"Anti-maskers" portrayed as irrational and unstable, even possibly dangerous

[woodman]

Pooled data study shows Medical/surgical masks have NO effect (relative risk of 1.01 vs no mask) reducing spread of acute respiratory viruses.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochrane_(organisation)


cochranelibrary.com: Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses

I sterilize my hands after going shopping in the towns near me. I've been doing so for about 5 years, long before the Covid insanity. It seems to help me stay bug free. I noticed a direct correlation some years back between my trips into town and getting sick. When I am shopping or doing errands I try to keep my hands away from my face/nose/mouth/ears. I just seem to get sick less this way. Masks are ridiculous.

[Neuro]

I sterilize my hands after going shopping in the towns near me. I've been doing so for about 5 years, long before the Covid insanity. It seems to help me stay bug free. I noticed a direct correlation some years back between my trips into town and getting sick. When I am shopping or doing errands I try to keep my hands away from my face/nose/mouth/ears. I just seem to get sick less this way. Masks are ridiculous.

I hope it won’t make your immune system long term weaker through lack of exercise?

[woodman]

I hope it won’t make your immune system long term weaker through lack of exercise?

I have wondered about this also. There is some speculation that in our modern age with kids being kept so antiseptic and protected that their immune system doesn't reach full potential. Being older, I may have a fully developed immune system that has been zeroed in on most classes of disease. Maybe not though. The claim is that the Native Americans could not fight off the diseases of the Europeans. The stories of the purposefully infected blankets are probably false as viruses typically can't be infective after a day outside the human body; or so I have read. It is also interesting to wonder wether or not a person can be infected with two different flu or cold viruses at one time. Why not?

Of course, if I simply stayed away from People it would be the same as sterilizing my hands.

[keehah]

The communist-corporatist fake news journalists are reinterpretating the Cochrane analysis in two ways to conclude (in their illogical but ideological minds) masks still work.

simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis

In statistics, a null hypothesis, often written as [Ho], is a statement assumed to be true unless it can be shown to be incorrect beyond a reasonable doubt. The idea is that the null hypothesis generally assumes that there is nothing new or surprising in the population. The most common null hypothesis is the "no-change" or "no-difference" hypothesis

The null hypothesis is that masks don't work. Studies then would attempt to prove with a 90-95% confidence interval (that any particular study should be right 18 or 19 times out of 20) that masks work.

The meta-data review then concluded that there is no evidence that masks work. As the kid reporter at the Toronto Star points out, it is technically incorrect to conclude there is evidence or null hypothesis proof that masks don't work. What these reporters omit is that also technically one should then be assuming masks do not work until proven otherwise.

thestar.com: How the Cochrane Review went wrong. Report questioning COVID masks blows up, prompts apology

By Alex Boyd Staff Reporter Fri., March 10, 2023
The Cochrane Review has apologized for an evidence review that led many to conclude, inaccurately, that masks don’t work.

The sociologist that first got Karla in Cochrane management to apologize for the science and scientists works for the New York Times. To summarize her revisioning of unacceptable truth: The original report that masks don't work is technically incorrect because in the real world additionally mask use don't work.

nytimes.com: Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work

OPINION ZEYNEP TUFEKCI March 10, 2023
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane review shows that ‘masks don’t work,’ which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of the Cochrane Library, said in a statement.

“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”

She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary...

The flawed summary — and further misinterpretation of it — set off a debate between those who said the study showed there was no basis for relying on masks or mask mandates and those who said it did nothing to diminish the need for them.

Michael D. Brown, a doctor and academic who serves on the Cochrane editorial board and made the final decision on the review, told me the review couldn’t arrive at a firm conclusion because there weren’t enough high-quality randomized trials with high rates of mask adherence...

So what we learn from the Cochrane review is that, especially before the pandemic, distributing masks didn’t lead people to wear them, which is why their effect on transmission couldn’t be confidently evaluated...

Why aren’t there more randomized studies on masks? We could have started some in early 2020, distributing masks in some towns when they weren’t widely available. It’s a shame we didn’t. But it would have been hard and unethical to deny masks to some people once they were available to all...

So how should we evaluate an interview in which the lead author of the Cochrane review, Tom Jefferson, said of masks that the review determined “there is just no evidence that they make any difference”? As for whether N95s are better than surgical masks, Jefferson said, “makes no difference — none of it.” ...

So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus

Easy-peasy revisioning as if reality and science are but mere objects for journalistic womipulating:

abcnews.go.com: Masks are effective but here's how a study from a respected group was misinterpreted to say they weren't
March 14, 2023

justthenews.com: 'Thrown under the bus': Research collaborative caves to media pressure on mask meta-study

March 17, 2023
Apublic-private campaign to discredit a mask meta-study by one of the world's most respected research collaboratives has prompted that organization to mischaracterize the study's findings, according to doctors, scientists and journalists supporting the lead researcher.

Cochrane may have violated Committee on Publications Ethics (COPE) protocol by preempting the post-publication debate process with Editor-in-Chief Karla Soares-Weiser's March 10 statement deeming the study's results "inconclusive," overriding the authors' interpretation and framing.

"Cochrane has thrown its own researchers under the bus again" by giving "little workable notice" before purporting to speak in their name, University of Oxford epidemiologist Tom Jefferson, who has led the oft-updated mask meta-study since 2006, told medical scientist-turned-journalist Maryanne Demasi in a lengthy interview.

"It sends the message that Cochrane can be pressured by reporters to change their reviews," he said, citing a March 10 New York Times column by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci that explained why "the science is clear that masks work" and put Cochrane on the defensive for Jefferson's portrayal of the findings.

The dozen authors agreed to present their grievances to Cochrane about Soares-Weiser circumventing the "tried and tested way of handling criticisms" through back-and-forth with commenters on the review page, Jefferson said.

Without naming Cochrane, COPE told Demasi that publishers may not change the "interpretation and conclusions" of papers without getting the "input and approval" of the authors.

"Open season on scientists" is how Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, both of Oxford's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, described Cochrane's response to external pressure in their newsletter.

Jefferson previously accused the British charity, often labeled the "gold standard" of evidence-based medicine, of withholding his international research team's spring 2020 update for several months as COVID-19 pandemic policy was developing because it lacked the "right answer."

Published in January in the Cochrane Library, the update immediately drew attacks from prominent proponents of masking. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky minimized the findings before Congress because they were based on RCTs [Randomized controlled trials], rather than the uncontrolled observational studies the CDC favors.

"No doctor had ever said that in modern existence," Yale University epidemiologist Harvey Risch told "Just the News, No Noise," referring to Walensky's dismissal of RCTs as insufficient evidence,

The CDC's "cherry-picked" mask studies stand in contrast to "more than 150 studies that show that masks are useless for viral respiratory infections" as opposed to, say, "construction dust," the original purpose of N95 masks, he said.

Public health authorities "rang this bell of panic and fear" to get Americans to wear primarily cloth masks with no evidence of benefit and "continue to cling to ideas that really had been discredited in the scientific community" before COVID, Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya told JTNNN regarding the Cochrane study.

"Behavior manipulation by public health," not scientific thinking and results, are what drive continued masking, he said.