I am an old timer in stats in data, both academia and industry, and I completely agree. I think this dimension of bias is the least understood in science.
I used to explain it as an axiom: if a group publishes a finding, but their careers would be destroyed by finding anything contrary, then that paper contains zero informational value.
I have friends with faculty appointments who were told on day one, your job now is to bring in grant money to this university. Like a law partner who is supposed to make it rain. I don't know why anyone thinks someone with those incentives, will go against any headwinds in pursuit of truth. Some do anyway, but they are exceptional people.
And like you say, too few people understand that typical statistical methods only rule out chance to a certain degree. This always means if enough studies are run, false positives will appear. I remember reading about a drug that was finally approved after 33 trials! More evidence something is a placebo is not possible.
This is also why research is meaningless until there are independent direct replications. Basically everyone understands this since 2011 but no one does it, because, see axioms and incentives above.
That's exactly the same reason I never ask a doctor if I should trust vaccines or other medications. There's a 99% chance they'll say YES! YES! YES! and a 1% chance they'll say no and try to sell me some vitamins.
I work at a working class setting where the bosses demand everyone wear a mask. Due to the nature of my job, I get to visit new such locations almost weekly. One thing I’ve noticed at all of these places is that absolutely no one ever wears a mask during breaks when only their co-workers can see them. The people know, and they know that the others know. One of the things I hate the most about these stupid mask mandates is that they require people to behave in a fundamentally dishonest way.
Very similar experiences here. The masks have become this awful sign of submission to authority. A lot of the support staff, student assistants, etc., where I work never wear them when they're among themselves. As soon as I step into the room they all apologise and put them on immediately.
In California clinical settings the public disdain of mask Kabuki theatre has became quite great. They have HVAC systems that by their own admission are literally trying to kill you indoors, yet force you to wait alone in their examination rooms where they prominently display handmade signs that say words to the effect of: "If your doctor or nurse enters the room and you do not have a mask on, you will be instructed to put on your mask and will be visited again after 15 minutes. If upon return visit you again do not have your mask on, you will be asked to leave the clinic for the day." Apparently they seem to feel as though your custom nylon Scorpions rock-and-roll facediaper will clear the air of virums within 15 minutes in a way that their surgico-industrial HEPA filters cannot. Or perhaps they have something entirely different in mind, something more of a power and control thing. In either case, should you trust this level of science understanding and/or abuse with your health in any way? Some people have grown tired of being treated like children; some people mistakenly think of this kind of scolding as caring and pampering. Neither kind should want to live with the other in charge of their lives any more.
Exactly right. I finally pinpointed my deepest objection to the stupid masks, and now tell people I am unwilling to put on the costume of someone who sees myself and everyone else as Sick Until Proven Healthy. The argument that annoys me the most is “but it makes other people feeeeeeeel better.” I am not interested in enabling the irrational fears of others.
All the safety measures are pure theater - giant plexiglass barricades that you can’t hear through so you poke your head around it, masks while walking to the table, no masks while seated, etc. - and I am no longer willing to be an actor in this dystopian charade.
This is such an excellent point! I was trying to explain to someone how my 7th grade abhors the mask and one of his reasons is that he feels he's "wearing a lie"
I must be the only mask hater who thinks the Bangladesh study was more or less ok.
As with you, though, I think poking holes in it misses the point to begin with. Literally who cares if masks "work"? What is the end of slowing spread? The seasonal waves will still come, and burn the fuel that is available when they do.
Stopping the healthcare system from "being overwhelmed," or eradicating the virus through herd immunity - these frauds are obsolete. I'd rather be dead than look like a germaphobic idiot every day, or see children psychologically tortured as a cultural norm, anyway.
Here’s part of my issue with the Bangladesh study - the abject poverty, population density, and lack of clean water there make it very hard to draw any meaningful parallel to the US (or any other first world country). They have so many other problems, it’s not really an apples to apples comparison.
Better alive than dead. Fight another day. Patton said don't die for your cause, make the other side die for theirs. Success comes from recognizing the fraud. Defeating the fraud requires teaching others to recognize the fraud. Tell your friends.
The willingness to revolt / die is the only thing that makes living as an autonomous being, rather than a commodity managed by the state, possible. You have to pay your way in pain.
