Thread by @CWBabich

The flawed NEJM mask study, reviewed by an expert who does literature reviews for money... 🧵 1/15

"Lifting Universal Masking in Schools — Covid-19 Incidence among Students and Staff" was published on Nov 9,2022. Please note the second author is @EpiEllie who produced some of the most ridiculous takes. Including this 2/15

Now onto the study. DiD analysis is a social science tool, not an effective empirical measure which is evident in the study. 3/15

Authors claim they found a 32.6 to 57.1 incidence of cases after the masks were removed. Of course, this is a significant bias given the narrow scope of the study. 4/15

This is enough to discredit the study on this statement alone, this has nothing to do with viral replication. 5/15

Bias of over-testing, considering tests for "regardless of symptoms" include asymptomatic which renders false positives at a high cycle threshold. 6/15

Law of Large numbers is the first thing you learn in a university statistics class, so naturally, large incident testing will render larger results closer to the Mean. 7/15

I hope that this is explained in a limitations section. 2 schools vs. 46 schools will naturally render lower results considering the wild difference in sample size. 8/15

Notice this, incidence testing masked vs. unmasked. Authors totally ignore case incident rates were higher with masks than without. If I were to use the weak correlation analysis from the authors I could easily say, mask removal contributed to 41.6% decrease in cases. 9/15

The incidence with a narrow scope does not imply causation, especially when you ignore the analysis on the graphs above. 10/15

Mentioning this and not the massive dredging of 2 schools vs. 46 schools is enough for this paper to be retracted. 11/15

What? 12/15

What again? 13/15

In sum, I feel medical doctors have a duty to write NEJM and get this article retracted based on its shotty research and overwhelming biases. I know those lovely ladies and doctors of #TeamReality are doing their part on Twitter calling attention to this crap. 14/15

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