You can tell how defensive the idiots who designed and mandated the pandemic-era restrictions are about their lack of effectiveness by the fact that they keep publishing more made-up research claiming that these restrictions worked. The latest efforts are hilarious in their bogus design. This one purports to show that in geographic areas with strong mask mandates and vax mandates, there were fewer deaths than in those without or with weak ones. Absolute bullshit. All of this research needs to be looked at from the perspective that everyone got infected, literally almost everyone, and most people more than once, including most people getting infected after being vaxed. So the futility of all these measures is obvious. (JAMA Study)
The authors looked at the period July 2020 to June 2022 across states, looked not just at vax and mask mandates, but at what they euphemistically call “activity limitations”, which includes business and school closings, social distancing, forcing people to stay home. They create a binary distinction between very restrictive and less restrictive states. Mortality was the outcome, and of course that itself has problems as we learned during the epidemic that the process of assigning causes of death is wildly variable and in this epidemic it was particularly difficult to assess whether a person actually died because of CV-19. So you are starting with a really bad outcome to use. The authors make this worse by using excess deaths as the real outcome, and as we have also seen, that is very, very hard to determine. They used only a two year baseline, completely inadequate to capture trends.
They used the promulgation of restrictions to determine how widespread they were, and had no measure of actual compliance, just the usual completely untrustworthy estimates generated by various organizations. Vax mandates never applied to a large proportion of the population, so you started with a flawed “restriction” to evaluate. And there appeared to be no recognition of the time dynamics in regard to something like the % of people vaccinated–no one was at the start of the study period and the rollout varied by jurisdiction, similarly, mask mandates and other nonsense varied in the time they were applied.
Note the geographical difficulty as well–the epidemic did not proceed uniformly across the country, partly because transmission appears affected by climate factors and partly because density of population, age of the population, health status of the population, etc. are highly variable across states of regions. And the ding-dongs completely ignore the impact and timing of infection rates and resulting immune responses–this is always ignored in this research. Interestingly, even these goofballs couldn’t concoct a finding of any effectiveness of “activity limitations”, i.e., those business and school closures, etc. had no impact on deaths.
Where they did find the impact, the range of the supposed effect was broader than the number representing the lower bound, indicating that there was no precision in the finding, and it is likely bogus. So supposedly the most restrictive states had 10% to 21% lower deaths than the least restrictive. A low effect to begin with, and as I said, the width of the range tells you what you need to know about the statistical precision. Finally, read the limitations section, in particular the acknowledgment that they completely failed to even attempt to adjust for important compounding factors like those I mentioned above. This is a weak, worthless study. Once again, all you really need to know is that everyone got infected regardless of masks, vax mandates or anything else.
And then of course, we still have the mask morons trying to convince us that they actually can stop spread. This study looked at the supposed effects of wearing surgical masks in public on “respiratory symptoms”. Adults were the study group and one large group was assigned to wear masks in public, but not at home or at work, where the closest contacts are found, and the control group did not wear masks. The secondary outcome was a self-reported or actual CV-19 infection. So the authors are trying to back into saying that masks stop the spread of CV-19. But they didn’t, there was no difference in infection level between the groups. 9% of people in the mask group and 12% in the non-mask group reported respiratory symptoms. A small and weak difference, which likely is largely accounted for by self-reporting and mask wearers wanting to believe they have less symptoms and non-mask wearers perhaps thinking they were more likely to have a symptom. A placebo effect in other words. Interestingly, only 25% of people in the face mask group reported wearing it all the time, and 41% most of the time, suggesting more difficulty wearing a mask than is assumed by proponents. And a much larger number of people in the mask arm failed to complete the follow-up questionaire than in the non-mask group, and no effort was made to find out why or if something was different about that group. A higher proportion of people in the mask group reported seeking health care for respiratory symptoms than in the non-mask one, suggesting that they had worse respiratory symptoms. Masks will do that to you, as they are a virus collection device. So while the authors say masking had a positive impact, I say bullshit, they appear to make no difference other than to lead to worse respiratory symptoms. (BMJ Studies)
One additional comment on the pro-masking effectiveness studies.
First I agree that everyone was going to catch covid at some point and secondly I agree that the only long term solution was to develop immunity throughout the population – note that pre vax, the only way to obtain any immunity was to catch covid.
That being said, the most effective mitigation protocol to slow the spread (not stop the spread ) was simply to avoid people. People that wore masks tending to be much more paranoid, and therefore tended to avoid people. That factor alone skewed the data and was poorly accounted for in the pro-masks effectiveness studies.
Even at that, almost all pro- mask studies that showed positive results only showed positive results for short time periods. After 8-10 weeks, pro masks reversed itself and the non masks groups had lower infection rates.
I went through that data a couple of times in the 2021-2022 timeframe and in aggregate there was no trend, there are always additional factors, and by selecting carefully you could prove it or disprove it all day long. Bottom line is ALL the reports were so distorted there is no way from public information to conclude anything. An extensive sweep of medical records, done as an audit, might be able to prove something but it’s liable to prove the various social mandates were useless or harmful.