Dying, even willingness to die, doesn't make living possible. Pain is a cost of conflict, but successful conflict minimizes your pain and maximizes your opponent's pain. Dying means you failed.
Again, it's a matter of willingness. If you aren't willing to die, you cannot resist a lockdown, a mask, a vaccine mandate. Quibbling over who decides what does and doesn't save your life doesn't get the job done. Only the willingness to die. Blake Smith made a nice essay along the same lines https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/michel-foucault-warsaw-ghetto-covid-19
Victory comes from confrontation, and confrontation always has risks. But dwelling on the risks distracts from effective confrontation. The risks shouldn't be a consideration except trying to avoid them.
I'm watching the sports car race in Virginia. They know they could crash. But they know if they crash, they lose. They're prepared for a crash but do everything they can to avoid it. They focus on the win.
The interesting part about that flaw is that it is evident the authors didn't design the study to actually measure spread. They were just interested in mask uptake in of itself. I think they got some phone calls and were forced to improvise a sampling system. An even bigger "nit" is that there were almost no cases going on in Bangladesh during the entire observation period - the summer wave came after.
I'm on board with tossing medical research. Exercise good. Fighting microbes bad. Move on with life.
the weird metric I think is pretty clear evidence of p-hacking. who knows all the different metrics they collected, to try to find one where they could show a significant effect.
And it's one of the original metrics that both supports and undermines the results - the village observers reported more "distancing" in the intervention villages. So there's no way to sort direct and indirect effects by looking at seroprevalence to begin with. Another reason that attacking the study over its statistical methodology, a la el gato malo, misses the point. "Ok, but so what" is the best reply.
I had a govt job where I needed to "find" evince of pay discrimination in large companies. We "made" the companies helpfully send us their compensation data in EXCEL format and then we had our statistician "work on it" until we found a pay disparity, somewhere, between somebody and somebody else. The more groups we had, the more variations we could run. We were originally looking for the "standard" men vs. women or white vs. minorities disparities, but if that failed, we would run it white women vs Asian men or Black men vs Native Americans. Or everybody against Hispanics. Whatever we could think of. And then we would run it again and separately for each Job Title we could find. So we would have to go to the company and present to their CEO, with a straight face, that they were obviously racist and sexist and discriminating against everybody because they favored and overpaid the Asian male accountants compared to black female accountants, AND they favored and overpaid the white female security guards compared to the male Hispanic security guards, AND they favored and overpaid the Black male sales men compared to the white male salesmen. All at the same place. I learned first hand that statistics are meaningless and that the govt can't really be trusted. I had no background in math or stats, but even i figured how to work the numbers. God help us if they do this in the drug studies.
The first thing I noticed about the Bangladesh preprint abstract was that two different metrics had confidence intervals terminating at exactly 1.00, so they could claim significance. If they had gone to 1.01, due to our silly conventions, this claim could not be made in the same way. I could smell the p-hacking wafting off the page.
I can't do it any more as I am outed as a non-believer, but asked and could not find a single person in this western country who had ever had a stranger cough or sneeze into their face, which is what the droplet theory espouses masks will prevent.
Thinking too much: masks are Progressive/Empire hijabs. The symbol-manipulator class is having a terrible time with this war. Maybe proles have an advantage looking at it from the outside.
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. -- Marshall McLuhan
I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet, but another important flaw in the thinking with those who scream "We must mask our children in school" lies with the fact that in most schools the kids gather in the cafeteria for lunch and take off their masks to eat and talk to their friends. Cafeterias, of course, are large and confined spaces with poor ventilation and lots of excited breathing, sneezing, coughing, and cursing (yes, my sons learned to curse at school, back in the day when things weren't crazy).
"When that paper finally squeaked into print, they spent more months trying desperately to poke holes in it."
Let's not forget that when that paper was finally published that the journal published a rebuttal by Tom Frieden in the very same edition. They didn't even give it a second to breathe but had a dismissal of it ready to go.
