year-old triathlete is just as vulnerable as a chess-playing 45-year-old who gets no exercise,” he said. “We just don’t know who it is that this virus carries the master key to.”
But he does have a message for any young people still under the impression that covid-19 is a disease that seriously threatens only the elderly and infirm. “Just because they are young doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable,” he said.
No one who worked in a hospital at that time would agree with Dr. Ioannidis that COVID was harmless for young and middle age people. I previously described seeing a healthy 23-year-old die as the most memorable moment of the pandemic for me. He died on April 9, 2020.
“For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%”
Though Dr. Ioannidis said “for people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%”, a small percentage of a large number is a large number. COVID killed thousands of young people in 2020, when most people were trying to avoid the virus, and it became a top killer of young people in 2021. Its toll would have been much worse had unvaccinated young people been willing to contract COVID en masse in 2020 as pro-infection doctors suggested.
Source: CDC
So let’s be clear what happened here. With theoretical harms from the vaccine, Dr. Ioannidis warned that “maybe… someone would just drop dead on the floor.” However, with actual harms from the virus, Dr. Ioannidis said for healthy people under age 65, “the risk is completely negligible“and that “for people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%“.
He was hardly unique in this regards. Unfortunately, Dr. Ioannidis was just one of several influential doctors who treated theoretical harms from the vaccine, even abnormal lab values in children who feel fine, with more gravitas and concern than actual deaths from COVID.
Abnormal lab values are treated seriously. Actual dead children are not.
COVID hospitalized 234,000 children this pandemic. Subclinical myocarditis is an abnormal lab value in a child who feels fine. Watch the video below. Actual COVID harms to children were casually shrugged off because the virus was worse for older people. In contrast, theoretical vaccine harms from the vaccine were treated with the utmost concern.
This happened all the time.
In reality, actual death is worse than theoretical death, and this didn’t used to be controversial in medicine.