The name of the blog is, as we say, Science-Based Medicine. As the name implies, we generally discuss medicine, science, and the intersection between the two. Also, sadly, politics, religion, and other ideologies can’t be avoided, because science-based medicine inevitably interacts with them. Depressingly these days, given who is in power in the US, this interaction is now mostly antagonistic, or, as I call it Lysenkoism 2.0, the ongoing effort by the current administration to impose its ideology on all federally funded science, be it biomedical or any other science. Lysenkoism, of course, is named after Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet scientist who devastated Soviet agriculture for three decades in the 20th century with his Marxist ideology-inspired version of warmed-over Lamarckism that became state science dogma because Josef Stalin liked it and who persecuted scientists who actually tried to stand up for (and do) actual science. The parallels to our current administration are just too unpleasantly apt. Indeed, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement was just the start of the Lysenkoism in this administration, and the difference between now and when Lysenko ruled Soviet agriculture in the 1930s is that this administration is trying to put its ideological stamp on all science, not just genetics as applied to agriculture.
It’s in this environment that my attention was directed to an article by John Ioannidis about science journalism, which is one of the two subjects of this post:
Ioannidis is, as you probably recall, a physician-scientist at Stanford University—Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and Population Health—who is also one of the most published scientists in the world (if not the most published living scientist), with well over 1,200 peer-reviewed papers indexed in PubMed and 39 papers just in 2026 alone. As I admit every time I write about him, John Ioannidis was once a personal scientific hero and, I daresay, a hero of SBM bloggers in general. Pre-pandemic, we featured general laudatory commentary about a number of his papers, including papers about bad epidemiologyregarding diet and cancer risk, the life cycle of translational research, whether popularity leads to unreliability in science, problems with reproducibility in science, and the reliability of scientific findings, all of which contributes to the puzzlement many of us at SBM have expressed over Ioannidis’ evolution into a COVID-19 contrarian who has been wrong about so much about the pandemic and has even credulously regurgitated outright conspiracy theories about it.
After the pandemic hit, Professor Ioannidis has arguably evolved into one of the most prolific producers in the scientific literature of articles that downplayed the severity of the pandemic, many based on methodolatry. Jonathan Howard and I documented it all, the most egregious example being when Ioannidis credulously repeated a conspiracy theory from early in the pandemic claiming that doctors were intubating COVID-19 patients willy-nilly who didn’t really need intubation, thereby killing them. Less egregious (but still quite egregious) examples include downplaying the death toll from the pandemic by misrepresenting how death certificates are filled outto claim that it was comorbidities killing patients rather than COVID-19 and that COVID-19 mortality statistics were therefore hugely exaggerated (another conspiracy theory); downplaying the impact of the pandemic on hospitals; and publishing articles that overestimated the prevalence of COVID-19 and underestimated its infection fatality rate (IFR), among other things. His low point, arguably, came in 2022 when he weaponized the Kardashian index, a publication citation scoring index that was always intended from the beginning to be satirical, to attack his critics.
Unfortunately, encountering serious public criticism for probably the first time in his life seems to have warped Prof. Ioannidis’ worldview in a major way. In his persecution complex, for the past several years since the pandemic first hit in early 2020, he seems to view the gravest threat to science to be criticism of contrarian views on the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the ones he espoused, by journalists and bloggers. That’s why I think it’s a useful exercise to compare the threat to science as outlined Prof. Ioannidis’ article entitled Science Journalism and Advocacy: disseminating, facilitating, defending, shaping, terrorizing, or usurping science? with the actual threat to science outlined in a lengthy New York Times report published over the weekend. The NYT article is by Christopher Flavelle, Irena Hwang, Adam Sella, Alan Blinder, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Benjamin Mueller, and Michael C. Bender and entitled How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine. Of course, it’s not just scientific and medical research that is being dismantled, as we’ve discussed many times here. It’s medicine and public health as well.
First, let’s see Prof. Ioannidis’ view of the problem.
That nasty advocacy!
The interesting thing about Prof. Ioannidis’ article is that there are parts of it with which I actually agree, at least divorced from the context of the parts of the article that come across as score-settling with his critics. For instance, he argues that advocacy should be separated from journalism as much a possible and that the difference should be clear, which, of course, is a pretty unobjectionable point of view. He laments how artificial intelligence is being used to add slop to the scientific literature, again, a pretty unobjectionable concern. He advocates “giving priority to science over opinion; improving accountability in authorship/contributorship, other types of transparency, and documentation of information sources; and endorsing and honoring ethical standards,” again all pretty unobjectionable suggestions.