The corruption of science is absolutely the worst outcome of this sorry episode. Worse than 3 million deaths, since it will lead to many more millions. It was demonstrated in the HCQ frenzy when competent doctors publicized effectiveness in early treatment and the vax nazis immediately constructed tests of ICU patients to prove it doesn't work in advanced cases. This isn't really new -- there have always been corrupt doctors and researchers, more interested in profits than truth, or patients, and politicians ready to use their frauds to promote their own interests. "Betrayers of Truth" was a frightening expose of rampant academic fraud back when it was still not the prevalent process. This episode has accelerated the fraud to the highest levels of medical industry bureaucracies and government. Dark times ahead unless we can reestablish academic integrity.
It’s funny/not funny the John Ioannidis, despite his similar recognition of the lack of studies showing mask efficacy, he still believes they work. (He has said this in recent presentations.)
He's caught an enormous amount of opprobrium for his views on lockdowns and the rest of it. People in that position often end up taking whatever cover they can.
Will you run an article on the gov covid statistics? I just came across an article in the Swiss media in which the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (BAG) is stating that 93% of deaths are in the unvaccinated and jet in UK only 20% are in the unvaccinated since most people who die are in the elderly and most of them are vaccinated… ( even if the effect of the vaccine per 100'000 is still positive)
How is the 93% possible? Something doesn’t add up…
"Von den seit Ende Januar registrierten 1681 Todesfällen betrafen 93 Prozent ungeimpfte Personen."
"From 1681 reported deaths *from the end of January* 93 percent involved unvaccinated people"
This is just a simple statistical lie; they're counting deaths since the end of January - when vaccines were hardly available and almost nobody was vaccinated, until now.
This is the persistently obfuscating statistical treachery the public has been subjected to since the outset.
Here in Maine, USA our Governor, Janet Mills, (one of the most mediocre political minds to ever be elected) responding to a direct question in an 'update news conference' reported: "The Vast Majority of Hospitalizations and fatalities are in the UnVaxx'd."
It took almost 2 hours of calling the Maine CDC (as a physician) to get the actual stats... That morning there were 235 patients in the Hospital with a SARS CoV-2 diagnosis, 84 in ICUs, 36 were intubated.
151 of 235 were UnVaxx'd 62.5% (Vast Majority)
58 of 84 ICU patients UnVaxx'd 69.1% (Beyond Vast Majority)
28 of 36 Vented pts UnVaxx'd 77.8% (Overwhelming Vast Majority)
Vaccine Dashboard from Maine CDC Website 65.92% of total population Vaxx'd
As long Political Leadership remains captives of their own narrative to the point they feel compelled to openly lie to the public, knowing the public knows they are committing statistical deception, we will remain Tribal, Divided, and Mutually Confrontational.
20min.ch is the most read newspaper in Switzerland so it’s a simple but very effective and big lie.
I truly start to wonder why health officials, politicians and news agencies in every country do it in such systematic fashion... as far as I understand your theory of the whole process, it is just the result of a dysfunctional bureaucratic machine - which is a reasonable assumption. But for some reason I have the feeling that the cost(credibility, re-election or worse if something goes wrong with the vaccine) is too high for such an explanation. They obviously want to vaccinate the maximum amount of people as fast as possible no matter the cost ... but why?
I would like to add a few words about your podcast. I have the feeling to be in movie when I listen to it. With the background noise and your accent it sounds and feels very important and deep like some radio emission in a zombie apocalypse. I hope you continue .
Great post. I'd say there were actually three kinds of early studies: (a) the ones you mention, where if you wear something over your face fewer particles blast out, often using crash test dummies; (b) embarrassing anecdotes like the hairdresser story; and (c) opportunistic looks at case rate changes against NPI introductions, where as soon as you introduce controls or adjust the date range you can get the opposite results.
(1) I think it's easy to understand how all this happened. Contrary to claims that the measures taken were abrupt novelties, the WHO has long-standing flu-pandemic preparedness plans, going back I think about ten years and updated periodically, that recommend various measures and explain the urgency of the recommendation and its evidentiary basis. One of the most brutal is school closures, which the plans insist should only be done if children are at special risk. A consistent one is universal masking, but they are clear that there is no evidentiary basis for it and the reasoning is based on mechanistic plausibility. In other words, they are quite open that the thinking is: we really don't know if this will help, but it might, so under dire circumstances we should just try it.
