Comment by zahlman
9 hours ago
> He wasn't necessarily wrong in all his conclusions, but neither were the other researchers that he rightly criticized for their own statistical gymnastics earlier.
In hindsight, I can't see any plausible argument for an IFR actually anywhere near 1%. So how were the other researchers "not necessarily wrong"? Perhaps their results were justified by the evidence available at the time, but that still doesn't validate the conclusion.
I mean that in the context of "Most Published Research Findings Are False", he criticized work (unrelated to COVID, since that didn't exist yet) that used incorrect statistical methods even if its final conclusions happened to be correct. He was right to do so, just as Gelman was right to criticize his serosurvey--it's nice when you get the right answer by luck, but that doesn't help you or anyone else get the right answer next time.
It's also hard to determine whether that serosurvey (or any other study) got the right answer. The IFR is typically observed to decrease over the course of a pandemic. For example, the IFR for COVID is much lower now than in 2020 even among unvaccinated patients, since they almost certainly acquired natural immunity in prior infections. So high-quality later surveys showing lower IFR don't say much about the IFR back in 2020.