Here’s the problem. If you read the article, it doesn’t take long to see that he’s definitely coming from a specific ideological point of view. For instance, all the examples share a rather obvious commonality, and his analogies are very much overblown and off-base, particularly in the abstract, where he warns that “science journalism and advocacy may exert tyrannic power, even to the point of terrorizing scientific fields or usurping science.” Wait, what? “Tyrannical power”? (He uses different forms of the word “tyrannical” six times in the article, and one whole section is entitled “Tyrannizing science.”) “Terrorizing scientific fields”? What on earth is Prof. Ioannidis talking about? Unfortunately, what he is talking about becomes all too apparent all too soon.
I’m going to start with the part of the article that reveals what is really behind Prof. Ioannidis’ fears. First, he starts with a clever misdirection that makes it seem as though he understands real threats to science from corporate and political interests, citing tobacco as an example in the 20th century:
For many traditional journalists, the relationship with advocacy and activism is obvious and vital. Dispassionate objectivity is traditionally considered a coveted professional virtue for any journalist. However, there is also strong pressure and an ethical imperative to promote and fight for the right causes, and this is seen as a service to the community and to the future of humanity at large. When major threats such as tobacco persist, and where “merchants of doubt” abound (Oreskes and Conway 2010), their dark plans should be countered. However, most scientific topics are not so clear-cut that they require forceful, outspoken activism. We need to pick carefully our battles.
Funny how Prof. Ioannidis recognizes that there are actual “Merchants of Doubt,” to cite the title of a famous book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway that documented how corporate interests worked to subvert science by corrupt scientists into casting doubt on the dangers of tobacco smoking and the emerging scientific consensus on human-caused global climate change. It’s a foundational work in the sphere of combatting science denialism. So far, Prof. Ioannidis sounds reasonable. Then he goes off the rails with a false equivalence so epic that this is the only appropriate reaction, in my not-so-humble opinion:
Think I’m not being fair? Think I’m just doing a Gorski-ism bit of exaggeration for rhetorical and/or comic effect. I’m happy to let you judge for yourself:
For example, for many pundits and science communicators, mask mandates during COVID-19 were as important a hill to die on as tobacco. While my personal bias and hope during the early pandemic years was that masks might be effective, most likely I was wrong—at least randomized trials do not suggest effectiveness for COVID-19 (Jefferson et al. 2023). Masks may reduce self-reported respiratory symptoms (not COVID-19-specific), but only in those participants who before the trial believed that masks would be effective (Solberg 2024). However, convinced advocates continued to defend mask mandates and vehemently attacked the relevant randomized trials and their carefully conducted systematic review (Oreskes 2023). Such an indefensible partisan position opens the gates wide open to any malicious merchant of doubt: “Look, these are the scientists and communicators who claimed that tobacco is bad. For mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures and so many other unbelievably egregious measures, they were so wrong, they continue to be wrong, and they will not accept it. Why should we trust them then on tobacco, climate change, or anything? These are just fanatics.” The malicious merchants of doubt will justifiably trash us if we behave as activists when we should behave as impartial communicators and as self-correcting scientists.
That’s right! To Prof. Ioannidis, the attacks on those who claimed that mask wearing was ineffective for decreasing the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, were just like the nefarious corporations and politically motivated actors doing everything they could in the mid- to late-20th century to cast doubt on the science increasingly showing all the health problems associated with smoking, including lung cancer, a number of other cancers, heart disease, and chronic lung diseases. And, again, demonstrating his methodolatry, he places all his reliance on randomized clinical trials, even though randomized clinical trials of masking are incredibly difficult to carry out and prone to all sorts of issues. (Methodolatry is defined as the “profane worship” of the randomized controlled clinical trial as the only valid method of clinical investigation.) I would also point out that Cochrane’s editor-in-chief called characterizations of the Cochrane systematic review like the Prof. Ioannidis’—that masks don’t work for COVID-19—an inaccurate and misleading reading:
The way I like to put it is that testing whether masks work is really, really difficult, and, more importantly, most of the studies cited by people like Prof. Ioannidis to claim that “masks don’t work” for COVID-19 are not testing masking itself, but rather policies requiring or encouraging masking. As a commenter on a discussion forum wrote at the time:
Cochrane continuing to be clown college central. RCTs are completely invalid for this, EBM is a freaking disaster. On the issue of masks they are built on engineering principles using knowledge of physics and unlike medicine, there is no need for evidence-based engineering because everything engineered is based on evidence, medicine is the only profession that has had and continues to use practices devoid of any actual evidence. Actually arguing that better masks don’t work better is equivalent to dismissing physics. Physics works, it’s predictive, reliable, accurate.
