Masking these toddlers is child abuse, by science, morality, and common sense. The policy reflects either stupendous bad judgment, a will to inflict psychosocial damage, or a self-invalidating abuse of power for it’s own sake.
I'm pulling out what's left of my hair. How can science be this utterly broken?
We had a hypothesis. We tested it. We tested a million billion times, in every country, in every cohort. Our hypothesis failed. It failed when we tried two masks. When we tried n95s. When we tried it at nursing homes. It failed, and failed, and failed.
But we became so in love with our hypothesis, and it became such an easy way to get published if we could data-drudge our way through some retrospective bullshit study, that we kept up this charade, and now have only the weight of a hundred ridiculous studies as "evidence".
Now half the world is convinced this useless intervention has value. Beyond the damage we are doing to toddlers, think of the long term implications? How many PhDs and MPHs are going to conduct research beginning with the premise "That masks work"? How much detriment will that have to future decades of research when we begin with a baked-in assumption that falsely describes viral behavior? How much damage would have been done if we clung to elevation correlating to Cholera for another 50 years after Snow demonstrated otherwise?
Everyone looks to John Snow as the hero of Epidemiology, but what we need is the next William Farr.
Who among the Public Health establishment will concede, just as William Farr had done 160 years ago, that their pet theory turned out to be completely wrong?
This nonsense needs to end. We knew for 100 years that masks didn't stop bacteria much less viruses. We knew through RCT even in the operating room they had no measurable impact on asepsis.
Just because the "bad team" was against masks without having the evidence to back up why didn't work doesn't mean that we need to cling to this failed and unfalsifiable hypothesis out of spite or some moral obligation. Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans.
What do we need to do? Resurrect the James Randi 1 million dollar prize to challenge practitioners of this pseudoscience to prove their claims? Or would people like Gorski just claim they are "above" having to demonstrate their claims [1] and simply point to that time some people in a salon in Georgia who agreed to be tested didn't get Covid while wearing loose fitting cloth masks as his mic drop?
The public health establishment has been thoroughly Gish Galloped. They point to the 100+ "pro" IVM studies as example of how something false can be Gish Galloping, but refuse to realize they too have fallen for the same logical fallacy.
Social Media Archaeologists will someday find the primary source of how something that doesn't work got 70 studies to "show" it does work [2], but we can't wait for them to catch up.
I have taken that original collection of Gishes and added to it over the last 18 months, including every study, notable article, or Bill Nye TikTok into this spreadsheet. Now I need the next William Farr to take over and shut down this nonsense once and for all.
Thank you for the Google Doc. An excellent reference. And we definitely need a William Farr. He would have to be funded outside the system, because no one in the system will fund the obvious study. I wish Vinay would do one (I would help sponsor it) but he has generally refused to get beyond calling masks "bioplausible" which is nonsense. But he seems to be coming around so there may be hope.
Thank you for the continued courage. 🙏🏻❤️. Btw, loved your latest episode vpzd show. The “ free cappuccinos” made me laugh toooooo hard. Also, masking toddlers is pure evil.
Copy/paste with hyperlinked converted to [footnotes]. And yes, in the US this is actually a thing. Crazy.
_____________________
"Just end the toddler mask mandate, mayor"
by Vinay Prasad
New York City is hard at work competing for the title of having the cruelest, dumbest and most ineffective COVID-19 policy in the world. The city is fighting in the courts to protect their “only toddlers” mask mandate. This policy essentially means that while indoor mask mandates have been dropped for all other ages and groups, children between the ages of 2 to 4 will continue to be required to wear face coverings. Mayor Adams has said he wants to lift it soon, but he is simultaneously using the city’s Law Department to try to prolong the rule.
The fact that a politically savvy mayor has doubled down on this regulation is baffling.
