(I swear, pretty soon we'll be required to stick our finger up our butts before we go out in public to prevent farting - to declare our morality. American mind numbing has reached previously un-attained levels.
And all
DaPeople said amen! –
CL)
"The speed with which
mask-wearing among the general public transitioned from unheard of to a moral
necessity struck me as suspicious."
Authored by Jenin Younes via The American Institute for Economic
Research,
I
remember vividly the day, at the tail end of March, when facemasks suddenly became
synonymous with morality: either one cared about the lives of others and donned a mask,
or one was selfish and refused to do so. The shift occurred virtually overnight.
Only a day or two
before, I had associated this attire solely with surgeons and people living in
heavily polluted regions. Now, my friends’ favorite pastime during our
weekly Zoom sessions was excoriating people for running or socializing without
masks in Prospect Park. I was mystified by their certitude that bits of
cloth were the only thing standing between us and mass death, particularly when
mere weeks prior, the message from medical experts contradicted this new
doctrine.
On
February 29, the U.S. surgeon general infamously tweeted:
“Seriously
people – STOP BUYING MASKS. . . They are NOT effective in preventing
general public from catching #Coronavirus.”
Anthony
Fauci, the best-known member of the coronavirus task force, advised Americans
not to wear masks around this time.
Similarly,
in the earliest weeks of the pandemic, the CDC maintained that masks
should be worn only by individuals who were symptomatic or caring for a
sick person, a position that the WHO stood by even longer.
As
rapidly as mask use became a matter of ethics, the issue transformed into a
political one, exemplified by an article printed on March 27 in the New York Times, entitled “More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection.”
The piece was heavy on fear-mongering and light on evidence. While acknowledging that
“[t]here is very little data showing that flat surgical masks, in particular,
have a protective effect for the general public,” the author went on to argue
that they “may be better than nothing,” and cited a couple of studies in which
surgical masks ostensibly reduced influenza transmission rates.
One
report reached its conclusion based on observations of a “dummy head attached to a breathing simulator.” Another analyzed use of surgical masks on
people experiencing at least two symptoms of acute respiratory
illness. Incidentally, not one of these studies involved cloth
masks or accounted for real-world mask usage (or misusage) among lay people,
and none established efficacy of widespread mask-wearing by people not
exhibiting symptoms. There was simply no evidence whatsoever that healthy people
ought to wear masks when going about their lives, especially outdoors. Yet by April,
to walk the streets of Brooklyn with one’s nose and mouth exposed evoked the
sort of reaction that in February would have been reserved for the appearance
of a machine gun.
In
short order, the politicization intensified. President Trump
refused to wear a mask relatively early on, so resistance to them was equated
with support for him. By the same token, Democratic politicians across the
board eagerly adopted the garb; accordingly, all good liberals were wearing
masks religiously by the beginning of April. Likewise, left-leaning
newspapers such as the New York Times and
the Washington Post unequivocally promoted mask-wearing after that March 27 article,
with no real analysis or consideration of opposing views
and evidence.
The
speed with which mask-wearing among the general public transitioned from
unheard of to a moral necessity struck me as suspicious. After all, if
the science was as airtight as those around me claimed, surely masks would have
been recommended by January or February, not to mention during prior infectious
disease outbreaks such as the 2009 swine flu. It seemed unlikely that the
scientific proof became incontrovertible sometime between late February and
late March, particularly in the absence of any new evidence surfacing during
that time period.
Perhaps
none of this is particularly surprising in this hyper-political era. What is shocking
is the scientific community’s participation in subverting evidence that does
not comport with the consensus. A prime example is the Institute of Health Metrics
Evaluation’s (“IHME”) rather astounding claim, published in the journal Nature-Medicine and echoed in countless articles afterward, that the lives of
130,000 people could be saved with a nationwide mask mandate.
As
my colleague Phil Magness pointed out in an op-ed in
the Wall Street Journal, the IHME model was predicated upon faulty
data:
it assumed that 49% of Americans were wearing masks based on a survey conducted
between April and June, while claiming that statistic represented the number of
Americans wearing masks as of September 21. In fact, by the summer,
around 80% of Americans were regularly wearing them. (Ironically, had Dr.
Fauci and the Surgeon General not bungled the message in March, mask use probably
would have reached much higher rates much earlier on).
This called into
question the accuracy of the 130,000 figure, since many more people habitually
used masks than the study presumed.
Although
Magness contacted Nature-Medicine to point out the problem, after stalling for nearly two
weeks, the journal declined to address it. Needless to say, the damage had
been done:
newspapers such as the New York Times undoubtedly would fail to correct the error and any
retractions certainly would be placed far from the front page, where the
initial article touting the IHME figure appeared. Thus, as expected, the
unfounded claim that 130,000 lives could be saved with a nationwide
mask-mandate continues to be repeated, including by president-elect Joe Biden and National
Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.
