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
"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."
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."
"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
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/
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.
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.
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...
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
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
Just out on @medrxivpreprint and @CityJournal
We analyzed all COVID19 corrections in the @nytimes
We show that 2:1 the Times OVERSOLD covid risk or FALSELY HYPED the benefit of restrictions
1 reporter alone was 7% of all corrections
Let's take a look 🧵
Naturally, in times of crisis, newspapers won't get everything right
Corrections are inevitable and forgivable
But corrections should occur at random
Sometimes they are too high and sometimes too low
If they tend to be in one direction...
That's bias
Here is the key figure
When the New York Times made mistake those mistakes were TWICE as likely to OVERSTATE the harm of COVID, particularly to kids, than UNDERSTATE
This is evidence of systematic BIAS in their reporting
Just out
Led by @mmb03966692 Mariana B
We argue that annual flu shots and covid shots have a VERY WEAK evidence base and there are TONS of things we can do better.
The status quo for annual flu shots is little good premarket evidence and some post market surveillance.
Shown in figure
We think that is suboptimal.
One reason is...
The CDC uses a flawed method to calculate flu vaccine effectiveness. (test neg. case control, for e.g.) If anything, this will be biased upwards-- towards bigger effects, but even with that method, effectiveness can be very poor.