Are you serious? Ioannidis is well-known and respected among scientists because he's a heretic. Nobel prizes are given for heresy. There's a lot to gain by being the first to overturn an established idea.
Do you hear what you are saying? How could that possibly be a reasonable way to find a good source of information? "Here's a bunch of people who aren't taken seriously by their colleagues. But hey, because you don't know any better, go ahead and trust what they have to say unconditionally."
Your understanding of how an actual real-world science (not idealised philosophical abstaction of "the Science") works is ridiculously and miserably inadeqate.
Mainstream science had given up genuine innovation and progress decades ago, turning into an ersatz-religion, a kind of a secular clergy; the White Coat Priesthood, as a superb anarchist thinker Keith Preston has cynically - but rightfully - named (and nailed) it. It has near-completely lost all its once-praised objectivity, and subsequently all its reliability and trustworthiness, becoming a mere tool of (and for) power - cultural, political, economic, whatever.
My old pen-friend Henry Bauer explained it in detail:
https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com...ading-popular-myth-of-science-exceptionalism/
As for heresy, it does not mean any criticism of the scientific clergy and canon: before the Era of Covid-1984, mainstream science did allow some moderate level of deviance and defiance from within - as long as they do not cross the red line of apostasy (much like the Roman Catholic Church did in the old times of its dominance). Ioannidis is exactly such respectable, mainsteam-accepted - in fact, mainstream-praised and even mainstream-encouraged - moderate critic who has never dared to cross the forbidden threshold where the real heresy begins... until now. Yet now, he tastes what it's like to be treated like a real apostate, not a moderately critical insider approved by the establishment.
What is especially disturbing, even outright threatening, in our whole current situation is exactly the quick shrinking, up to the point of near-disapperance, of the area of the Acceptable Deviance and Permissible Definace: for example, once upon a time a mainstream researcher or clinician was allowed to express some not-too-far-reaching doubt and disdain about, say, bird flu or swine flu, in the mainstream sources, without being censored, vilified and persecuted. Now, nearly every step aside from the Covid-1984 orthodoxy is effectively forbidden and punishable. And this scares me for real.
Because there aren't any RCTs which directly test "real world" effectiveness of community masking for COVID.
Again, why are you trusting him on that? In one of the references provided by Rancourt,
Jefferson says "It is debatable whether any of these results could be applied to the transmission of SARs-CoV-2". But now we're supposed to believe they're the last word because of a physicist's say so? Why does Jefferson give a list of nine ongoing RCTs to answer the question with respect to COVID-19 and community masking, if "Rancourt's RCTs" have supposedly already answered the question?
The hard fact that yet-existent RCTs show that masks don't work, doesn't mean that further RCTs can't show something different, Maybe it will be proven, one coming day, that masks do work after all, and nearly all previous research suffered from some kind of yet-unidentified mistakes. Maybe.
But right here and right now, the best available evidence explicitly and unequivocally points toward total ineffectiveness of mask-wearing as a measure against the spread of viral respiratory infections. And therefore, there is no scientific basis to enforce them, violently, on the unwilling individuals (and population as a whole).
Because there aren't any RCTs which directly test "real world" effectiveness of community masking for COVID.
Again, why are you trusting him on that? In one of the references provided by Rancourt,
Jefferson says "It is debatable whether any of these results could be applied to the transmission of SARs-CoV-2". But now we're supposed to believe they're the last word because of a physicist's say so? Why does Jefferson give a list of nine ongoing RCTs to answer the question with respect to COVID-19 and community masking, if "Rancourt's RCTs" have supposedly already answered the question?
The reasons I trust him are the sound empirical evidence and valid rational argumentation he presents - as well as a laughable inability of his opponents - including you - to present anything like sound counterevidence and valid counterargumentation, which leads them - and you - to the irrational and unempirical personal attacks against him, and other heretics and apostates exposing the rot and corruption of the Global Scientific Church.
Were I to trust anyone heretical simply on the virtue of being heretical, I would have already started seeking for the secret cabals of the bloody-rites-performing, demon-worshipping, sexual-taboo-violating Satanists (as quite a few people in the heretical circles in general, and here on Skeptiko specifically, are sadly doing already). I don't and won't. I only trust the apostates whom I found at least partially trustworthy, and only in the areas, and to the extent, their perceived trustwothiness goes. All epistemic decisions I make are ultimately mine.