That the science behind mask-wearing
is questionable at best is further exemplified by a letter to the editor written in response to
Magness’s article. Dr. Christopher Murray acknowledged that rates of
mask-wearing have steadily increased, but then concluded that masks should be
used because they are “our first line of defense against the pandemic” and
current IHME modeling indicates that “if 95% of U.S. residents were to wear
masks when leaving home, we could prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of
Americans” because “masks work,” and “much deeper pain is ahead if we refuse to wear them.”
None
of this accounts for the failure of either Nature-Medicine or the IHME
modelers to recognize and correct the error. Moreover, neither the
IHME modelers nor Dr. Murray provide any evidence that masks work. They assume
masks are extremely effective at preventing spread of the coronavirus, and then
claim that the model is correct for that reason. This sort of circular
reasoning is all-too typical of those who so vociferously insist that masks are
effective without going to the trouble of substantiating that contention – or
differentiating what is likely a modest benefit from mask-wearing in specific
indoor locations and around high-risk individuals from the media-driven
tendency to depict masks as a silver bullet for stopping the virus in all
circumstances.
Coverage
of a recent mask study conducted in Denmark
likewise epitomizes the failure of the scientific community to rigorously
engage with results that do not fit the prevailing masks-as-a-panacea
narrative. The first randomized and controlled study of its kind, it
found an absence of empirical evidence that masks provide protection to people
wearing them, although it apparently did not assess whether they prevent
infection of those who encounter the wearer. The report was covered in
a New
York Times article bearing the patronizing headline, “A New Study Questions Whether Masks Protect Wearers. You Need to
Wear Them Anyway.”
Noting
that the
results “conflict with those from a number of other studies,” primarily
“laboratory examinations of the particles blocked by materials of various
types,” the author remarked that, therefore, this research “is not likely to
alter public health recommendations in the United States.” Notably,
laboratory examinations, as opposed to the Danish study, do not account for the
realities of everyday mask usage by non-medical professionals.
The
author then quotes Susan Ellenberg, a biostatistician at the University of
Pennsylvania, who claims that the study indicates a trend: “‘in the direction of
benefit’ even if the results were not statistically significant. ‘Nothing in
this study suggests . . . that it is useless to wear a mask,’” according to Dr.
Ellenberg.
Nor does anything in
this study suggest that it is useful to wear a mask, a fact that Dr. Ellenberg
(and the headline) conveniently ignores. Furthermore, if a result is
statistically insignificant, it should not be used to make the case for any
proposition — as even I, a layperson, know.
Scientists ought to
dispassionately analyze data that contradicts their biases and assumptions, and
be open to changing their beliefs accordingly. That the results of the
only randomized, controlled study were and continue to be automatically
discounted demonstrates that, when it comes to the subject of masks, anything
approximating the scientific method has gone out the window. That is all the
more evident given the lack of interest that mask proponents have shown in
conducting a randomized, controlled study themselves.
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An article in the Los Angeles Times went even further: it
twisted the findings of the Danish study to argue, incomprehensibly, that the
research demonstrated more mask-wearing is warranted. The author
cited, as supposedly compelling evidence that masks work, the low Covid-19
death rates in Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Indeed, according to
the latest YouGov poll, administered in mid-November, 83%
of Americans now wear masks in public, higher rates than Vietnam (77%) and
Taiwan (82%).
Furthermore,
there are other explanations, apart from widespread mask usage, for the
remarkably low death rates in these countries. Some scientists believe
that previous exposure to other coronaviruses in
these regions may confer partial or total immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Others have speculated that obesity, environment or genetics could be the reason
that Europe and the United States have substantially higher death rates than
many Asian and African countries; after all, obesity is one of the most significant risk factors for severe
illness.
To
conclude on the basis of low death rates in several countries that masks
prevent coronavirus transmission is patently absurd, illogical, and unscientific. A casual
observer might also note that coronavirus cases (albeit not necessarily deaths)
are rising
in many parts of the world, regardless of mask mandates or rates of
implementation. While not a controlled experiment, this fact at least
ought to be addressed when making such sweeping claims.
Ultimately,
I do not have the credentials to determine whether or not –or to what extent —
masks work. But it is obvious that the issue has become so politicized that
mainstream media outlets, politicians, and even scientists seize upon the
slightest bit of favorable evidence, dismiss out of hand anything that
conflicts with their theory, and most egregiously of all misrepresent the data,
to support the conclusion that masks worn by asymptomatic people prevent
coronavirus transmission.
And masks are only one
part of this story: school closures, lockdowns, and social distancing all have
been dogmatically embraced as a means of controlling infection. The substantial evidence that these
mechanisms are not effective, particularly beyond their duration, has been
automatically rejected for too long. This is not science: it is politics, and those within the profession
who have refused to examine their confirmation biases, or manipulated the
evidence to score political points, are utterly unqualified for the job.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/strangely-unscientific-masking-america