It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID and It Cost Lives
This guy encapsulates what I understood from day one concerning covid. I understood our response would be what was most politically beneficial rather than what was scientifically supportable.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A s a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.
I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.
I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity , school closures and disease transmission , aerosol spread , mask mandates , and vaccine effectiveness and safety , especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time , not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.
But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.
What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were —very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.
We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.
We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated longstanding heath and economic disparities.
Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions on the people we are supposed to serve. We systematically minimized the downsides of the interventions we imposed—imposed without the input, consent, and recognition of those forced to live with them. In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who would be most negatively impacted by our policies: the poor, the working class, small business owners, Blacks and Latinos, and children. These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant, corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.
Most of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them. When strong scientific voices like world-renowned Stanford professors John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas , or University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi, sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community—often not on the basis of fact but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.
When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon. And when Dr. Antony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.
Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy. But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response. Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national, collaborative project.
And we paid the price. The rage of the those marginalized by the expert class exploded onto and dominated social media. Lacking the scientific lexicon to express their disagreement, many dissidents turned to conspiracy theories and a cottage industry of scientific contortionists to make their case against the expert class consensus that dominated the pandemic mainstream. Labeling this speech "misinformation" and blaming it on "scientific illiteracy" and "ignorance," the government conspired with Big Tech to aggressively suppress it, erasing the valid political concerns of the government's opponents.
And this despite the fact that pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society who anointed themselves to preside over the working class—members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health, who are highly educated and privileged. From the comfort of their privilege, this elite prizes paternalism, as opposed to average Americans who laud self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk. That many of our leaders neglected to consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is unconscionable.
Incomprehensible to us due to this class divide, we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil. We dismissed as "grifters" those who represented their interests. We believed "misinformation" energized the ignorant, and we refused to accept that such people simply had a different, valid point of view.
We crafted policy for the people without consulting them. If our public health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in the United States might have had a very different outcome, with far fewer lost lives.
Instead, we have witnessed a massive and ongoing loss of life in America due to distrust of vaccines and the healthcare system ; a massive concentration in wealth by already wealthy elites ; a rise in suicides and gun violence especially among the poor ; a near-doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders especially among the young ; a catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children ; and among those most vulnerable, a massive loss of trust in healthcare , science, scientific authorities , and political leaders more broadly.
My motivation for writing this is simple: It's clear to me that for public trust to be restored in science, scientists should publicly discuss what went right and what went wrong during the pandemic, and where we could have done better.
It's OK to be wrong and admit where one was wrong and what one learned. That's a central part of the way science works. Yet I fear that many are too entrenched in groupthink—and too afraid to publicly take responsibility—to do this.
Solving these problems in the long term requires a greater commitment to pluralism and tolerance in our institutions, including the inclusion of critical if unpopular voices.
Intellectual elitism, credentialism, and classism must end. Restoring trust in public health—and our democracy—depends on it.
Kevin Bass is an MD/PhD student at a medical school in Texas. He is in his 7th year.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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We no longer hear about covid anymore because it serves no political purpose to do so. It has nothing to do with health.
Yeah, tell that to the people who have fallen ill or died from it.
Tell them that the mandates weren't based on data?
I think Fauci & Walensky should beg for forgiveness.
Um... for the people who have fallen ill and have read this post, I already did. For those who are dead... are you suggesting that they still have access to what the living say?
Are you suggesting Covid is not a health issue?
Mandates were based on common sense and established practices for a viral pandemic at the time we knew nothing about.
Um, what? Seriously. What?
You wrote:
Gordy asked a perfectly reasonable question:
You could simply state that you meant to say that the reason we do not hear of COVID anymore is because it no longer serves a political purpose. That would disambiguate nicely.
Is that why all those people lost their jobs?
Why would Dr. Fauci do that?
Why did all those people lose their jobs???????????????????????????????????/
Well, I suppose, if one has a mental disability of some sort. I have no reason to believe Gordy is subject to such a thing. Given that I was speaking unambiguously about politics, it wasn't a reasonable question. Do you notice (because any thinking person would) that you have to highlight only the second part of my statement, as if taking it in isolation, for your argument to work? IOW, pay attention to this part, ignore the part that gives it context.
I could be wrong, though. Does Gordy have a mental defect?
What do you mean? What people?