The worst part of this is that you can say exactly the same things about a vaccine-only strategy for COVID, it has low adherence therefore is not viable, but no one cares about reasoning or logic, it’s all about what feels right. No one in their right mind would go to a high hazard biolab or breathe toxic fumes wearing only a surgical mask. Because the issue isn’t about whether they work, it’s about whether they want to tolerate them. Of course they work, it’s just that, somehow, medicine has built some weird belief system about the immune system needing to be constantly challenged, or whatever. Many want infections, think they’re good. A belief contradicted by evidence.
My interpretation of the existing literature is that surgical masks work, but N95s work better. What anti-maskers frequently do is what antivaxxers do: Weaponize the Nirvana fallacy by portraying surgical masks as being imperfect (and arguably their efficacy is modest, certainly compared to N95s, which are more efficacious, and equating that with “not working” at all, just as antivaxxers like to portray vaccines that don’t completely block transmission (e.g., most of them) or disease (e.g., vaccines like the influenza vaccine) as being completely useless. In doing so, they ignore the principle of risk and harm reduction, as if any preventative intervention that isn’t 100% effective is not worth doing. Moreover, again, what these RCTs tested were efficacies of mandates and other policies to promote the preventative intervention, not the preventative interventions themselves. The preventative measures work. Mandates appear to work, but the evidence is a lot softer and more mixed, because, you know, human nature.
That particular commenter is also very on target regarding the misguided belief, one apparently shared by Prof. Ioannidis, that post-infection immunity (usually called “natural herd immunity” by advocates) is always preferable to vaccine-induced immunity or to avoiding catching the disease. It’s no coincidence that Prof. Ioannidis was in favor of a “natural herd immunity” strategy starting very early in the pandemic and later latched onto the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), the statement issued by three scientists, one of whom is now our Director of the National Institutes of Health, issued in October 2020 that called for a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic plus a vague call for “focused protection” of individuals at individuals at high risk of death or serious complications. The claimed that their policy would would lead to “natural herd immunity” in six months, which is why it was often called a “natural herd immunity” approach. The GBD, as you recall, was hugely influential because it aligned with the natural interests of business to “re-open” the economy by eliminating pandemic restrictions on business and social interaction intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. Unfortunately, Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, appeared not to have thought too deeply about any of it, particularly the focused protection part, given that they really proposed no realistic strategy to achieve such protection. At its heart, the GBD was a profoundly social Darwinist document that, in essence, advocated abandoning the weak to the virus so that the strong could “open up” the economy again. Basically the GBD could never have worked, as one of its supporters implicitly admitted, but managed to do devastating damage to public health, due to its influence.
The funny thing here is that Prof. Ioannidis inadvertently does cite an actual good example of how the “merchants of doubt” attacked science in order to cast doubt on conclusions that they didn’t like; he just got it completely backwards. After all, the GBD was the result of Jeffrey Tucker, who at the time was affiliated with the very conservative “free market” think tank American Institute of Economic Research, bringing together three unhappy scientists, Martin Kuldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Sunetra Gupta, to draft it at a retreat. Later he bragged, riffing on the famous line in the musical Hamilton, about how he’d been in the “room where it happened.” In reality, the real “merchants of doubt” were the forces behind the GBD and their boosters—I’m looking at you, Prof. Ioannidis—who did their damnedest to bring to an end any non-pharmaceutical interventions designed to hinder the spread of COVID-19 when they interfered with businesses making money. It’s projection at its finest. It’s also particularly ironic given that Prof. Ioannidis, as the world’s most published health scientist, can publish his jeremiads almost anywhere in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature almost he wants any time he wants. We, his humble critics, are lucky when we manage to get articles calling out health misinformation formation published anywhere in the peer-reviewed biomedical literature.
