Vinay Prasad MD MPH Profile picture
Feb 17, 2022 20 tweets 8 min read Read on X
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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More from @VPrasadMDMPH

Nov 29
Here's what they are not saying
Vaccine hesitancy has been rising for some time. This includes preventable illnesses like measles. There will be measles outbreaks in the future! Covid policy accelerated hesitancy. The question is: how many extra outbreaks will occur bc of RFK...
... If RFK is HHS secretary, versus if RFK is not HHS secretary. That's the question.

Even though he has tremendous administrative authority, he has already stated he's not going to withdraw these vaccines. I also suspect it's not going to be the first topic he touches...
Moreover, I and others have repeatedly provided compromised positions where we can improve safety detection of current vaccines. The current system can be honest and admit that our vaccine surveillance is abysmal. Companies don't want safety discovered.
Read 9 tweets
Nov 22
Every single one of these garbage papers use the denominator of PCR+ covid infections, and not the actual denominator of people who had covid-- many do not present to the doc. Every single one of these papers is shit. I would be embarrassed to be an author. Incompetent work. Image
People with covid who are so sick they have to go to the doctor have poorer health than people who don't. That should be in the journal of obvious things. All of these authors are extrapolating beyond the evidence. They're creating a body of trash calling itself science
Is there a single paper that uses a sero prevalence denominator? Is there a single researcher in this field whose brain is working? Just one. That's all I ask for.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 3
Totally wrong. Because Vincent is not thinking about the counterfactual correctly.
*Teachable moment*

1 These drugs were approved by accelerated approval in the LAST line. Some later improved survival & others didn't in an EARLIER line.

2 The counterfactual to AA... 🧵
is demanding RCTs powered for say, OS (survival). If a company couldn't use RR to get AA, they wouldn't run a trial in the 2nd line or 3rd line setting powered for OS, they would run it in the 7th or 8th line

Why? more dire = faster result
3. We have proven that in these v late lines RR and median DOR (the current AA criteria) result just as fast as OS
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30933235/
Read 10 tweets
Sep 29
Many people want covid to be worse than it is. They imagine it has long-term consequences that are worse than other respiratory viruses. Adjusting for severity of illness, it doesn't. Only anosmia is unusual. Why do they want it to be worse than it is? 🧵
For some reason, some people want to live with perennial precautions. They don't want to take off the mask, they want their children to mask, they want to keep getting booster after booster. I don't know why but they want to live in fear.
They have...
A mountain of retrospective observational data that they think supports their claim that covid has long-term disability. That it's a vascular disease. And all sorts of other claims. Nearly all these studies are flawed. They don't have good controls.
Read 15 tweets
Sep 25
I spent a lot of time today reading this paper, the criticism, the rebuttal, the retraction notice. OMG! My head hurts.

But... An important point no one has said is that the entire premise of the study & criticism is flawed. 🧵 Here is a short summary
Lots of prior studies show many psychological findings don't reproduce. Obviously that's because so much of this science is bullshit. Small sample size, weak methods. Entire fields struggling to justify their existence & people p hacking and exaggerating to be on @HiddenBrain
How do you fix this problem? No one really knows. All of academia is incentivized for hype and discovery, actually being a thoughtful student, criticizing things, pushing for better methods that's unpopular.
Read 17 tweets
Sep 14
Thank you @Erman_Akkus for ur reply it is a good learning opportunity for #ESMO24

In 15 tweets, I will summarize the trial, my criticism, and why this reply contains 3 common errors that oncologists make because our training doesn't teach these ideas.

First, the trial... Image
The trial is #LEEP-012 and randomizes pts with INCURABLE (see pic) liver cancer to TACE (embolization) plus costly drugs or embolization alone.

These 2 drugs are TOXIC (lenva is horrible) and cost a FORTUNE 200-300k per annum per person
#ESMO24 Image
Every single person has the cancer return. It is non-metastatic, as @Erman_Akkus says, but it is not curable.

Here is the time until measured lesions grow 20% or new lesions present or the patient dies

That's what he and others are excited by #ESMO24
a 4 months PFS Image
Read 16 tweets

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