You said covid has nothing to do with health, to which I asked if you were suggesting covid was not a health issue. Considering many people died from covid and still do, it's reasonable to conclude it is still a health issue.
What was unclear to you?
This 'article' is complete and utter garbage.
Thanks for stopping by.
No need to thank me for stating the obvious/truth.
Drs. Robert Malone, Makary, Paul, Siegel, Saphier, and Nesheiwat were also among those who were ridiculed by the left wing media, Fauci, Collins, the Biden Administration, and the CDC even though all of them have been spot-on in everything they've said since the pandemic began - especially about masking, lockdowns, and giving vaccines to infants, children, and young adults.
Remember the 6 foot distance rule? That was pulled out of thin air and based on the 1918 pandemic.
How was it pulled out of thin air if it was based on the 1918 pandemic??????
Definitions don't equate to being pulled out of thin air when that's not true.
[deleted]
I understand perfectly.
You have nothing to teach me.
Dr. Fauci, et. al didn't invent anything.
Stop pretending I don't understand and stop quoting nonsense to me and definitions.
You cannot teach me anything.
You can have the last word, for now
[deleted]
Indeed, the views are also political / emotional in nature given the author presented claims and his links do not support his claims.
Of course the scientific community (and the politicians who effected policy) were imperfect. This was a worldwide pandemic and the world was learning in real time.
So would perfect knowledge have allowed better choices on school closures? Of course. Same with the other complaints.
But the key factor the author ignores is that COVID-19 was indeed killing people and was indeed spreading throughout the planet. Masks are effective in reducing infecting others. Social distancing is effective in creating barriers to mitigate the spread of the airborne virus. Vaccines do indeed help the immune system fight off the infection and at the least reduce the severity. This article claims that ALL the studies showing effectiveness of methods are wrong and that his select studies are correct. And worse, the author portrays the entire worldwide scientific community as simply WRONG. No notion of nuance (i.e. generally correct but with certain exceptions learned over time) — just categorically wrong.
And then the author makes note of facts such as the distrust of vaccines cost lives ... which is an argument for the use of vaccines.
This is a political piece, IMO.
It's utter garbage.
I've never had a problem with shots, as a kid and later enlisting in the Air Force I didn't have a choice in the matter....same as the haircut.
I take the boosters because I'm an old guy with a bit of COPD....that 20 some years of smoking finally caught up with me.
But looked at what happened in China after the extreme isolation and lockdowns were lifted. Full blown pandemic all over again.
The amount of conflicting misinformation coming from the so called experts only added to the confusion. Trumps uninformed blatherings were not helpful. We'll never know for sure how well the lockdowns, masking, and social distancing worked at stopping the spread.
Which, in my opinion, is a point against such practices. The idea that we can contain something like covid seems ludicrous to me. We demonstrably cannot. China attempted extreme measures in this area and once they ended it due to public pressure, they now face what they had always inevitably faced and what the rest of the world has already gone through. Those of us in countries who've already gone through it are still getting covid, vaccinated or not, and variants are still being produced. This is inevitable. Short of sealing up people who are actually at high risk of mortality from covid in hermetically sealed environments forever, it simply can't make a significant difference. Covid is still here and will be for the foreseeable future.
Virologists knew this from the start, once it was known covid had escaped beyond any hope of containment, yet supported lockdown policies that could not possibly work unless as draconian as what China did and even such a tyrannical state such as theirs could not realistically keep it up forever. So why do it? What was the point? Politics. It was a great political tool for Democrats for various reasons. First and most obvious was as a weapon against Trump, (who seemed to be helping them attack him as often as he could.) The other is Democrat's desire for centralized-control style of government and this was perfect for training citizenry in that direction.
The evidence for this is that there actually were professional, credentialed experts in the field who tried to point out that what was being put out as scientific concerning the response was not, in fact, scientifically proven to be the actual answer. What happened to them? A rational debate among the experts? No. They were ridiculed by politicians and MSM, who were manifestly NOT credentialed professionals in the field of virology. Any possibility of debate was shut down, publicly.
No, I think this article pretty much nails it concerning how covid was manipulated for certain narratives and goals.
TL:DR? This article sucks.
He's also a terrible writer when it comes to crafting a persuasive argument.
