Inside Policy Talks24 Jul 2025

John Ioannidis: What's shaken public confidence in science?

Science is often seen as the gold standard in policymaking – objective, rigorous, and self-correcting. But what happens when the science itself is uncertain, contradictory, or unreproducible?

Over the past two decades, concerns about replication, statistical misuse, and institutional bias have shaken public confidence in science – from medicine to psychology to public health. On the other hand, institutional confidence in science seems unshakeable, defensive, and resistant to change. And with rising polarization and decreasing trust in institutions, the need for both epistemic humility and stronger standards of evidence has never been clearer.

To discuss this, Dr. John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most cited scientific voices confronting these challenges, joins Inside Policy Talks. Dr. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, is the author of a landmark 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, which helped spark the understanding of science's replication crisis.

On the podcast, he tells Peter Copeland, director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that when the term “evidence-based policy” arose in the 1980s, it was initially “seen as kind of a revolution” because it was pushing for “rigorous, unbiased, systematically assessed scientific evidence, instead of just expert opinion.” However, says Ioannidis, the term's popularity soon led to it being adopted by political actors as “an alibi” to sway the public towards positions not grounded in evidence.

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