Thread by @michaelpsenger

THREAD - HOW ZEYNEP TUFEKCI AND JEREMY HOWARD MASKED AMERICA

Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard played a decisive role shifting CDC guidance and ushering in mask mandates across America. Zeynep’s role in the COVID story goes far deeper than most realize. 1/
michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/how-zeynep-t…

After three years of speculation, an authoritative gold-standard Cochrane review including results from 78 peer-reviewed RCTs confirmed that across populations, masks, regardless of type, made “little to no difference” in preventing COVID or flu. 2/
city-journal.org/new-cochrane-s…

The Cochrane review seemed to settle the matter. Mask opponents had their trump card. But alas, the pro-mask establishment responded with a trump card of their own: an NYT op-ed by Zeynep Tufekci: “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work” 3/
nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opi…

This new trump card was a disaster for mask opponents—the proverbial queen of spades—and it quickly went viral among mask devotees, newly reassured in the righteousness of their talismans, drowning out news of the Cochrane review itself. 4/

Yet Zeynep’s op-ed brought new attention to a lingering question: Where exactly did all these mask mandates come from? Why did the US CDC suddenly reverse its longstanding guidance and begin recommending masks for the first time in modern history in April 2020? 5/

Zeynep’s first article on COVID appeared Feb 27, 2020, in which she stressed the importance of getting ready for major disruptions during COVID in order to “flatten the curve.” At the time, her advice on masks followed the public health establishment. 6/
blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/p…

Over the next few days, Zeynep’s views on masking apparently changed dramatically, and this about-face would have a profound impact on all Americans. As NYT wrote, her writing in the next few days was the “tipping point” changing CDC’s masking guidance. 7/
nytimes.com/2020/08/23/bus…

Around this time, Zeynep began working with Howard, who founded the American branch of #Masks4All. Howard is a WEF AI expert and something of a Sinophile who repeatedly advocated for the use of information and expertise from China during COVID. 8/

It’s not entirely clear how they began working together. Zeynep and Howard’s first public interaction regarding COVID was when Howard cited Zeynep as a contributor to his viral March 9, 2020 article encouraging shutdowns on China’s example. 9/
fast.ai/posts/2020-03-…

Howard says he’d been inspired by a viral video posted on March 14, 2020, by Petr Ludwig, a founder of the original #Masks4All movement in the Czech Republic, in which Ludwig encouraged everyone to wear homemade masks. 10/

The internationalization of #Masks4All was based on the story that universal adoption of homemade masks in the Czech Republic had “slowed the spread” of COVID cases, preventing them from “growing exponentially” as they had in the rest of the world. 11/

This story was always false, if not a lie. Today, the Czech Republic is among the 10 worst countries in the world in terms of its recorded number of “COVID deaths.” Yet this falsehood was the impetus for #Masks4All and soon a basis for mask mandates across the world. 12/

With the assistance of the WEF Young Global Leaders, Howard published “Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve. We should all wear them in public.” in WaPo, gushing about the Czech Republic’s mask mandate and citing Chinese CDC Director George Gao. 13/

We see Gao’s emphasis on “droplets” reflected throughout Howard and Zeynep’s work. For example, the “sources” section of the official #Masks4All website prominently features another quote on droplets from Gao: 14/
masks4all.org/sources

Howard then went on a media blitz. As Howard tells it, his GMA interview, in which he was joined by Fauci, was monumental in that it was the first time Fauci had ever come to advise mask use by the American public. GMA also repeated Gao’s quote on masks preventing “droplets”. 15/

Howard then discussed masking with Senator Pat Toomey, who briefed the CDC and President Trump. The next day, Trump announced that universal masking might be needed. 16/

Howard then began making inroads at the CDC, which was still reluctant to reverse its longstanding guidance on masks because “the science wasn’t strong enough.” So Howard “tried to ratchet up the public pressure.” 17/

Zeynep and Howard submitted their preprint, an “interdisciplinary narrative review of the literature on the role of face masks in reducing COVID-19 transmission,” soon the most-viewed paper of all time on preprints.org. It begins: 18/
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

In their paper, Zeynep and Howard argued that “everyone, adults and children, should wear masks,” citing as a major benefit masks’ potential to “shape new societal behaviors” as “a visible signal and reminder of the pandemic.” 19/
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

The CDC officially reversed its mask guidance on April 3, 2020, and Zeynep and Howard’s preprint was a factor. Zeynep and Howard then turned their focus toward getting states to mandate masks. 20/

USA Today published Zeynep and Howard’s op-ed, titled “Over 100 health leaders to governors: Require masks to help contain the coronavirus,” in which they wrote it was necessary to have “80% of the population wearing masks to stop the spread.” 21/
usatoday.com/story/opinion/…