His accusations are vague, and devoid of examples or any other supportive evidence. He presents no cause and effect connection to support his claim that anyone's actions "cost lives."
There are links in his article, but they are useless. For example, he inexplicably puts hyperlinks on CDC, WHO, and FDA. But those links only go to a Newsweek page defining what those organizations are. His other links to articles or studies are similarly pointless. Am I supposed to read the whole article and discern for myself why it might be relevant? That's not how effective persuasion works. You need to point me to something specific in the source and present an analysis of how that evidence supports a thesis.
For the ignorant - and Mr. Bass appears to be one of those people - the primary point of lockdowns and masking was to ease the load on our medical system. This was popularly known as "flattening the curve." Did it work? That would be the important question for analysis, but Mr. Bass doesn't seem to understand that.
To be fair, he's not wrong about a lot of things.
Mistakes were made. Experts got a lot of shit very obviously wrong and then refused to admit they were wrong no matter how obvious it became.
The math on most of this was very clear to even casual observers.
Covid was never primarily transmitted through droplets. Wearing a mask, while effective to a small degree, never offered the protection advertised. Vaccinated people were never in serious danger from unvaccinated people. Several interventional treatments were quite obviously effective in certain circumstances, despite claims to the contrary. We achieved "herd immunity" far earlier than anyone acknowledged.
Credibility is massively important in times of public crisis, and public health officials in the US certainly didn't help theirs very much.
For example?
Well, I think that’s inevitable. But it doesn’t mean that the whole business was handled in bad faith or without due care. I do think that health agencies like CDC and WHO have been burned in the past when they sounded an alarm and an epidemic fizzled out.
Covid was, and remains, transmissible through droplets. However, what was not fully acknowledged at first is how well it spreads through smaller droplets - referred to as “aerosols” - that can linger in the air for hours. I do think that was a fairly obvious oversight given that we had ample evidence of outbreaks in indoor spaces like hospitals, churches, and so on. So, in the earliest days of the pandemic, I would say far too much emphasis was put on a concern for surfaces, for the reason I mention above. Also, it is my understanding that several respiratory diseases do spread primarily through larger droplets.
I’m not sure what you think was advertised, but masks have been shown to be very effective at inhibiting the spread of the virus. It’s not 100%, to be sure, but anyone who thinks it was supposed to be 100% hasn’t been paying attention. The very best masks are labeled “N95,” not “N100.” Even lesser masks have been shown to be better than no mask at all.
I don’t know. Serious danger” is probably subjective. People are not all the same just because they become vaccinated. They may still have underlying medical conditions that are specific to them, so they react to the virus in unique ways. With the Alpha and Delta versions of the virus, in particular, unvaccinated, infected people were more likely to shed larger quantities of virus than those who were vaccinated because the virus was allowed to flourish deep in the lungs. Taking in a more potent dose of virus can lead to a more serious infection. With Omicron, the difference has not been as strong because the virus lives in a different part of the respiratory system and is more contagious anyway.
I don’t wear a mask anymore because I’m up to date on my vaccines, I’ve had Omicron, I’m not elderly, and I’m generally healthy. And let’s face it, Covid is everywhere, anyway. So, fuck it. At this point, if people have special concerns personal to them, they can wear a mask. I would not have said that 2+ years ago, but the situation has evolved.
As the virus has evolved, various treatments have become more and/or less effective. I would say that by and large, doctors have been free to fight infections in whatever way they thought best. Arguments in the media and online are not relevant to the treatment of an individual. I think a lot of that political stuff goes away once you’re alone with your doctor.
We have not achieved herd immunity, nor are we ever likely to. Covid is here to stay. It evolves quickly and people get reinfected only a few months later. Maybe if the whole world could have been vaccinated all at once, we could have achieved herd immunity, but at this point, that dream is done.
Having said that, we may have reached a point where we won’t see the huge spikes we saw previously.
I would say that's a rather large understatement. My most intense medical training was the Combat Lifesavers course I had in the Army so, not qualified medically on much at all. However, I hardly think it needed much training to conclude that covid was highly transmissible, and that aerosolization was easily the most obvious likelihood, given how fast this thing spread throughout the world.
