Thread by @jocami_ca

The ultimate compilation of Michael Levitt fails about Covid19. Follow me on this journey of destruction of reputation earned with a Nobel prize. 👇

First, I need to clarify that he has acknowledged many fails in a cute manner, claiming that making errors is key to science. But as you will see all his errors are always on the same side (play down the dangers of virus), so rather than science it looks like agenda pushing.

Let’s start with the most famous one: on July 25th he says Covid19 will be over in US in 30d with 20K more deaths than the 150K we had back then. 70d later (Oct 3rd) there was still excess mortality and 64K more deaths. Errors confirmed and growing.
cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr…

It took him more than 2 months to 1) understand what reporting delays mean and 2) admit his spectacular error.

And when he finally did admit the error he went and implicitly made another prediction saying US end would be one month later (Sep 25th). That one has also been wrong 😔

In March he said he’d be “surprised if more than 10 excess deaths in Israel”. In the real world, Israel has reported 2,319 Covid19 deaths and still growing.

m.jpost.com/israel-news/no…

Just a few days later he announced with his classic overconfidence that Switzerland had past midpoint and therefore would end at 500 deaths. Switzerland passed that number five days later and continued until reaching 1,800. Death growth resumed in Sep and is now at 2,039.

He had of course done a similar prediction for Italy: 20K deaths in total according to him, 37K and growing according to reality. Yes, it is indeed terrible Michael, and your overconfidence might transfer to people who then become less cautious.

Also in March he said in an interview with LA Times that Iran was past the halfway mark, just like Italy or Switzerland...
latimes.com/science/story/…

One of his recurrent confident affirmations in early summer was that the virus was over in Europe, and pretty much everywhere were excess deaths went back to baseline.

September came and then more confident affirmations: Second wave is “all cases but little deaths”

He even invited Ivor Cummins, another legend in Covid19 failures, into the party to step it up to “all cases no deaths”. Note the comment “Ivor is 6 weeks ahead of others”, pure gold.

And then eventually reality came in for both

I make a pause here with this quote: “Predictions are so much easier than sound scientific research” - Yeah, no shit.