– “I’ve explained my reasons for trusting the Ioannidis evidence. He is an expert in that field with everything to lose if he gets it wrong.”
But you didn’t really listen to Ioannidis. He said there are grounds for hope, that society can return to normal eventually; you only heard the bit you wanted to “no worse than flu”. He failed to make clear the difference between CFR Case Fatality Rate and the always lower IFR Infection Fatality Rate.
But this is all besides the point. You’re starting from a political/economic assumption about the objectives of the elite, and working backwards to infer the nature of a virus and the epidemic it causes, and cherry-picking on that basis. But politics and economics don’t determine the epidemiology of a virus; the converse is true.