Covid-2019 - 2022-02-17

Stanford's John Ionnides has a paper in the British Medical Journal quantitatively comparing the prestige of the scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, versus those who signed the competing John Snow Memorandum. Both, he concludes, were led by highly prestigious scientists. So why was GBD trashed in the public square as fringe-science, while JSM was held up as revealed wisdom? The quantitative answer seems to be that the JSM crowd had more Twitter followers! (And when I say "followers," that's not like in "follow the science.")