Posted on 10/06/2021 4:24:28 AM PDT by MtnClimber
I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.
As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.
The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.
Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:
CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
This piece of “guidance” is not a small deal. The numbers of students and teachers in K-12 schools in this country is enormous: some 50.6 million kids in K-12 public schools, another 5.8 million in K-12 private schools, some 3.5 million public school teachers, and a few million more of staff of various kinds. So under this “guidance,” the number of people trapped behind these masks all day every day for months on end would be well over 60 million, the large majority of them kids 17 and younger. Meanwhile, according to CDC data here, the number of kids 17 and under who have died of the virus inception to date is all of 478. That is way fewer kids than die of the flu in a normal flu season.
Granted, not everyone is following the CDC “guidance” on this issue. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is one of several who have refused to go along. But plenty are going along. Here in New York, the City announce back in June that it would have a mask mandate for the upcoming school year, and our brand new Governor Kathy Hochul made that statewide as one of her first acts in office on August 28. New York State by itself has about 2.6 million public school students.
Anyway, the CDC is filled with highly credentialed scientists, and surely they have only issued their “guidance” after giving the subject due and deliberate consideration. Isn’t going along with their advice “following the science”?
The other approach to the “science” — the Manhattan Contrarian approach — would be to look for the results of efforts to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that mask wearing lowers the rate of infection and/or death among children 17 and younger. Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that before issuing an edict that would impose all-day mask wearing on tens of millions of children at little risk from this disease, the CDC would have done a large and serious randomized and controlled study to demonstrate that this intervention actually works, if only just a little. You would be absolutely wrong. As far as I can determine, there has been no such study.
What’s the closest we can find on this subject? Looking around today, I find a long and thoughtful piece from the City Journal on August 11, 2021, by a guy named Jeffrey Anderson. The title is “Do Masks Work? A review of the evidence.” Anderson is identified as former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, so at least someone who knows something about statistics.
Anderson identifies a total of 14 what he calls “RCTs” (Randomized Controlled Trials) studying the effectiveness of mask wearing on reducing the spread of respiratory viruses. Almost all of them pre-date the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and none focus on school-age children. OK, we’ll take what we can get. It turns out that there is exactly one large RCT dealing specifically with the effect of mask wearing on the transmission of Covid-19:
The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.
4,862 participants, and a tiny, not-statistically-significant effect. It actually gets worse from there. Anderson goes through every one of the 14 RCTs studying the effectiveness of mask-wearing on respiratory virus transmission, and finds essentially none demonstrated significant effectiveness. Some actually had negative results, where the mask wearers were more likely to be infected than the non-wearers. The speculation is that touching the mask, or not cleaning it, could actually make it a vector for the spread of viruses.
Here is Anderson’s summary of all 14 RCTs:
In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.
In simple terms, it’s nothing, nothing and nothing. Not a single one of the 14 RCTs showed a statistically-significant benefit from mask wearing.
But surely the CDC must have some kind of studies to support its edict to subject tens of millions of innocent schoolchildren to all-day mask wearing. Yes. What they have is not RCTs, but rather so-called “observational” studies of restricted time periods and relatively small numbers of people. Here is a CDC release from September 24, trumpeting some of these latest studies. Healthy Skeptic (Kevin Roche) on September 28 calls these studies “CDC Garbage,” which they are. These studies are properly characterized as non-science. Instead of attempting to falsify the hypothesis under consideration, they attempt to confirm it, with complete freedom to truncate time periods, cherry-pick data, and ignore confounding factors to get the pre-determined answer. And Roche puts his finger right on the key issue, which is that the CDC is under enormous pressure from the White House and its masters in the teachers unions to get the “right” answer:
The White House has been turned into slave quarters for its teachers’ union masters, and therefore must do whatever those unions want, and in turn the CDC is ordered to produce (i.e., make up) research findings to justify the policies the teachers’ unions want, regardless of what the data says, so the agency does its desperate best to sate the insatiable lust of those unions for masking every child for the rest of their lives. One garbage study after another, with the most recent coming at the end of this week.