Consider the facts. New York City’s policy goes beyond the advice of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, which is not to mask kids under the age of 6 years old.[1] There is no well-done medical evidence (a cluster randomized trial) that supports the idea that masking kids between the ages of 2 to 4 improves their wellbeing or slows the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
The best study we have comes from Spain.[2] There, due to a national policy, 6-year-olds masked, but 5 and under did not. The authors examined the rate of spread at each age from 3 to 11 years old. As kids got older, the risk of viral spread grew. If mask mandates on children at this age worked, we would expect a serious decline in spread from age 5 to 6. That didn’t happen — suggesting that masking children has at best a negligible effect.
Cloth masks have been studied in the gold standard of medicine, a cluster randomized trial — not in kids, but in adults. In one such study from Bangladesh, they failed to slow spread even among adults who were unvaccinated.[3] In that same study, surgical masks had a small reduction in the rate of laboratory confirmed COVID-19.[4] The group advised to wear a surgical mask had a 0.68% risk of COVID, and the group assigned not to wear them had a 0.76% risk of COVID. This minuscule difference — one COVID case averted among 1,250 people — was seen in experimental conditions in the throes of the pandemic, and when motivated adults wore the mask. The effect will surely be smaller, perhaps approaching zero, in toddlers, and notably, the NYC mandate does not specify a surgical grade mask.
In a devastating article from the journal Public Health in Practice, entitled, ”Making pre-school children wear masks is bad public health,”[5] the authors write, “The importance of early childhood for the rest of a person’s life is now well understood; what happens in those early moments really matters, and changing the beginning has the potential to change the whole story — including learning, earning and happiness.” As such, not only is the mayor doubling down on a likely ineffective policy; he is doing so in the age group that stands to lose the most.
The policy is especially bizarre given that kids of this age face the least risks of the virus. Their risk of death is hundreds of times lower than older individuals. [6] A healthy unvaccinated toddler faces lower risks than a vaccinated older adult. [7] Both of course can spread the virus, and yet in New York City today, only the youngest ones remain masked.
If you zoom out on the policy, the decision is especially baffling. Bars and restaurants are now open in New York City to unmasked patrons. Professional basketball players — vaccinated or unvaccinated — can play. Stadiums can be packed with unmasked spectators, vaccinated or not.
As New York tries to return to some semblance of normal life, which is what Adams has repeatedly said he wants, the last COVID-19 containment policy is masking toddlers? It seems like the plot of a dystopian novel, not the policy of a progressive, vibrant, cosmopolitan city.
When the history books are written, nearly everything we did to children in the course of this pandemic will look excessive, heavy-handed and harmful. That is true for school closures, the single greatest domestic policy failure. And that is true for aggressively masking the youngest amongst us.
We did so without robust evidence that it helped, in contrast with most European nations, including social democracies that routinely spend more on early childhood enrichment, care and development than we do. New York City’s current policy is regressive and futile. It represents the many ways in which the COVID-19 response hit hardest those with the least power, and the least ability to fight back. When history judges us, we will look as primitive as our ancestors who battled the plagues of Europe with superstitions and rituals, victims to their own ignorance and fear.
Prasad is associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco, and a practicing physician."
Masking these toddlers is child abuse, by science, morality, and common sense. The policy reflects either stupendous bad judgment, a will to inflict psychosocial damage, or a self-invalidating abuse of power for it’s own sake.
I'm pulling out what's left of my hair. How can science be this utterly broken?
We had a hypothesis. We tested it. We tested a million billion times, in every country, in every cohort. Our hypothesis failed. It failed when we tried two masks. When we tried n95s. When we tried it at nursing homes. It failed, and failed, and failed.
But we became so in love with our hypothesis, and it became such an easy way to get published if we could data-drudge our way through some retrospective bullshit study, that we kept up this charade, and now have only the weight of a hundred ridiculous studies as "evidence".
Now half the world is convinced this useless intervention has value. Beyond the damage we are doing to toddlers, think of the long term implications? How many PhDs and MPHs are going to conduct research beginning with the premise "That masks work"? How much detriment will that have to future decades of research when we begin with a baked-in assumption that falsely describes viral behavior? How much damage would have been done if we clung to elevation correlating to Cholera for another 50 years after Snow demonstrated otherwise?
