Ioannidis responds to criticism over Neeleman funding the controversial coronavirus antibody study

The lead researcher, John Ioannidis, of the controversial study of antibodies has responded to his critics who complained about a conflict of interest after David Neeleman was found to have provided funding for the study. An anonymous complaint was filed with Stanford University in early May.

 John Ioannidis spoke to Undark about the study, which was released as a preprint on April 17 and declared that the number of coronavirus infections was 85 times higher than already believed. That infection rate would drive down local fatality rates to between .12 and .20 percent – which is closer to the known death rate for the flu, according to a Buzzfeed piece published on May 15.

“It’s hard to recall another paper that has been so extensively peer reviewed. And lots of accounts were very useful and very constructive. The revised version has tried to address all the major concerns. I think the results are still very robust,” Ioannidis said in an interview with Undark. “But it’s a single study. You can never say that a single study is the end of the story. You need to see all studies that are done, and by now there’s more than a dozen serology studies, and I think they pretty much paint the same picture.”

The newest controversy isn’t focused on the rates Ioannidis has pointed to, but that David Neeleman, founder of Jet Blue Airways, provided funding for the study. Neeleman has been quite vocal about the COVID-19 crisis not being deadly enough to justify the continuing lockdowns.  

“David Neeleman has a particular perspective and some ideas and some thoughts,” John Ioannidis told BuzzFeed News. “I don’t know exactly who were the people who funded the study eventually. But whoever they were, none of them really told us it should be designed in a given way or done in a given way or find a particular type of result or report a particular type of result,” said Ioannidis. He noted that the funding came from an anonymized pool of financial gifts to Stanford’s Office of Development.

But, Neeleman told Buzzfeed that the authors of the study did know he made a donation.

 “The whistleblower jumped to a false conclusion that is not provable, because it never happened,” Neeleman said.