Indeed, if you really want your irony meter fried, read this bit:
Importantly, many media outlets are already deep into advocacy and activism for the wrong causes. They are tainted by conflicts with powerful political, business, industry, tech, religious, or other stakeholders. Most influential legacy media are owned or indirectly controlled by billionaires and other powerful stakeholders (including, in many countries, totalitarian or corrupted and cartel-endorsing governments). These media outlets strongly and clearly try to promote specific agendas, which are rarely seriously based on science. The state of freedom of the press worldwide is lamentable and deteriorating in most countries (Reporters Without Borders 2025). Social media are not immune to these perturbations and may be even more amenable to swift and effective, massive biasing. AI tools make the possibility to infuse advocacy and activism even easier, with new industrial scales of interference in science and science-related material.
Projection, thy name is Ioannidis! After all, the right wing media and ecosystem that sprang into action to oppose “lockdowns,” mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and then ultimately vaccines did exactly what Prof. Ioannidis describes here. In the era of the Trump administration, the government is joining in.
An even funnier thing is the intensity of Prof. Ioannidis’ laments about criticism directed at him, even when that criticism was well-grounded in science, not to mention their frequency. This is by far not the first time that Prof. Ioannidis has written an article like this. It’s not even the first time this year. Earlier this year, he was the corresponding author for a paper entitled Misinformation blaming and labelling may damage health, science and policy making. Our very own Dr. Jonathan Howard rightly called it DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), citing this perfect gem from Kevin Kretsch:
Misinformation labelling may damage health, science, and policy making? Gee, that sounds an awful lot like somebody wants misinformation to be left alone and never called out. I wonder why that might be?
I get very similar vibes from the current article by Prof. Ioannidis, even when I admit to agreeing with some of it. Indeed, his complaints about conflicts of interest and how billionaires and powerful stakeholders control what is seen in the media, both legacy and social media, apply very much to how attacks on pandemic restrictions and public health played out. This time, however, he’s more specifically attacking journalists, science communicators and social media influencers, and bloggers, almost none of whom have the influence he does.
Yet, it is journalists and bloggers whom Prof. Ioannidis reserves his vitriol as he calls them out:
Science defenders often preach to the choir, and they fail to win over any of the doubters. Moreover, anti-science movements can gain ammunition when science defenders behave non-scientifically. A calm look at the struggling work of some communicators who emphatically call themselves “science-based” or “evidence-based” shows that their tools do a disservice to science. Sadly, some may even cause more damage to science than anti-science conspirators. In journalistic venues that hijack the terms “science-based” and “evidence-based,” one can find a prolific production of hit pieces and hate-, obsession-, and sick-ideology-driven libels. Largely disconnected from serious science, these outlets simply try to stir raw emotions within echo chambers of blind, addicted followers. But even the most prestigious scientific journalism venues can deteriorate rapidly if ideology gains an upper hand over science in their pages. For example, Scientific American witnessed a radical transformation after early 2020. Once highly respectable, it became a polarizing ideological outlet, occasionally even employing outright smearing machinery. The editor-in-chief who led this sad transformation ended up resigning after publishing highly insulting political messages in social media.
Don’t hold back, Prof. Ioannidis. Tell us how you really feel. “hate-, obsession-, and sick-ideology-driven libels”? We “cause more damage to science than anti-science conspirators” (who are, conveniently, not named)? We “stir raw emotions within echo chambers of blind, addicted followers”? (It’s you, dear readers, whom he’s calling “blind” and “addicted.”) Seriously, who is the one using emotionally charged language here? Prof. Ioannidis sounds like a very, very angry, which strikes me as odd, given his level of privilege, standing, and power in the scientific community. Seriously, he comes across as ranting as he tries to swat away what, compared to him, are flies.
It’s also funny that he mentioned Scientific American. Say what you will about its political coverage of science over the last several years, The Nation provides a story of what happened to it in an article by Emmet Fraizer entitled The Fall of Scientific American. The tagline? It’s very telling: “When the Trump administration objected to the magazine’s political coverage, its corporate owners stepped in. Now its future is uncertain.” Part of the story related how editors had been instructed not to put Donald Trump’s name in any headlines:
What about that rumor, someone asked him: Had editors really been told to not put the word “Trump” in headlines?
That was true, Ewalt said. Last year, a Breitbart article had criticized Springer Nature, Scientific American’s German owner, for attacking those “skeptical of the coronavirus vaccine” and spreading “gender insanity.” “No more taxpayer money for woke publishers!” declared Donald Trump Jr., retweeting the article. In June 2025, Axios reported that all federal subscriptions to Springer Nature publications had been canceled. Although Trump officials later walked back the bulk of the cuts, they had shocked the scientific community: Without access to Springer Nature’s thousands of journals, including the prestigious Nature publications, researchers at federal agencies—from the NIH to NASA—would struggle to stay abreast of scientific developments. The company itself, meanwhile, risked losing as much as $25 million in federal contracts.