Over the next three years, mask use exceeded 80% of the population in countless states and countries, but in no instance did it “stop the spread” of COVID. 22/

Howard had no relevant credentials in the field, but he was forceful. When virologist Angela Rasmussen questioned his analysis, Howard went so far as to email her boss to demand a “public retraction” of her critique. 23/

Zeynep and Howard were invited to present their masking preprint and advise the WHO. When WHO officials expressed concern that people wearing masks might start behaving recklessly, Zeynep advised them, “No, listen, I’m a sociologist, I know that’s not true.” 24/

In Zeynep’s work, we see this repeated insistence that masks have no “plausible” downsides. Zeynep claimed the WHO “went out of their way to inflate a harms list,” and decried doctors focused on “alleged ‘harms’” which she believed to be “ridiculous.” 25/
kelleyk.substack.com/p/where-us-mas…

Though it’s always been well known that COVID poses virtually no risk to schoolchildren, Zeynep repeatedly advocated child masking, urging school mask mandates on the false basis “even the vaccinated may pose a danger to unvaccinated children.” 26/
nytimes.com/2021/07/24/opi…

Zeynep’s indifference to harms during the response to COVID wasn’t limited to masking. Though the policy had no precedent in the modern western world until Xi’s lockdown of Wuhan and wasn’t part of any pandemic plan, Zeynep argued the US “should be in full lockdown.” 27/

Later, Zeynep wrote about "3 Ways the Pandemic Has Made the World Better," citing “mRNA vaccines,” new “digital infrastructure,” and the fact we’d “unleashed the true spirit of peer review and open science” as reasons to be thankful for COVID. 28/
theatlantic.com/health/archive…

Like Matt Pottinger, Zeynep pushed for more COVID interventions in part based on information from China, though she simultaneously fashions herself as something of a China hawk and supports the “lab leak theory” of COVID’s origins. 29/
michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/matt-potting…

Despite knowing that “no scientist in China can operate truly freely,” when it came to arguing in favor of more COVID interventions, Zeynep repeatedly advocated the use of information from Chinese scientists, apparently without questioning any of it. 30/

Eg, Zeynep advocated for increased ventilator use in early March 2020 based on information from Chinese scientists, noting in a widely-shared tweet that “Chinese scientists” had advised “many COVID-19 patients need to stay on mechanical ventilators as long as four weeks.” 31/

Indeed, in journal articles, “Chinese expert consensus” had advised ventilators as the “first choice” for COVID. This advice was slurped up by the WHO and spat out all over the world in the WHO’s initial guidance on ventilators for COVID patients. 32/
who.int/docs/default-s…

This guidance proved extremely deadly. JAMA later revealed a 97.2% mortality rate among those over 65 put on ventilators in accordance with initial WHO guidance. Overall, mortality among COVID patients in NY hospitals fell over 2/3 after spring 2020. 33/
jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

The initial ventilator guidance from Chinese scientists led to countless thousands of deaths. Yet despite having specifically disseminated this guidance—while knowing “no scientist in China can operate truly freely”—Zeynep never apologized or acknowledged the error. 34/

Finally, Zeynep’s op-ed on the recent Cochrane review. The title is a lie, given it specifically calls for scientists to “continue to collect data on mask wearing.” 35/
nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opi…

Zeynep relies on a selection of clinical studies, none of which are RCTs; this same level of evidence would show that any number of silly things work against COVID, from ginseng to magnesium to melatonin to fish oil. 36/

Zeynep cites a trial from Bangladesh which found an 11% reduction in COVID cases when villagers were given masks, without disclosing a re-analysis that found no benefit and attributed that finding to bias. 37/
trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

Glaringly, Zeynep apparently didn’t disclose her advocacy or conflicting narrative review concluding “everyone, adults and children,” should wear masks when she elicited Cochrane’s EIC’s clarification of the wording of the review’s conclusion. 38/
disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/unmasking-th…

Regarding Zeynep and Howard’s masking of America, there are only two possibilities—neither good. The first is it was essentially scripted theater—a pretext for actions that a network of elites was planning to take anyway, unbeknownst to the public. 39/
michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/how-zeynep-t…

The second possibility is that it really was this easy for ambitious activists with no relevant expertise to convince institutional leaders to reverse longstanding public health guidance—who then spent years closing their ears to all contrary evidence. 40/

Either way, Zeynep pushed falsehoods and harmful policies based on info from China. She and Howard played a decisive role in the mask mandates that so intimately affected every American, for dubious reasons like “shaping new societal norms.” /end
michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/how-zeynep-t…