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
With covid waning, we see many PH pro's back-track, revise, or straight up gaslight us with the “we didn’t know lockdowns…” or “knowing what we know now…”. Heard it from Birx and Fauci. Luckily, we have receipts to remember 🧵 1/9
Just recently on the Rising segment from The Hill TV, Fauci stated that “knowing what we know now about covid he would have done things differently with the lockdowns” giving himself an out for the bad decision. Not so fast… 2/9
My blog post from March 24, 2020, showing early research that elderly people are the most at risk, school closures were unnecessary, and serious negative economic implications would happen through stringent lockdowns causing more harm than good. 3/9 carsonbabich.wordpress.com/2020/03/24/fin…