Problem is that in the age of the internet and low social trust, people wanted a reason. So we first got "uh, it helps keep you from touching your face," but over a couple months a ramshackle evidentiary base to throw at people was assembled. But too many people trusted their own memories of the hasty and haphazard "consensus" construction, so it didn't work. I still think--perhaps naively--that just saying "we're not certain, but please work with us on this" would have been fine, though probably not for longer a month or two--which is exactly what happened.
(2) Lack of RCTs behind something is not always grounds for skepticism. There are no RCTs showing that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. There are only explanations of mechanistic plausibility, individual case studies, and statistical models. It's a talking point, but it really is true that the tobacco industry pointed to this kind of evidentiary ensemble as a reason to doubt the conclusions.
So what's the difference? As a non-specialist, I can see a few. First, it really did require some time to establish the connection, though not nearly as long as industry lobbyists claimed. Second, all the pressure was coming from that direction--the cancer link was not something people were eager to learn about. Third, smoking->cancer is a pretty unmediated connection between individual behavior and individual consequence, so extracting causal chains took a lot less speculation. Fourth, non-scientists living in the world and using common sense could see it.
All medical research and most other science too, I think. After all, the editors of the top journals don't quit, stating that same thing, when it's not true. And that started long before the public part of the CV19.
I am an old timer in stats in data, both academia and industry, and I completely agree. I think this dimension of bias is the least understood in science.
I used to explain it as an axiom: if a group publishes a finding, but their careers would be destroyed by finding anything contrary, then that paper contains zero informational value.
I have friends with faculty appointments who were told on day one, your job now is to bring in grant money to this university. Like a law partner who is supposed to make it rain. I don't know why anyone thinks someone with those incentives, will go against any headwinds in pursuit of truth. Some do anyway, but they are exceptional people.
And like you say, too few people understand that typical statistical methods only rule out chance to a certain degree. This always means if enough studies are run, false positives will appear. I remember reading about a drug that was finally approved after 33 trials! More evidence something is a placebo is not possible.
This is also why research is meaningless until there are independent direct replications. Basically everyone understands this since 2011 but no one does it, because, see axioms and incentives above.
really excellent comment, thank you.
That's exactly the same reason I never ask a doctor if I should trust vaccines or other medications. There's a 99% chance they'll say YES! YES! YES! and a 1% chance they'll say no and try to sell me some vitamins.
I work at a working class setting where the bosses demand everyone wear a mask. Due to the nature of my job, I get to visit new such locations almost weekly. One thing I’ve noticed at all of these places is that absolutely no one ever wears a mask during breaks when only their co-workers can see them. The people know, and they know that the others know. One of the things I hate the most about these stupid mask mandates is that they require people to behave in a fundamentally dishonest way.
Very similar experiences here. The masks have become this awful sign of submission to authority. A lot of the support staff, student assistants, etc., where I work never wear them when they're among themselves. As soon as I step into the room they all apologise and put them on immediately.
In California clinical settings the public disdain of mask Kabuki theatre has became quite great. They have HVAC systems that by their own admission are literally trying to kill you indoors, yet force you to wait alone in their examination rooms where they prominently display handmade signs that say words to the effect of: "If your doctor or nurse enters the room and you do not have a mask on, you will be instructed to put on your mask and will be visited again after 15 minutes. If upon return visit you again do not have your mask on, you will be asked to leave the clinic for the day." Apparently they seem to feel as though your custom nylon Scorpions rock-and-roll facediaper will clear the air of virums within 15 minutes in a way that their surgico-industrial HEPA filters cannot. Or perhaps they have something entirely different in mind, something more of a power and control thing. In either case, should you trust this level of science understanding and/or abuse with your health in any way? Some people have grown tired of being treated like children; some people mistakenly think of this kind of scolding as caring and pampering. Neither kind should want to live with the other in charge of their lives any more.
Exactly right. I finally pinpointed my deepest objection to the stupid masks, and now tell people I am unwilling to put on the costume of someone who sees myself and everyone else as Sick Until Proven Healthy. The argument that annoys me the most is “but it makes other people feeeeeeeel better.” I am not interested in enabling the irrational fears of others.
All the safety measures are pure theater - giant plexiglass barricades that you can’t hear through so you poke your head around it, masks while walking to the table, no masks while seated, etc. - and I am no longer willing to be an actor in this dystopian charade.