“So if Ewalt had asked people to keep Trump out of the headlines last summer, it was because corporate higher-ups were visiting the site all the time. “And if they saw the word ‘Trump,’” he said, according to the recording, “they were wetting their fucking lederhosen.” People had no idea how “lily-livered and weak-kneed and cowardly” Springer Nature was, he said. “They are so fucking afraid of the Trump administration.”
I find it telling that Ioannidis seems unbothered (or at least fails to mention) that the “downfall” of Scientific American was not so much for its political reporting, but because the publisher became afraid of the Trump administration and decided to cool it. If you read the rest of the story, you’ll find that, as a result of political pressure, Scientific American basically folded the opinion department and reassigned opinion writers and editors, calling it a “hiatus” until the new editor-in-chief arrived. Now, a year after David Ewalt, the new editor-in-chief, has been in the position, the opinion page has not returned, and there is no indication that it will, with Ewalt quotes as warning his staff, although they could put Trump’s name in headlines again, “But let’s be realistic about the world we live in,” he told his staff.” Last August, Ewalt warned, “
And:
Last August, Ewalt warned, Springer Nature could have easily decided that the magazine’s “$4 million in losses” wasn’t worth risking millions more that the company earned from federally funded subscriptions to its scientific journals. He had been “trying to keep Springer Nature from freaking out and shutting us down,” he said.
That’s right. Springer Nature toned down Scientific American’s coverage of Trump science policy because its publisher was worried that Trump would cancel millions of dollars worth of subscriptions to its scientific journals by federal agencies, such as the NIH. Again, Prof. Ioannidis is either blissfully ignorant of these facts or thinks that Scientific American deserves what happened to it because it was too “political” and “woke.” Take your pick.
Then there’s stuff that Prof. Ioannidis claims that is straight up misleadingly presented, such as the following unsourced claim. First, however, if you are a Wikipedia editor, feel free to facepalm:
Journalism may shape science in powerful ways. Scientific investigation can be complex, resisting facile, unidirectional interpretation. When communicators simplify evidence for wider audiences, the simplified narrative may then become what gets canonized as scientific “fact” or “truth” in the wider community. Influential summarizers, such as Wikipedia, generally select secondary sources (largely journalism) rather than primary scientific literature to present and support with citations their science coverage. Wikipedia explicitly encourages the use of material from journalists and discourages the use of material from scientists—unless they act as journalists or get their views filtered and massaged by journalists. For evolving fields, this selection bias can make the opinion and perspectives of largely ignorant influencers more powerful than the peer-reviewed work of legitimate scholars.
This is highly misleading. First, for one thing, Wikipedia articles must, above all, emphasize that all of its articles must be written in a neutral point of view, “which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.” Now here’s where the misrepresentation comes in. It is correct that Wikipedia discourages the use of primary research articles (which, by the way, is not the same thing as prioritizing journalism over primary scientific literature. Read Wikipedia’s article on identifying reliable sources, if you don’t believe me.
First:
Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published sources, making sure that all majority and significant minority views that have appeared in those sources are covered. If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
Now here’s what it says regarding the preference for secondary sources:
Articles should rely on secondary sources whenever possible. For example, a paper reviewing existing research, a review article, monograph, or textbook is often better than a primary research paper. When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised. Wikipedians should never interpret the content of primary sources for themselves (see Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view).
This is a very different requirement than what Prof. Ioannidis states, to the point where, quite frankly, I think he’s intentionally misrepresenting it. I suppose that the good professor will likely conclude, in the unlikely event that he happens to read this, that I’m writing another “hit pieces and hate-, obsession-, and sick-ideology-driven libels.” My retort is: Dude, you’re the one who misrepresented Wikipedia’s requirements and didn’t bother to source your claims. Saying so and being far less angry and nasty about it than you have been about the journalists who have criticized you and whom you view as bigger threats to science than, apparently, the Trump administration is not “libel.” It’s my opinion, backed by facts and referencing your own claims.