I don't think that is what Jack meant nor do I think what you've said here is accurate. As I recall, even though it should have been obvious to everyone nearly from the start that covid was aerosolized, the progression of the mask mandated went from not necessary, a bandana is sufficient, a cloth mask is sufficient, a double layered cloth mask is sufficient, a triple layered cloth mask is sufficient and then, finally, only an M95 would do.
But regardless of what mask may have been sufficient, it was unrealistic to think that they had any hope of actually making much of a difference in the long run. First off, because covid was spread because it was an aerosol that lingered in the air for hours. What masks did was change people from getting covid really fast to something more slowly, but they were going to get it eventually. It would be impossible not to short of a full biohazard suit and biohazard procedures for the rest of one's life.
For example, lots of businesses had rules in place just like my place of work. Whenever interacting with someone else masks had to be worn but if you were by yourself, in an office for instance, you didn't have to wear the mask unless someone else entered your office. Thing is, if you were contagious with covid, while you were alone you were filling the air in your office with aerosolized covid. So, when someone entered your office, even if wearing a properly fitted M95 mask, they were at risk of exposure. This is because the mask would be fitted to a relaxed, expressionless face, not one that is speaking or reacting to what someone has said with a smile, which will break the seal of the mask. And this is assuming that everyone was wearing an M95 mask the whole pandemic, which obviously only a tiny fraction were. It gets a lot worse with anything less.
Like I said, masks may have slowed the inevitable, but it did nothing to prevent it.
In my opinion, you are thinking about all of this wrong, like many people. To my mind, it is like a simple math equation. Covid exists X time + variants = eventual infection. People have been dying from the flu for all of recorded history. Covid is no different and for the same reasons. From the beginning, people like me up to experts in virology have been saying the same thing. Now, today, we see that they are right because covid is still with us and we're treating it the same as the flu.
That is what this seed has been about. We treated covid as if it were something more easily contained, like Ebola, when it was obvious it never was. Political decisions were made not based on any real science or common sense. It was based on political agendas.
No, actually, it hasn't. Not medically, anyway. Only politically. Even nobodies like myself know that viruses evolve. Some of us always accepted that this would be another version of the flu in practice. Covid followed the path predicted by those who said we were reacting to this wrong. We knew that, eventually, when covid served its political purpose, we'd get back to what we have now because the lockdown and the rest was simply unsustainable, even if it had been necessary or beneficial.
True, but also not to which the seed was referring. It was about how we handled covid as a nation.
Untrue, possibly because "herd immunity'' is misleading concerning what it refers to.
It doesn't refer to actual immunity but, rather, resistance. I think we've probably achieved the same level of herd immunity to covid as we have the common flu.
I think you can count on the fact that we won't. Covid was devastating at first because it was something we hadn't encountered before. Now we have and most of the world population has already been exposed to it. It is no longer new to our immune system. Of course, there's always the possibility of a truly monstrous variant emerging, but that's true of any virus, be it covid, flu or anything else.
You mean other than the several I gave?
It's not inevitable to double down on them when challenged, especially when it's obvious enough that they certainly knew they were wrong.
This is a perfect example. Define "very". When we use real numbers, what we find is that "very effective" means about a 20% reduction in the spread of the disease.
So that's certainly a significant statistical impact. But when we look at other data we see other ideas.
During January of 2021, Kern County, California had more active covid cases than Dallas, Harris and Bexar Counties (Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio) combined, despite having a fraction of the population. Kern County's mask adoption rate was 94%, while the average in those Texas counties was about 80%. So yes, the masks are effective....BUT.... the math is screaming at us that there are vastly more significant factors at work.
But we didn't dare talk about any of those ideas. As a society, we were thoroughly committed to catering to people who did not understand the math or science and who also wanted to panic. If you asked about other factors at the time, people just yelled at you about wearing a mask.
So this ends up being like a sort of Level I tech support situation, where you've called for help with your computer and all they tell you to do is keep restarting it. You know there is something more to the situation, but when you suggest that something else might be wrong, they just keep telling you to restart in a progressively louder and angrier voice. It doesn't take you very long to start ignoring all their instructions.
The math is both objective and overwhelming. "A pandemic of the unvaccinated" is one of the most statistically accurate phrases in recent memory.
It has evolved socially. It really hasn't evolved very much scientifically or mathematically. How you look at it now would have been equally valid in July of 2020 after most people were vaccinated. But we weren't ready to stop being scared, so we just ignored the science.