This is such an excellent point! I was trying to explain to someone how my 7th grade abhors the mask and one of his reasons is that he feels he's "wearing a lie"
I must be the only mask hater who thinks the Bangladesh study was more or less ok.
As with you, though, I think poking holes in it misses the point to begin with. Literally who cares if masks "work"? What is the end of slowing spread? The seasonal waves will still come, and burn the fuel that is available when they do.
Stopping the healthcare system from "being overwhelmed," or eradicating the virus through herd immunity - these frauds are obsolete. I'd rather be dead than look like a germaphobic idiot every day, or see children psychologically tortured as a cultural norm, anyway.
Here’s part of my issue with the Bangladesh study - the abject poverty, population density, and lack of clean water there make it very hard to draw any meaningful parallel to the US (or any other first world country). They have so many other problems, it’s not really an apples to apples comparison.
Better alive than dead. Fight another day. Patton said don't die for your cause, make the other side die for theirs. Success comes from recognizing the fraud. Defeating the fraud requires teaching others to recognize the fraud. Tell your friends.
The willingness to revolt / die is the only thing that makes living as an autonomous being, rather than a commodity managed by the state, possible. You have to pay your way in pain.
Dying, even willingness to die, doesn't make living possible. Pain is a cost of conflict, but successful conflict minimizes your pain and maximizes your opponent's pain. Dying means you failed.
Again, it's a matter of willingness. If you aren't willing to die, you cannot resist a lockdown, a mask, a vaccine mandate. Quibbling over who decides what does and doesn't save your life doesn't get the job done. Only the willingness to die. Blake Smith made a nice essay along the same lines https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/michel-foucault-warsaw-ghetto-covid-19
Victory comes from confrontation, and confrontation always has risks. But dwelling on the risks distracts from effective confrontation. The risks shouldn't be a consideration except trying to avoid them.
I'm watching the sports car race in Virginia. They know they could crash. But they know if they crash, they lose. They're prepared for a crash but do everything they can to avoid it. They focus on the win.
Yes, I like that. What really matters is the point. What really matters is what can people really do to face and beat whatever is really the threat.
So we need true threat figures everywhere, absolutely everywhere
And we need real therapeutic protocols everywhere, absolutely everywhere.
And then the academic dissertations, discussions, argument, whatever.. can and should continue...
But first... what's grannie got to worry about and what can she do about it?
What's my little son got to worry about and what can I do about it for him...?
The interesting part about that flaw is that it is evident the authors didn't design the study to actually measure spread. They were just interested in mask uptake in of itself. I think they got some phone calls and were forced to improvise a sampling system. An even bigger "nit" is that there were almost no cases going on in Bangladesh during the entire observation period - the summer wave came after.
I'm on board with tossing medical research. Exercise good. Fighting microbes bad. Move on with life.
the weird metric I think is pretty clear evidence of p-hacking. who knows all the different metrics they collected, to try to find one where they could show a significant effect.
And it's one of the original metrics that both supports and undermines the results - the village observers reported more "distancing" in the intervention villages. So there's no way to sort direct and indirect effects by looking at seroprevalence to begin with. Another reason that attacking the study over its statistical methodology, a la el gato malo, misses the point. "Ok, but so what" is the best reply.
I had a govt job where I needed to "find" evince of pay discrimination in large companies. We "made" the companies helpfully send us their compensation data in EXCEL format and then we had our statistician "work on it" until we found a pay disparity, somewhere, between somebody and somebody else. The more groups we had, the more variations we could run. We were originally looking for the "standard" men vs. women or white vs. minorities disparities, but if that failed, we would run it white women vs Asian men or Black men vs Native Americans. Or everybody against Hispanics. Whatever we could think of. And then we would run it again and separately for each Job Title we could find. So we would have to go to the company and present to their CEO, with a straight face, that they were obviously racist and sexist and discriminating against everybody because they favored and overpaid the Asian male accountants compared to black female accountants, AND they favored and overpaid the white female security guards compared to the male Hispanic security guards, AND they favored and overpaid the Black male sales men compared to the white male salesmen. All at the same place. I learned first hand that statistics are meaningless and that the govt can't really be trusted. I had no background in math or stats, but even i figured how to work the numbers. God help us if they do this in the drug studies.
