
JetBlue Funded a Stanford Study That Said the Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly - elorant
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-coronavirus-neeleman-ioannidis-whistleblower
======
hodgesrm
Did I miss something in this article? It says that David Neeleman of Jetblue
donated $5,000. I don't know how big Ioannidis' research budget is but this is
peanuts.

You would think there would be better things for reporters to look into, such
as whether Ioannidis might actually have a point.

~~~
cma
"Ioannidis added that he did not know how much the study cost, but the funding
came from an anonymized pool of financial gifts given to Stanford’s Office of
Development: “This form of funding is the most unconflicted type of funding
process to do research. It secures perfect intellectual and scientific
independence of the study.”

Anonymizes pool of financial gifts but he was in contact with the guy? Is that
a joke?

And then suggesting funding a lab if the kit is validated:

> “David, I think you should write Taia a note and tell her you’ll support her
> lab if she validates this kit.” Bendavid confirmed that he put Neeleman and
> Wang in touch.

~~~
rumanator
> Anonymizes pool of financial gifts but he was in contact with the guy? Is
> that a joke?

More than a joke, it sounds like Ioannidis was out right lying. From the
article:

> But according to Neeleman, the authors did know he’d given money to fund the
> study. Neeleman confirmed that he made a $5,000 donation to Stanford to be
> given to these researchers and that he was in communication with them while
> they were conducting their research.

------
tasty_freeze
There is a way to head off all the quibbling about false positive rates and
methodology, etc.

Look at the all-cause mortality figures for April vs the historical average
for that month. If it isn't COVID-19 killing all of those people at a multiple
of the normal death rate, we have an even bigger mystery of what is causing
all the extra deaths.

In fact, these numbers were apparent for NYC a month ago:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/corona...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/10/upshot/coronavirus-
deaths-new-york-city.html)

~~~
elcritch
It’s not too much of a mystery. There’s a very good likelihood that the fact
that people aren’t getting regular healthcare for other health problem has
lead to higher deaths rates. Hospital utilization is significantly below
normal currently which means those common heart attacks, strokes, cancer
screenings, among others are still occurring but not treated and resulting in
higher fatalities.

~~~
cma
But then why would it be correspondingly higher in New York along with their
infection rate? Other places were just as locked down without a spike of
similar magnitude. That makes no sense.

~~~
elcritch
Good point, and that could indicate those unaccounted deaths are skewed
towards being covid-19 related. There’s still odd patterns with the covid-19
hotspots, and I’d suspect that the underlying reasons could correlate with
higher non-covid-19 death rates. As in older and/or sicker populations.

~~~
cma
Didn't it follow the infection lag for the most part? Why would heart attacks
lag lockdown infection growth stoppage by the same amount as virus deaths?

------
tbenst
I’m most concerned about the new reporting from Boyd, that according to gold
standard ELISA retest of positive samples, just under half came back negative,
indicating a possible false positive.

Of course, the samples going through freeze thaw cycles may contribute to
antibody degradation but seriously concerning.

~~~
nodamage
This seems like a really big deal, so I'm going to second the request for a
source on it.

~~~
nodamage
Nevermind, it's mentioned in the original article which I missed the first
time around:

> The following week, Boyd had results in hand. Using ELISA tests to reassess
> the samples of community members who had come up positive for antibodies on
> the Premier test, he had ended up getting positive results for a little over
> half of them.

------
fithisux
Why would Ioannidis risk reputation for such a small amount? I do not bite it.
He did a basic research which is what he is paid to do. If his analysis has
flaws

a, The paper was peer reviewed b. We can see other peer reviewed papers
disprove his findings.

The flame wars feed conspiracy theories in both sides.

I am not an expert, I am not even a researcher any more, however my possibly
flawed opinion is that deadliness of the virus is not a number written in
stone and may have seasonal and regional variation.

~~~
cma
That's the only documented amount. We don't know of all the other funders or
LLC funders that are associated with him.

Even aside from the funding, the article unveils many more disturbing things.

------
m0llusk
This is turning a flawed study into a conspiracy theory and ignoring important
related epidemiology. The fact is that the large number of asymptomatic cases
led to initial undercounting of infections so the virus appears to be less
deadly when looking at numbers that include previously missed cases. This
doesn't make the pandemic any less serious.

At this point we have data from places with no lockdowns, mild lockdowns,
strong lockdowns, and recently ended lockdowns. All of this verifies the long
held epidemiology that points out that once a highly infectious agent is loose
in the general public lockdowns have extremely limited benefit. This is not a
political issue and does not relate to managing airlines or running clickbait
web news sites.

~~~
perl4ever
"once a highly infectious agent is loose in the general public lockdowns have
extremely limited benefit."

Huh? What data supports this? It looks like the top dozen or so countries in
terms of new cases are almost completely different from a month or two ago.
Isn't it obvious this is because the US and western Europe that had the
lockdowns slowed it relative to others?

Here is a list in descending order of new cases from a day or two ago, see how
the US and UK are the only remaining of the first wave. Spain and Italy aren't
even there! I don't see how your comment could be more at odds with the
information I'm seeing.

USA

Brazil

Russia

Peru

India

UK

Chile

Pakistan

Mexico

Iran

Saudi Arabia

Turkey

~~~
gowld
That's mostly a list of most populous countries in the world. Is that data per
capita?

~~~
throwlaplace
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-
cases-p...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-cases-per-
million?tab=map)

there you go (may 9)

    
    
      df=pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/total-daily-covid-cases-per-million.csv")
      df.sort_values(['Date', 'Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)'])[-20:][['Entity', 'Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)']].to_string(index=False)
      Out[14]: 
      Entity  Daily new confirmed cases per million (cases)
      Saudi Arabia                                    48.860
      Armenia                                         48.933
      Belgium                                         50.994
      Gabon                                           52.118
      Portugal                                        54.233
      United Arab Emirates                            55.913
      Gibraltar                                       59.363
      Sweden                                          63.569
      United Kingdom                                  68.482
      Chile                                           72.765
      Russia                                          73.314
      United States                                   81.440
      North America                                   84.775
      Sao Tome and Principe                           95.820
      Belarus                                         98.737
      Peru                                           100.722
      Singapore                                      131.274
      Bahrain                                        143.984
      Kuwait                                         150.097
      Qatar                                          455.041

~~~
perl4ever
That is interesting, but per capita data is not the answer to what I was
interested in originally - what countries is the epidemic growing fastest in
is different from in what countries is most of the epidemic's growth happening
in.

------
tonywastaken
Neeleman is no longer the CEO of JetBlue.