We have achieved immunity in the same sense that we have with the common cold. It's a minor inconvenience as opposed to a national health crisis. Statistically speaking, we know that the actual rate of infection in any disease far exceeds the reported rate of infection. In previous major US outbreaks (swine flu, etc), studies showed that for every diagnosed case there were approximately 50 that went unreported. Tests at UCLA and Stanford confirmed similar ratios for C19 in the spring of 2020. So the number of people who have already survived Covid and either had or now have natural immunity is almost surely much, much higher than the cases we've counted.
Which part? We seem to agree that it was an obvious mistake.
Your argument is that masks were not used properly - not they’re bad at slowing the spread of the virus. Therefore the fault lies with people, not the device.
With a brand new disease, that was not obvious. Ebola spreads differently than the flu or Covid, but other diseases that are airborne (e.g.: measles, legionnaires disease) have been well contained. So the hope that Covid could be stopped was a legitimate one.
Of course it has. Why would you even say something so silly? Doctors tried many treatments in the early days that didn’t work. So, they found other treatments and prevention tools. We now have vaccines and antiviral meds. Furthermore, as the virus has evolved, some treatments which worked better early on (like monoclonal antibodies or prophylactic meds) are no longer effective. The medical situation has not evolved? I can’t believe you really think that.
That sounds like some conspiracy theory nonsense.
Yes. Some people only want to focus on the politics. My point was all that nonsense goes away in the doctor’s office. It’s a perfectly valid critique of any article or comment to say that it is over-emphasizing something.
Possibly. I don’t know how we would determine that. I do know Covid is still killing several times the number of people that the flu does. So it’s still valid to think of it as a greater threat to public health.
To be fair????????????????????????
Yeah, I was hoping you’d specifically quote the author. Instead you seemed to be giving your own thoughts. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.
People stick to their guns all the time. That’s not that weird. As I think I alluded to, though, advisory agencies like WHO and CDC are in a sticky situation. Most of the time, their advice is fine. But once in a while they make a recommendation that is just wrong, and the fallout threatens the very existence of the agency. I think for that reason, they are very hesitant to commence or change guidance on something that impacts the whole population.
Why would you say this? Of course it has. Once the Omicron strains developed, Covid went from being a lower respiratory infection to an upper respiratory infection. That was a game changer. It’s still deadly, but now far less so than it used to be. We also have vaccines and recovered patients increasing the resistance of the general population. And of course, new treatments pop up all the time. Scientifically, the pandemic has changed a lot.
I would not look at it the same now as in July 2020, for the reasons I just gave. Also, in July 2020, no one was vaccinated. Vaccines were not approved until December of 2020, and they were rolled out slowly due to limited supply. We didn’t even get to 50% fully vaccinated (two shots) in the US until late August 2021. To this day, we are barely at 2/3 of the population, and that’s only for the original vaccines, which are less effective against Omicron than the latest vaccines. Nationally, that rate of vaccination is less than 20%.
In 2021, that would have bothered me, but not so much now. Why? Because even if you haven’t been vaccinated, you’ve probably caught the damned thing by now. The vast majority of people have some level of resistance. The percentage of Americans that have both never caught Covid and never been vaccinated is becoming vanishingly small. I don’t know if that qualifies as herd immunity. I haven’t been hearing people call it that just yet. But it might be the best we can hope for.
Are there any studies of masks as actually used that show them. Working with corona? Every one I’ve seen showing a benefit is under tightly controlled lab conditions, never in the field.
There is a quite a bit of field evidence.
That it was fairly obvious.
Not quite what I said, but it doesn't really matter. Let's assume the fault lies entirely with people. How does that change anything?
In the first couple of months it was not obvious to the common person, largely thanks to the MSM trying to weaponize the crisis and doing their best to shut down anyone with a view that didn't align with their narrative. After a couple of months, anyone with even a basic understanding of viruses began to piece together what was actually going on. People began comparing it to the flu because, essentially, it is spread the same way. I know Ebola isn't spread in that manner, which is why I used it as an example of the way MSM and government outlets were trying to make it sound like.
Because I was referring to your "it made sense at the time but doesn't anymore" tone of what you said. That is, I was referring to the human response to covid, not covid itself. Pretty much the entire response to covid, politically, didn't make any sense and, instead, created consequences which we are still paying for.