The first thing I noticed about the Bangladesh preprint abstract was that two different metrics had confidence intervals terminating at exactly 1.00, so they could claim significance. If they had gone to 1.01, due to our silly conventions, this claim could not be made in the same way. I could smell the p-hacking wafting off the page.
so much for the scientific method!
el gato malo eviscerates the dodgy bangladesh study here:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/bangladesh-mask-study-do-not-believe
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/more-on-the-bangladesh-mask-study
The study was atrocious.
indeed, linked his related substack in the footnote
Oops, so you did.
I hate the droplets argument.
I can't do it any more as I am outed as a non-believer, but asked and could not find a single person in this western country who had ever had a stranger cough or sneeze into their face, which is what the droplet theory espouses masks will prevent.
The entire fiasco is one big cluster fck.
I live in a poor SE Asian nation. There is a mask mandate. Everyday I see people removing their masks to cough, sneeze and spit.
It's been like this for getting on to two years now and the government is oblivious. No basic health education anywhere.
Some other takedowns of interest, including one dissecting the hersterical Nassim Talib, see these:
https://wmbriggs.com/post/37320/
https://wmbriggs.com/post/33752/
https://wmbriggs.com/post/37548/
Thanks, updated!
William Briggs substack when?
Well, the blog is just like, only easier for me to control
Thinking too much: masks are Progressive/Empire hijabs. The symbol-manipulator class is having a terrible time with this war. Maybe proles have an advantage looking at it from the outside.
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. -- Marshall McLuhan
I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet, but another important flaw in the thinking with those who scream "We must mask our children in school" lies with the fact that in most schools the kids gather in the cafeteria for lunch and take off their masks to eat and talk to their friends. Cafeterias, of course, are large and confined spaces with poor ventilation and lots of excited breathing, sneezing, coughing, and cursing (yes, my sons learned to curse at school, back in the day when things weren't crazy).
"When that paper finally squeaked into print, they spent more months trying desperately to poke holes in it."
Let's not forget that when that paper was finally published that the journal published a rebuttal by Tom Frieden in the very same edition. They didn't even give it a second to breathe but had a dismissal of it ready to go.
yes, exactly. that whole saga was more than enough to know that all published findings in this area are hopelessly compromised.
Excellent! I’m loving your substack.
thank you!
The corruption of science is absolutely the worst outcome of this sorry episode. Worse than 3 million deaths, since it will lead to many more millions. It was demonstrated in the HCQ frenzy when competent doctors publicized effectiveness in early treatment and the vax nazis immediately constructed tests of ICU patients to prove it doesn't work in advanced cases. This isn't really new -- there have always been corrupt doctors and researchers, more interested in profits than truth, or patients, and politicians ready to use their frauds to promote their own interests. "Betrayers of Truth" was a frightening expose of rampant academic fraud back when it was still not the prevalent process. This episode has accelerated the fraud to the highest levels of medical industry bureaucracies and government. Dark times ahead unless we can reestablish academic integrity.
It’s funny/not funny the John Ioannidis, despite his similar recognition of the lack of studies showing mask efficacy, he still believes they work. (He has said this in recent presentations.)
He's caught an enormous amount of opprobrium for his views on lockdowns and the rest of it. People in that position often end up taking whatever cover they can.
Will you run an article on the gov covid statistics? I just came across an article in the Swiss media in which the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (BAG) is stating that 93% of deaths are in the unvaccinated and jet in UK only 20% are in the unvaccinated since most people who die are in the elderly and most of them are vaccinated… ( even if the effect of the vaccine per 100'000 is still positive)
How is the 93% possible? Something doesn’t add up…
The article : https://www.20min.ch/story/93-prozent-der-covid-todesfaelle-sind-ungeimpfte-218347301737
The UK statistic(from which I get the 20% unvaccinated deaths and 75% vaccinated - table 4):
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1023849/Vaccine_surveillance_report_-_week_40.pdf
No matter what I just want to say that I love your work!
The key line is this one:
"Von den seit Ende Januar registrierten 1681 Todesfällen betrafen 93 Prozent ungeimpfte Personen."