Roche refers us over to this September 25 post by a guy named Vinay Prasad, going through obvious flaw after obvious flaw with the study on which CDC relies most heavily, coming out of the Phoenix area of Arizona. Excerpt:
First, schools with mask mandates were fundamentally different. It should not be surprising given political differences in mask acceptance that districts with masking are different than those without in ways apart from masking policies. Specifically, schools with mandatory masking policies were more likely to be in Pima county; Maricopa county mostly did not have mask policies. As illustrative of political differences, Pima county voted more strongly in favor of Joe Biden than Maricopa county. Schools with masking requirements included younger kids (greater % elementary, fewer middle/ high), and had fewer students enrolled—also suggestive we may be comparing schools for younger kids vs. those for older kids. The endpoint of the study were not cases attributable to school spread, but rather the number of schools with 2 or more cases. This weighs equally a school with 4 cases vs. 400 cases.
And that’s only the beginning. It goes on and on from there. The study made no effort at all to deal with many, many confounding factors. If you’ve got time, read some more. It’s sad, but you can’t trust a word that comes out of the government “scientists.”
The left manipulates language to mean the opposite of what the common meaning is. It is just convoluted lying.
Psychology, mostly.
Masks have gone the way of a pair of socks. Something that will never go away and to most people, even more necessary. I used to joke about the idiot jogging, driving, walking alone wearing a mask. It’s now the norm and isn’t funny. It’s always been pathetic but now depressingly so.
The up-side to this is that these masked sheep are doing many things to jeopardize their own health. Survival of the fittest may come in to play in the long term.
Best article on masks seem to date! Thank you.
My in laws are convinced that they have to wear a mask out in the open walking down the sidewalk with nobody around. This isn’t about science, it’s about fear.
I look at masks as a kind of virtue signaling that they are "with" the agenda, much like Germans walking around with swastika armbands in the late '30s.
There has been tremendous flooding of the Yellow river in China.
There are videos of a subway being flooded. The passengers were told to stay on the car. The phones came out and recorded the hapless subway riders clutching the straps overhead as the water was up to shoulder level..
They were all still wearing their masks as they were about to drown
This isn’t about science, it’s about fear.
***********
They just want to be protected from the germs that are out
flying around or being scattered by the wind. Yep, they want
mask but to heck with gloves for touching all the same things
that previous people have touched.
——Here in New York, the City——
The City State of New York is no longer America having effectively seceded and not recognizing federal lawn
Bkmk
No. Next question.
We were told “if we all wear masks we’ll crush this bug”. Things only got worse. That I STILL see 50% of people wearing them just goes to show how powerful the fear mongering is.
They presented cases showing coughing and sneezing, how it greatly reduces the spread of droplets. NOBODY has said anything now we know COVID is an aerosol, it has nothing to do with droplets - only breathing and the masks do nothing.
What they DO accomplish is creating an acutely contaminated surface that you touch 50 times a day, adjusting them, taking them on & off constantly, etc. - then you TOUCH everything, contaminating everything.
At best they become a net zero difference. If we had any sort of honest media this would have been questioned out of existence long ago. That we still see the opposite, especially the push for kids to continue wearing them in schools is criminal.
A randomized-trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during COVID-19 shows that the intervention tripled mask usage and reduced symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.. Sounds promising, right?
And it's a big study: 178,288 individuals in the intervention group and 163,838 individuals in the control group.
The intervention increased proper mask-wearing from 13.3% in control villages to 42.3% in treatment village. The payoff? Based on blood samples, post-masking symptomatic seroprevalence for the masked group was 0.68% vs for the control group. 0.76% - a Mask Efficacy of 10%.
....except, look at the massive Big Brother intrusion/oversight:
To emphasize the importance of mask-wearing, we prepared a brief video of notable public figures discussing why, how, and when to wear a mask. The video was shown to each house- hold during the mask distribution visit and featured the Honorable Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina, the head of the Imam Training Academy, and the national cricket star Shakib Al Hasan. During the distribution visit, households also received a brochure based on WHO materials depicting proper mask-wearing.