You're welcome to your opinion.
Um, yeah.... kind of the point of the seed. That politics drove the science rather than the other way around.
Fine. The point is, we're already treating covid in the same manner we treat the flu.
It means that trying to get people to wear masks was the right call. Masks work. But you don’t abandon that guidance just because people go insane and think that mask recommendations are an attempt to destroy civil rights.
Doctors give advice every day that people ignore. Lose weight. Stop smoking. Exercise more. Eat healthier. People ignore that advice, but that doesn’t make it bad advice.
And aggregate studies pointing the other way:
. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low‐certainty evidence).
. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low‐certainty evidence).
No, they don't. Not for something like Covid in a real-world environment. There was zero chance masks would be effective because a. the nature of how covid spread and b. human nature.
I can't remember how many articles I read about mask/handwashing fanatics who complained about religiously obeying CDC guidelines and getting the immunizations but still got covid anyway.
There are always studies that conflict. You asked:
@5.1.8 I gave you one (actually a collection) of many examples.
Now you effectively change your question to: are there any indisputable studies showing that masks work [at a level you will manipulate] with coronavirus?
There are credible studies and of course there are studies that will seek to dispute them. Anything can be 'disputed'. Indeed, if a point is argued, it is usually easy to find some entity that will argue a counterpoint.
Bottom line. Yes, there are indeed credible studies of masks as actually used that show them working with coronavirus. Masks are one of the weakest countermeasures and that fact has been made quite clear. But masks do indeed inhibit droplets and thus mitigate the spread of coronavirus to others. Masks empirically do help and are (were) worth wearing.
Masks, social distancing, handwashing, etc. were never deemed to be measures that will ensure you are not infected. They reduce the chance of infect, but fall quite short of ensuring you are safe. Vaccines are the strongest measures and even there one is not guaranteed to be infected; but one is much more likely to fight off the infection quicker and will empirically have less severe symptoms.
It is strange how some argue, essentially, that if a method is not 100% effective then it is to be considered ineffective.
It's willful ignorance.
Funny how ideology affects interpretation.
So a few things from grade school in the 50's
In a building specifically built to be an elementary school in 1921 the heating system was considered state of the art oil fired boilers pumping hot water through a radiator system wrapped in asbestos. Just like every steam system used in the US Navy.
Daily chores included sweeping said asbestos from each classroom because in spite of being painted over with oil based paints which included lead, the asbestos was decaying on every supply pipe throughout the School, chapel and convent.
Approved by the US and state governments...
We didn't know what we didn't know.
Vaccines; lined up in the cafeteria for every one of them, thrilled when polio was administered with sugar cubes. All approved by the US government. My scars are on my left arm.
Cold War? Hiding under your desk, sitting on tiles which contained asbestos...
The big lie about surviving a nuclear strike, approved by the US Government, turned into a praying moment if you had nuns, Christian Brothers or priests for teachers.
What's strange is how some people have to rephrase what someone else has said into something different in order to make their point work.
Sticking to your guns when the data says you're wrong is the opposite of science. Yet that's what we got. And that's the author's point, and even though I think he overstates it somewhat, he's not entirely wrong.
My mistake. I meant 2021 (18 months ago).
You had probably caught it back then, and you've almost certainly caught it by now even if you have been vaccinated.
Studies on previous viral outbreaks indicated that only about 2% of cases ever actually get reported. Most people just don't get sick enough to seek professional care. So if we thought we had 2 million cases, we probably really had 100 million, and it just didn't affect most people that severely, because... as you say... the vast majority of people had some level of resistance. That's not new. That was happening from day 1. The big difference is that we've all calmed down.
In the above, you support your zero chance of masks being effective with your note that some who religiously obeyed CDC guidelines still were infected with COVID. So "some" (as in not 100%) were infected even when they followed all the rules.
So clear this up. Do you think that masks provide a measure of protection by inhibiting the spread of the virus from the mask wearer or zero protection (as in wearing masks is pointless)? And I am talking about the real world where a) and b) both apply.
Indeed. Notice how interpretation often conforms to one's own bias or narratives.
Contracted Covid long before a vaccine was available.
First thought that the rash on my leg was related to farm chemicals.
Then I remembered the old lady who had coughed and sneezed on me.
Sucks? You're too kind. It's garbage.