Here is another bullshit masking/schools paper. These are disgraceful for their methodological flaws and intent to prop up a policy which clearly failed. The authors claim that forced masking in schools substantially reduced CV-19 deaths in a community. No such thing occurred. The way they approached the issue completely ignored multiple events occurring at the same time as masking mandate changes and completely avoids determining how many people continued to wear a mask without a mandate and the characteristics of those persons. This nonsense of trying to use the presence of a mandate as equivalent to who is wearing a mask and when they wear it is just absolute garbage. It disgusts me that any source would publish and elevate this kind of result-oriented nonsense to the level of “science” or “research”. (SSRN Paper)
A study finds that not only did drug overdose deaths increase during the epidemic, by an estimated 25%, but that there were spikes in the increases every time the government made one of its income-supplementing payments. In other words, a bunch of people took those payments and used them to buy more drugs. (Medrxiv Study)
According to this research when a pregnant woman (and only biological women can get pregnant in case you were at all confused about that) gets a CV-19 infection, the virus can pass to the fetus and may cause methylation changes to the baby’s DNA. Methylation affects the actual coding products of DNA. Immune responses after birth may also be impacted. (Medrxiv Study)
When Omicron was the most prevalent strain of CV-19, there were still many hospitalizations and deaths associated with CV-19, even though it appeared to be a milder strain. (That appearance is likely due in part to the fact that the most vulnerable persons died in earlier waves.) The study was conducted on a large portion of the Swedish population and identified that being very old and being in poor health were the highest risk factors for a CV-19-associated hospitalization or death. Doh. (Medrxiv Study)
And now I am caught up for at least a month unless some really inane or impressive study pops up in the meantime.
K Roche writes in the next to last paragraph – “(That appearance is likely due in part to the fact that the most vulnerable persons died in earlier waves.) ”
That is a valid observation. In the US – almost every state had higher death rates after the vaccine was introduced. The three major exceptions were new york, new jersey and california which had large drops, primarily because of the very high deaths in the March/april 2020 time frame and the Nov/dec 2020 time frame. Those three states had significant decreases in death rates compared to all the other states, most likely since the vunerable were taken out in the two very early waves.
info based on graphs provided by worldometers.
By now – everyone has heard my commentary on the pro masking studies. Most are academic fraud level or approaching academic fraud level. As K Roche notes, they all have serious methodological flaws.
A – for one, none do a proper job of adjusting for the highest co founding variable, which is the time of interaction with other people. Time spent with other people is the single biggest factor in risk of transmission of any respiriatory virus. Individuals inclined to wear masks are also the type of individual that is scared and thus most likely to reduce their time of interaction with others. That factor is omitted and/or very poorly accounted for in every study.
B – Basic fluid dynamics is important to grasp. Every fluid (including air) seeks the path of least resistance. The mask greats a lot of resistance to the air flow, so the air flow is going to go out through the sides of the mask where there is little resistance. So unless the mask is sealed tightly, around 90+% of the air flow is going in and out of the sides of the mask, basically unfiltered.
I just love reading your column! My dose of actual common sense!
thank you for the kind words