"From 1681 reported deaths *from the end of January* 93 percent involved unvaccinated people"
This is just a simple statistical lie; they're counting deaths since the end of January - when vaccines were hardly available and almost nobody was vaccinated, until now.
This is the persistently obfuscating statistical treachery the public has been subjected to since the outset.
Here in Maine, USA our Governor, Janet Mills, (one of the most mediocre political minds to ever be elected) responding to a direct question in an 'update news conference' reported: "The Vast Majority of Hospitalizations and fatalities are in the UnVaxx'd."
It took almost 2 hours of calling the Maine CDC (as a physician) to get the actual stats... That morning there were 235 patients in the Hospital with a SARS CoV-2 diagnosis, 84 in ICUs, 36 were intubated.
151 of 235 were UnVaxx'd 62.5% (Vast Majority)
58 of 84 ICU patients UnVaxx'd 69.1% (Beyond Vast Majority)
28 of 36 Vented pts UnVaxx'd 77.8% (Overwhelming Vast Majority)
Vaccine Dashboard from Maine CDC Website 65.92% of total population Vaxx'd
As long Political Leadership remains captives of their own narrative to the point they feel compelled to openly lie to the public, knowing the public knows they are committing statistical deception, we will remain Tribal, Divided, and Mutually Confrontational.
Thanks! For some reason I did miss that one
20min.ch is the most read newspaper in Switzerland so it’s a simple but very effective and big lie.
I truly start to wonder why health officials, politicians and news agencies in every country do it in such systematic fashion... as far as I understand your theory of the whole process, it is just the result of a dysfunctional bureaucratic machine - which is a reasonable assumption. But for some reason I have the feeling that the cost(credibility, re-election or worse if something goes wrong with the vaccine) is too high for such an explanation. They obviously want to vaccinate the maximum amount of people as fast as possible no matter the cost ... but why?
I would like to add a few words about your podcast. I have the feeling to be in movie when I listen to it. With the background noise and your accent it sounds and feels very important and deep like some radio emission in a zombie apocalypse. I hope you continue .
Great post. I'd say there were actually three kinds of early studies: (a) the ones you mention, where if you wear something over your face fewer particles blast out, often using crash test dummies; (b) embarrassing anecdotes like the hairdresser story; and (c) opportunistic looks at case rate changes against NPI introductions, where as soon as you introduce controls or adjust the date range you can get the opposite results.
I meant to add to this two things:
(1) I think it's easy to understand how all this happened. Contrary to claims that the measures taken were abrupt novelties, the WHO has long-standing flu-pandemic preparedness plans, going back I think about ten years and updated periodically, that recommend various measures and explain the urgency of the recommendation and its evidentiary basis. One of the most brutal is school closures, which the plans insist should only be done if children are at special risk. A consistent one is universal masking, but they are clear that there is no evidentiary basis for it and the reasoning is based on mechanistic plausibility. In other words, they are quite open that the thinking is: we really don't know if this will help, but it might, so under dire circumstances we should just try it.
Problem is that in the age of the internet and low social trust, people wanted a reason. So we first got "uh, it helps keep you from touching your face," but over a couple months a ramshackle evidentiary base to throw at people was assembled. But too many people trusted their own memories of the hasty and haphazard "consensus" construction, so it didn't work. I still think--perhaps naively--that just saying "we're not certain, but please work with us on this" would have been fine, though probably not for longer a month or two--which is exactly what happened.
(2) Lack of RCTs behind something is not always grounds for skepticism. There are no RCTs showing that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. There are only explanations of mechanistic plausibility, individual case studies, and statistical models. It's a talking point, but it really is true that the tobacco industry pointed to this kind of evidentiary ensemble as a reason to doubt the conclusions.
So what's the difference? As a non-specialist, I can see a few. First, it really did require some time to establish the connection, though not nearly as long as industry lobbyists claimed. Second, all the pressure was coming from that direction--the cancer link was not something people were eager to learn about. Third, smoking->cancer is a pretty unmediated connection between individual behavior and individual consequence, so extracting causal chains took a lot less speculation. Fourth, non-scientists living in the world and using common sense could see it.
All medical research and most other science too, I think. After all, the editors of the top journals don't quit, stating that same thing, when it's not true. And that started long before the public part of the CV19.
I think you just gave me another link for class with that Ionnadis paper. Here here.