The Mask Distraction
brownstone.org
brownstone.org
Assuming that the study was correctly performed, maybe 100% usage difference between groups (all using masks in experimental groups vs nobody using them in control group) could have shown a much higher benefit. But that remains to be tested.
This article is, as an expert in the topic of agnotololy explains, an effort to "…spread doubt in the guise of balanced debate".
This other linked article is from early 2016 and is as relevant today as then: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160105-the-man-who-stud...
I.e. if the jump from 10-40 is 11% the jump from 40-70 would be strictly leq 11? Haven’t thought about this intuition too deeply, fair warning
I'd prefer to see empirical results.
This hypothesis is why medical staff has been wearing masks for the past 100 years or so.
The author doesn't discuss this side at all; when he says "transmission", he doesn't specify who would be wearing a mask.
The only usable data in that article is that outdoors, the chances of transmissions are so low that masks aren't needed anyway. Which is something that was known early on.
The article says nothing about the most important question: if I'm sick and I cough/sneeze, does wearing a mask make it safer for people to be near me?
Well, for one, they won't be covered in my snot. Which makes me thankful for mask culture to begin with.
The masks might well be useless for COVID, but we can't conclude it from the article.
As a side note: for some reason, I haven't heard the anti-maskers complain much about the TSA (or even having to take the shoes off). Or arcane password guidelines (”6-8 characters, one capital, one number, one emoji, no three consecutive lowercase, no substring spelling out "bob", etc).
The point being, we are performing many rituals for the sake of "security"; masks, if proven useless, wouldn't be unlike many others.
So I feel like it's never been about the efficiency of masks, but about giving a visible indication to others that you're either on board with current virus prevention efforts, or on board with the "COVID is fake conspiracy causee by 5G to instill new world order" crowd.
As an individual, it's not for me to worry about. What I'd want to know if a room full of masked people is safer for me than a room where some people aren't wearing masks.
The marginal benefit, I'd assume, would be low if most people can't choose whether to be in such an environment. But I can. Masks working well wouldn't contradict them having little marginal benefit, as, say, 10% of unmasked people might be the 10% that have covid (and, let's be honest here, there is a correlation, since anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and anti-whatever tend to be the same people).
Regardless of your take on public policy it’s time to recognize that masking is wildly ineffective. It has always been security theater.
Well, I did actually.
Per Brandolini's law, I wouldn't advise anyone to lose energy over this article.
Doing so was a steep challenge, for sure, but the costs (of all kinds) of failing have been astronomical.
It's no surprise that the public won't trust them when it really matters after the vaccines are finally out
Not sure how this theory got dismissed. It's been common knowledge for a while that this is exactly what happened. Knowing that doesn't make you cynical, it makes you informed. From [1], written in July 2020:
> Some of the messaging from public health officials was even more explicitly opposed, though. In late February, CDC director Robert Redfield testified before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and was asked if healthy people should wear masks. “No,” Redfield responded. The day after that, US surgeon general Jerome Adams tweeted “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS.” Fauci himself, in early March, told a Senate committee that the general public didn’t need to wear them because Covid-19 wasn’t widespread enough.
> The WHO was even more explicit in its advice: Tightly-fitted N95 masks, which filter out particles as small as 0.3 microns, are for health care workers dealing with sick patients, and they’re in critically short supply. Masks made of other materials—surgical masks made of a synthetic nonwoven, meltblown textile, layers of different kinds of cloth, and so on—can gap at the sides and don’t, on their own, fully protect people from getting infected. More quietly, public health experts worried that if people started wearing masks, they’d overestimate their level of protection and get careless. The science was blurry, but the message had to be clear: No masks for civilians.
Back to TFA:
> Thus the most likely reason why, at the beginning of the pandemic, the health authorities contraindicated the use of masks was because the vast majority of randomized controlled studies, which are the gold standard of clinical trials, carried out until then had concluded that face masks are mostly ineffective in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses.
The motive for lying about this later on would be...?
I have to conclude that the entire article is a result of motivated reasoning where the above paragraph was the intended "likely reason" at the outset, with the rest of the article crafted to support it, even in the face of much more likely explanations that contradict it.
1. https://www.wired.com/story/how-masks-went-from-dont-wear-to...
He argues that it's basically just poor decision-making as a result of "politicized science", politicians need to be visible to the public and what's more visible than a mask mandate (or closing down borders).
- Vaccine Mandates are Unethical
- Police Charged Thousands of People For Petty COVID Violations
- Vaccine Passports: Institutionalized Segregation
- The Cause of Myocarditis: COVID19 or COVID19 Vaccination?
- The Six Major Fails of Anthony Fauci
- Health is Personal and Medicine Must Be Personal Too
Since when did hackernews become /r/nonewnormal?