Why does Wikipedia urge its editors to tread likely citing primary scientific studies? The rationale is actually quite reasonable:
Isolated studies are usually considered tentative and may change in the light of further academic research. If the isolated study is a primary source, it should generally not be used if there are secondary sources that cover the same content. The reliability of a single study depends on the field. Avoid undue weight when using single studies in such fields. Studies relating to complex and abstruse fields, such as medicine, are less definitive and should be avoided. Secondary sources, such as meta-analyses, textbooks, and scholarly review articles are preferred when available, so as to provide proper context.
Hmmm. No journalism mentioned here, just systematic reviews, meta-analyses, textbooks, and the like. Prof. Ioannidis, help me! Can you link to where Wikipedia says that it prefers journalism and news stories to works by scientists? After all, aren’t systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and textbooks generally written by scientists and physicians? Isn’t that what Prof. Ioannidis claims that he wants, that Wikipedia value sources written by scientists, rather than journalists?
Maybe this is what bothers Prof. Ioannidis:
Scholarly sources and high-quality non-scholarly sources are generally better than news reports for academic topics (see § Scholarship, above). Press releases from organizations or journals are often used by newspapers with minimal change; such sources are churnalism and should not be treated differently than the underlying press release. Occasionally, some newspapers still have specialist reporters who are citable by name. (For topics relating to health or medicine, see § Medical claims, below.)
Wait, no. Wikipedia is still saying that scholarly sources are better than news reports, although high-quality non-scholarly sources can be considered acceptable, but:
Ideal sources for biomedical information include general or systematic reviews in reliable, independent, published sources, such as reputable medical journals, widely recognised standard textbooks written by experts in a field, or medical guidelines and position statements from nationally or internationally reputable expert bodies. It is vitalthat the biomedical information in all types of articles be based on reliable, independent, published sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge.
Seriously, Prof. Ioannidis, isn’t this what you claim you want? Did you not even bother to read Wikipedia’s guidelines on acceptable reliable sources that can be cited? I think that he might have just skimmed it until he came across the part where “secondary” sources are preferred because primary sources on scientific findings are tentative and can easily be misused and misrepresented. I’d be willing to bet that Prof. Ioannidis’ work is wildly cited in Wikipedia articles, because he generally doesn’t do primary research but instead critically analyzes research that is already published.
None of that stops Prof. Ioannidis from going straight up conspiracy theorist:
Under these circumstances, collusion and corruption are almost unavoidable. Journalists, all sorts of influencers and communicators, Wikipedia editors, and scientists engage in a danse macabre, shaping the perception of scientific evidence. And sometimes the same person assumes multiple roles, using pseudonymized personas (“sock puppets”). Even when discovered, little or nothing happens.
Nothing is said about the real examples of corruption and collusion in the science-denying space. No! It’s just us nasty critics who dare criticize brave maverick scientists like Prof. Ioannidis when they venture into claims that go against the scientific consensus in a field and appear to be aligned with a specific ideology.
I’m going to conclude with a quote that is one of the best examples of the projection engaged in by Prof. Ioannidis in this article. Again, dear readers, you might want to unplug your irony meters, as this one is guaranteed to fry all but the meters with the stoutest circuit breakers:
The perpetrators usually are well organized and connected: they can attack their victims in the most malicious ways imaginable in concerted fashion across many platforms. Cross-referencing and invocation and quotes of prominent members of activist networks lend weight to hit pieces. Another common technique is the invocation of anonymous sources, whom the journalists supposedly try to protect through anonymity. Anonymous interviewees can impress upon their audience any unsupported perspective without accountability. Attacks may include a mixture of seemingly more serious articles, along with memes, tweets, and weaponized fragments taken out of context to strike raw emotional chords. They may be accompanied by or lead to physical threats or even physical attacks. Ironically, perpetrators of ad hominem attacks may mobilize media and social media mobs to claim that they are the ones who are under attack. Some conflicted, ignorant, or mentally struggling scientists may even write seemingly sophisticated articles lionizing the perpetrators and further demolishing the victims. These articles may appear either in the lay press or occasionally even in scientific venues. As stated above, collusion between media and social media, big tech, and government can further expand the reach of that tyranny.
There’s the word “tyranny” again! Also, was that Prof. Ioannidis implying that his critics are mentally ill by calling them “mentally struggling”? It sure sounds like it! As for physical threats? Prof. Ioannidis should try criticizing the people behind the GBD, which he supported, or criticizing RFK Jr., MAHA, and the antivax movement. None of this is new either. I’ve had my reputation spread through the mud, cranks contacting my bosses to try to get me fired or otherwise censured, and even threats of lawsuits, including one actual lawsuit. There have been threats, too, inducing of physical violence. Again, none of this is new. It’s been going on since six months after I first started my not-so-super-secret other blog. As Dr. Howard pointed out, MAHA doctors berated and blamed legitimate scientists for literally everything bad about the pandemic, even though Dr. Anthony Fauci’s children needed bodyguards and Dr. Peter Hotez was stalked at home.
