Dazzling, daring, stunning piece by JH Russell and @DmpPatterson in @tabletmag tellin the true story of masking during COVID 👇
"The overselling of policies began in the early days of the pandemic with the problematic #masks4all movement...."
must read
🧵
tabletmag.com/sections/scien…
First, they are spot on. Many don't see it, but Trump is so influential, He sets the sides!
When he was for schools, Liberals lost their mind and worked to keep them closed; AAP did a bizarre flip flop & sided with unions to keep them closed.
And the same for masks 👇
Absolutely right again 👇
Inexperienced & naive twitter pundits kept saying the pandemic would vanish if we all worse a mask or n95 for 14, 21 days, a claim....
"neither true nor possible"
Yes! The CDC & FDA have made so, so, so many blunders, and most during 2021
Political appointees have cut the legs out from under the agency; In the next ten years, it may topple entirely
"The arbitrariness of the resulting policy recommendations and mandates is etched into the many photographs of masked kids, sometimes posed with unmasked politicians, that will likely come to represent much of our badly flawed pandemic response."
I tried to warn that going beyond WHO and UNICEF to mask 2 year olds-- against global guidance was absolute madness. It was too young; too scant data.
CDC & AAP further cut their own legs
Authors, are spot on👇👇
Since the summer it was clear that vaccination with mRNA products in young men required nuance & Paul Offit advised his son not to be boosted
But White House pushed so hard FDA vax directors quit!
The authors are right that the reason Fauci went on 60 mins and said community masking doesn't work is that was the best consensus of the totality of data pre-pandemic, including multiple RCTs from influenza
We detailed the evidence in a working paper
cato.org/working-paper/…
"While studies of aerosols on masked mannequins may tell us something about fabric quality, they do not tell us much about the effect of a mask mandate—the actual policy—in reality."
Yes! I saw the train wreck as it happened on a double mask mannequin
medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-…
Absolutely right; This group & twitter activists effectively poisoned efforts to run RCTs, polluting equipoise
Misdirected activism is harmful
Activism without evidence generation is catastrophic
A scientific q needed an RCT; now it is political
YES! people say with straight face that there are ZERO downsides; if that was true you should have been wearing it for years, and never take it off
"...little was known about the effects of masking on childhood development, which is part of the reason why the WHO and most European countries recommended against masking 2-year-olds."
Yes, indeed...
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
And the delusion deepened with time....
tabletmag.com/sections/scien…
Absolutely right, and John @NaudetFlorian and @IoanaA_Cristea
tried hard to teach us that RCTs were possible for masking
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33109299/
"Some say it is unfair to criticize PH for... flip-flops—whether about cloth masks, herd immunity, natural immunity, or the vaccines’ effects on transmissibility—because they were just “following the science”.... But in many cases, what evolved was politics, not science"
Everything we feared has come true
Totally, "the rules seemed not to apply to them"
True for all these hypocrite politicians who mask 6 year olds while they party with celebrities at football games
A beautiful ending
Pls, pls, pls read their full essay here
Its a work of genius
Historians should frame it
It is what really happened
@ID_ethics
tabletmag.com/sections/scien…
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