John Ioannidis has never trusted COVID death certificates. Doctors aren't clever or thoughtful enough to figure this whole death thing out, he says, and they even have financial incentives to choose COVID. But he also won't be satisfied by excess deaths. Those are imperfect too.

Population statistics can shed light on a reality that our eyes can't see. Doctors could easily see the bodies piling high as the pandemic unfolded. John doubted those. But if you also doubt all population measures, then you can never be convinced that the pandemic was real.

And yet we know, across the world, that excess deaths did not correspond to lockdowns or other second-order effects. No, they almost perfectly correlated to COVID outbreaks and known COVID deaths.

People know me as skeptical and questioning, even cynical at times. As a pathologist, I understand that our death metrics are imperfect. So I reviewed the data as it came out. The results were clear: COVID was causing more deaths than we knew about, not fewer. This is the truth.

A brave man says: I know COVID is awful, and killing many people who would otherwise live. But X policy is just too much, Y policy has too many harms, Z policy doesn't work. A coward has to advocate for his positions by finding any way to suggest the deaths probably aren't real.