As for the rest, the ecosystem of ideologically aligned publications, influencers, and blogs sure does sound like the ecosystem that promoted the GBD, MAHA, and the demolition of vaccination programs and public health. Projection, they name is John Ioannidis! I could take his laments about the toxic news and online ecosystem that leads to attacks on scientists more seriously if he had mentioned even a single example of someone with whom he does not agree, such as Dr. Hotez or Fauci, as an example of a victim of harassment, but he does not. Personally, I always say that we should not sink to the level of attacking someone like Prof. Ioannidis the way we are attacked by COVID-19 contrarians, antivaxxers, and the like. In this post, I’ve been a bit harsher than I usually am when criticizing Prof. Ioannidis, but that’s just because I can only stand so much of his self-righteous disingenuous one-sidedness when it comes to whom he attacks.
When it comes to the real threats to US science…crickets
It’s rather convenient (for me at least) that this weekend The New York Times published a long report on How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Scientific Research Machine. I’m not going to spend a lot of verbiage discussing this article, as its contents will not be a surprise to our readers, at least not when it comes to biomedical science at HHS under RFK Jr., Donald Trump’s lackey and longtime antivax activist who is definitely coming for your vaccines. The article is useful to me, mainly because it is a mainstream news source basically describing what we at SBM have been documenting for a long time: Lysenko 2.0 is here, and the Trump administration, through its Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, is doing its damnedest to use executive power to bring all federally funded science under ideological control. It goes far beyond just biomedical science and public health, however, as this article documents in detail.
Again, none of this will surprise readers, but it is useful to see it laid out in the introduction to the article:
The White House regularly proclaims that it is advancing American interests. Yet its actions are eroding the country’s scientific edge as global rivals challenge U.S. dominance in fields that will help define the 21st century, according to interviews with scientists, university leaders, government officials and analysts and a review of documents and budgets.
The damage is the byproduct of three pillars of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda.
One is the sweeping job cuts and grant cancellations engineered last year by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-led effort that viewed much of federal spending as wasteful and whose effects are still reverberating across the bureaucracy.
A second is the administration’s continued pressure on research universities, in which the White House used funding cuts to push schools into adhering to its demands for ideologically driven policy shifts.
The third is a campaign by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Russell T. Vought, to impose more political control over how the government spends money appropriated by Congress, further infusing politics into decisions around scientific research.
And:
Taken together, the changes underscore how Mr. Trump’s policies have disrupted scientific research beyond the areas the administration has targeted more directly, such as vaccines and climate science, endangering U.S. power and pre-eminence.
Again, what is Lysenkoism but the imposition of ideology on science to dictate what science investigates and concludes? What does the above sound like? Lysenkoism, of course, but encompassing all federal science, not just, as was the case for the historical Lysenko, agriculture. Here’s just one (of many) examples. The article describes the research of Prof. Ann Cohen, who directs an Alzheimer’s research program at the University of Pittsburgh and had been working on a federally funded five-year study looking at how people’s exposure to stress and health problems earlier in life can affect their odds of developing Alzheimer’s dementia.
Here comes the Lysenkoism:
Recruiting people from different backgrounds was difficult, because people who volunteer for scientific studies tend to have higher than average incomes and education levels. So Dr. Cohen and her colleagues recruited from rural Western Pennsylvania, whose residents were more likely to be white and low-income, as well as from Black communities in Pittsburgh.
This past August, the N.I.H. terminated the grant, effective immediately, on the grounds that the project was focused on structural racism — an argument that fundamentally misunderstood the work, Dr. Cohen said.
Apologies to Prof. Cohen, but I think the administration actually did understand the work, but did not approve of looking at the social determinants of health, particularly if there are racial and disparities in susceptibility to a disease. It doesn’t matter that poor rural whites, who are generally Trump’s base of support, were being recruited, as long as Black people in the inner city were also being recruited. Then there was, as the article describes it, the “hunt for woke,” in which any grant or research project that had even a whiff of the dreaded “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or “woke” was targeted for termination. These days, much as people living under totalitarian and authoritarian Communist and fascist regimes had to do, scientists are learning a new language and way of describing their work that avoids the words that trigger the “woke alarm” and bring their work attention from the Lysenkoists that might lead their funding to be denied or cut off. Meanwhile, the administration loudly proclaims that it is ushering in a new “golden age of science,” which it most definitely does not. This article is not the only piece of data supporting that conclusion.
