John Ioannidis was endlessly vilified around here when he dared to criticize the hygiene-terrorist hysteria. In the USA he was even threatened—he lives very close to the corporate (and not only) interests and has a “heavy” name, so he couldn’t go unnoticed.
In 2005 Ioannidis (then a professor of medicine in Ioannina…) and his team presented a well-documented study demonstrating that the overwhelming majority of scientific papers published in prestigious international journals, in every field, are wrong. It was like an atomic bomb in the great swamp of “scientific prestige,” so thoroughly documented that no one dared to challenge its findings (even though everyone would have liked to!) Since then that study has become the most cited worldwide; yet the “scientificality” has not improved in the slightest.
Ioannidis and his team also revealed the reasons behind this colossal “scientific” failure. Fraud and the bribery of researchers by companies or others to reach specific conclusions (“corruption”…) was one of them—but not the only one. Many scientific researchers are not deliberately dishonest. However, over-specialization, the inflation of “studies and publications” (hence the increased difficulty of securing “a place in the sun”…), and the “pressure” for recognition and career advancement cause a serious restriction of research persistence and, of course, the bypassing/suppression of data that might lead any study to failure.
What is politically significant is that Ioannidis’s study and some that followed have now documented what is openly called a structural crisis of the sciences – certainly in the West. This real, deep and worsening structural crisis is of course not caused by the … attacks of the …. obscurantists (as various fools claim). It is caused by the advanced and almost total subordination of the sciences (and of scientists…) to capital and to its norms. Statistics and its uses are one of these contemporary norms…