We implemented a basic set of interventions in all treatment villages, and cross-randomize additional intervention elements in randomly chosen subsets of treatment villages to investigate whether those have any additional impact on mask-wearing. The basic intervention package con- sists of five main elements:
1. One-time mask distribution and promotion at households.
2. Mask distribution in markets on 3-6 days per week.
3.Mask distribution at mosques on three Fridays during the first four weeks of the intervention.
4. Mask promotion in public spaces and markets where non-mask wearers were encouraged to wear masks (weekly or biweekly).
5. Role-modeling and advocacy by local leaders, including imams discussing the importance of mask-wearing at Friday prayers using a scripted speech provided by the research team.
Households were randomized to receive messages emphasizingei ther altruism or self-protection.
Households were randomized to receive twice-weekly text reminders or not. As mentioned above, the text message saturation was randomly varied to 0%, 50%, or 100% of all villagers receiving texts, and in the 50%
villages, the specific households that received the texts was also random. 3. Households were randomized to making a verbal commitment to be a mask-wearing house- hold (all adults in the household promise to wear a mask when they are outside and around other people) or not. This experiment was conducted in a third set of villages where there was no public signage commitment.
In short...wow...it took a MASSIVE propaganda push employing religious leaders and social shaming and frequent reminders and interventions via text etc, to treble mask wearing and that only lowered the incidence of infection by 10%.
So yes....masking accompanies a (barely) lower infection rate, but only if accompanied by Soviet-style reminders of what is required of you comrade.
I don't think this was what these researchers wanted to be the take-away, but as Christopher Walken would say...
Political Science
This study sponsored by WHO/CDC back in April 2015 showed that medical masks stopped less than half of infected aerosol particles, and cloth masks <5%.
The medical establishment has known for years that there is no science behind masks — yet, if any so-called scientists can find a study that does — they ignore all other data.
Masks are a scam. Wanna guess who $$$ benefits from their being pushed?
A Cluster Randomised Trial of Cloth Masks Compared With Medical Masks in Healthcare Workers
C Raina MacIntyre 1 , Holly Seale 1 , Tham Chi Dung 2 , Nguyen Tran Hien 2 , Phan Thi Nga 2 , Abrar Ahmad Chughtai 1 , Bayzidur Rahman 1 , Dominic E Dwyer 3 , Quanyi Wang 4
“Is There Any “Science” Behind Covid Mask Mandates?”
From a particular point of view, no. But according to the MAYO Clinic, face masks combined with other preventive measures, such as getting vaccinated, frequent hand-washing and physical distancing, can help SLOW spread of the virus.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/coronavirus-mask/art-20485449
The example of continuing scientific research, as they have no answer, are the masks. An N95 FFR is a type of respirator which removes particles from the air that are breathed through it. These respirators filter out at least 95% of very small (0.3 micron) particles. The diameter of the virus has been found to range between 50 nm to 140 nm. A nanometer is 1000 times smaller than a micrometer. So, that eliminates the best thing out there from success if the virus gets on it and can be inhaled.
I see the whole thing as putting out fires using oil. It never puts out the fire, factually perpetuates it, but it has the appearance of pouring something on it that people can assume through trial and error, there may be an answer out there somewhere to protect the public. But as the research is being disproved and changed, all we are doing is eliminating failed efforts, not going forward as we are unable to stay with the speed, change, and spread of the virus.
They drug out the term “herd immunity.” They, at the same time, created vaccines designed to help the body fight the virus. How do you reach their proposition of herd immunity if the virus changes and the vaccines are now being discovered to have a three to five month shelf life and require boosters that may not be any more effective than the original vaccine?
Viruses have been around for billions of years and seem to return on occasion. And now man learned how to create and change them along with watching them change and re-evaluating the lack of success of combatting them after they have turned Frankenstein loose into the countryside. Shots don’t work, face masks don’t work, and science doesn’t work...so all we’ve realistically got is hiding in your cave. I thought we had evolved past that. Guess not.
wy69
No science behind it. It is the mask of obedience.
Why Masks Don’t Work - “Careful Consideration Of Our Common Concerns” - Dr. Ted Noel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MKzKAzKCNk
No. It says right there on the box that it doesn’t protect against viruses.
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