Again, I only wanted to briefly cite the article, because our readers (mostly) already know the carnage that has been wreaked upon federal science in less than two years. They also know my sad conclusion that the damage is so severe that I am unlikely to live long enough to see it repaired, even if a science-friendly administration takes office in 2029; that is, if the damage is ever repaired at all. As I also sadly conclude, within a few years, China and the European Union will be eating our lunch, and we will likely slide at least to third place, if not lower, in global rankings of scientific achievements and innovation, all because of what has been done in 2025 and 2026 and what will be done in the following two years. Thinking about this profoundly depresses me as I barrel towards retirement age. (On the other hand, once I retire, I can devote a lot more time to trying to be part of the solution.)
That’s why, curious, I tried to figure out if Prof. Ioannidis has ever criticized the Trump administration, MAHA, or any aligned groups with anywhere near the fury that he’s directed at journalists, science communicators on social media, and bloggers like us? The answer, unsurprisingly, is no, and I looked using Google searches and questions to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini as natural language search engines.
One example that all three chatbots found is that he criticized the Trump administration in 2020 for its “lockdown” policies, which is not really relevant anymore to today, except to show how he aligns with the GBD, “natural herd immunity,” and anti-“lockdown” policies. Otherwise, he has obliquely criticized the Trump administration, and all three chatbots referenced this keynote address the 2025 Stigler Center Antitrust and Competition Conference—Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas in May 2025, Ioannidis said:
Less funding, in principle (this is an expert opinion so I may be wrong), means more competition for more limited funds. Many of the problems that we face are because of the need to exaggerate—to outpace, to outperform with exaggeration—competitors because we have limited funds. Just cutting funds I don’t think is going to help. I think it’s going to be detrimental.
Wow. Such a devastating takedown of Trump’s science policies, which he quickly followed up by saying that he thought that “reallocation” of resources for scientific research would be just fine with him. He also claims:
Also, I have to say because I think it’s very relevant to what I’m going to discuss and to this conference, I have no political party affiliation, membership, link, or whatever. I have been attacked by extreme leftwing, but this doesn’t mean that I’m extreme right-wing; I have been attacked by extreme rightwing, but this doesn’t mean that I’m extreme leftwing; I have been attacked by extreme moderates, but this doesn’t mean that I’m anything.
This is Prof. Ioannidis’ go-to line whenever it’s pointed out to him that his advocacy for antiscience positions associated with the right, such as the GBD, attacks on public health, and the like help the far right. I’ve seen him retreat to it many times. As I like to say, quoting Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” It appears to me that Prof. Ioannidis has made his choice.
In any event, none of my searches or queries of the chatbots could find any source that is publicly available online of Prof. Ioannidis criticizing RFK Jr., MAHA, the Trump administration (other than that reference to saying that just cutting science funding “won’t help”). No, as much as I searched with Google and LLM-based chatbots, I could not find a single example of anything more than them mildest criticism of this administration or MAHA, other than a criticism in 2020 during the first Trump administration that aligned with his advocacy for the GBD. I gave up, concluding that, if Prof. Ioannidis has ever criticized the real threats to science represented by this administration, it is not available anywhere that is publicly searchable. Contrast this to the downright histrionic language used in his attack on journalists and bloggers, as well as science communicators on social media, and where Prof. Ioannidis is coming from becomes painfully apparent.
So, too, does the purpose of his jeremiad disguised as an analysis of the shortcomings of science journalism and how, to him, they supposedly distort science. At the risk of being accused of writing what he considers to be another example of “hit pieces and hate-, obsession-, and sick-ideology-driven libels.,” I’d say that this article is nothing more than another chance for Prof. Ioannidis to use his position in the world of science to attack those whom he considers enemies because they criticized him, which is why this statement from the keynote address that I just quoted made me laugh out loud:
I’m just grateful for receiving criticism, no matter where it comes from.
It’s difficult not to wonder if his gratitude is because such criticism lets him vent his spleen against his perceived enemies, no matter how reluctantly and obsequiously they made their initial criticisms.