April 25, 2024

Athens News

News in English from Greece

Professor Ioannidis on government measures: “We have reached the limit of absurdity”

Stanford University professor of pathology, research, policy and health statistics, Yannis Ioannidis, has sharply criticized the Greek government’s response to the coronavirus.

The professor said that as a scientist who has served in the field of epidemiology for decades, he considers the response to the coronavirus in Greece to be incomprehensible, contradictory and fragmentary. He characteristically put it: “At the moment I am afraid that if we had no measures at all, everything would be much better.”

It could be a new type of epidemiology, different from the rest of the world, that he can no longer understand, he says. Yiannis Ioannidis stressed that the prevailing “measures that change at the speed of a machine gun, which are contradictory and mutually reversible”, which leads to complete confusion of citizens.

“Every two days, a new decision on special measures is announced. An impossible situation for a citizen who wants to be law-abiding, believes in the state and wants to do what he is told. He cannot do it.

What happened, I’m afraid, is that in the crisis we were facing, many experts and states took draconian measures, which was right at the beginning because we didn’t know what we were dealing with. But then they followed the same path of sophisticated measures, when the state seems to be the mother-in-law who tells you every day what to do.

After a while, instructions will appear on what socks you should wear to leave the house the next hour, and if you go outside in the wrong color, you will be fined. We have reached the limit of absurdity, ”said the professor.

J. Ioannidis said that “there are no serious epidemiological surveillance measures or public health strategies, and behind the unilateral action of vaccination as a” panacea “, in fact, there is a lack of effective measures to stop the chain of transmission of the virus and the spread of its mutations.”

Yiannis Ioannidis noted that “although it is too early to draw conclusions, the first data show that the Delta mutation is the most contagious, but does not have an increased mortality rate. Vaccines are considered to be one of the most valuable tools in terms of their effectiveness after two doses. But first and foremost, they should target the elderly and vulnerable groups. In contrast, estimates for young children are quite different, in terms of costs and benefits for both public health and the proportion of populations that should actually be directly convinced rather than indirectly or directly forced to vaccinate. “

At the same time, the professor said that “vaccination of young people and children, the picture is likely to get worse.”

Mr. Ioannidis commented on the importance of the measures he said about the restaurant, as well as the way to travel to and from the islands, noting that for him the chosen methods, which contradict each other, are meaningless from his point of view as a scientist.





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