Everyone looks to John Snow as the hero of Epidemiology, but what we need is the next William Farr.
Who among the Public Health establishment will concede, just as William Farr had done 160 years ago, that their pet theory turned out to be completely wrong?
This nonsense needs to end. We knew for 100 years that masks didn't stop bacteria much less viruses. We knew through RCT even in the operating room they had no measurable impact on asepsis.
Just because the "bad team" was against masks without having the evidence to back up why didn't work doesn't mean that we need to cling to this failed and unfalsifiable hypothesis out of spite or some moral obligation. Accepting that this is pseudoscience doesn't mean we are republicans.
What do we need to do? Resurrect the James Randi 1 million dollar prize to challenge practitioners of this pseudoscience to prove their claims? Or would people like Gorski just claim they are "above" having to demonstrate their claims [1] and simply point to that time some people in a salon in Georgia who agreed to be tested didn't get Covid while wearing loose fitting cloth masks as his mic drop?
The public health establishment has been thoroughly Gish Galloped. They point to the 100+ "pro" IVM studies as example of how something false can be Gish Galloping, but refuse to realize they too have fallen for the same logical fallacy.
Social Media Archaeologists will someday find the primary source of how something that doesn't work got 70 studies to "show" it does work [2], but we can't wait for them to catch up.
I have taken that original collection of Gishes and added to it over the last 18 months, including every study, notable article, or Bill Nye TikTok into this spreadsheet. Now I need the next William Farr to take over and shut down this nonsense once and for all.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ahaJui6Af0kGYMwHgAtnKCE6-bHbCLxnrQxuMC0kygA/edit?usp=sharing
Who's it going to be?
[1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/debate-me-bro-debate-challenges-by-science-deniers-in-the-age-of-covid-19/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
Thank you for the Google Doc. An excellent reference. And we definitely need a William Farr. He would have to be funded outside the system, because no one in the system will fund the obvious study. I wish Vinay would do one (I would help sponsor it) but he has generally refused to get beyond calling masks "bioplausible" which is nonsense. But he seems to be coming around so there may be hope.
Thank you for always saying what needs to be said in the plainest most common-sense way. History will judge you very well
NY, Eric Adams, De Blasio, and their whole lot can rot in hell. The City is dead to me.
Thank you for the continued courage. 🙏🏻❤️. Btw, loved your latest episode vpzd show. The “ free cappuccinos” made me laugh toooooo hard. Also, masking toddlers is pure evil.
Alas, not available in Europe.
Copy/paste with hyperlinked converted to [footnotes]. And yes, in the US this is actually a thing. Crazy.
_____________________
"Just end the toddler mask mandate, mayor"
by Vinay Prasad
New York City is hard at work competing for the title of having the cruelest, dumbest and most ineffective COVID-19 policy in the world. The city is fighting in the courts to protect their “only toddlers” mask mandate. This policy essentially means that while indoor mask mandates have been dropped for all other ages and groups, children between the ages of 2 to 4 will continue to be required to wear face coverings. Mayor Adams has said he wants to lift it soon, but he is simultaneously using the city’s Law Department to try to prolong the rule.
The fact that a politically savvy mayor has doubled down on this regulation is baffling.
Consider the facts. New York City’s policy goes beyond the advice of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, which is not to mask kids under the age of 6 years old.[1] There is no well-done medical evidence (a cluster randomized trial) that supports the idea that masking kids between the ages of 2 to 4 improves their wellbeing or slows the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
The best study we have comes from Spain.[2] There, due to a national policy, 6-year-olds masked, but 5 and under did not. The authors examined the rate of spread at each age from 3 to 11 years old. As kids got older, the risk of viral spread grew. If mask mandates on children at this age worked, we would expect a serious decline in spread from age 5 to 6. That didn’t happen — suggesting that masking children has at best a negligible effect.
Cloth masks have been studied in the gold standard of medicine, a cluster randomized trial — not in kids, but in adults. In one such study from Bangladesh, they failed to slow spread even among adults who were unvaccinated.[3] In that same study, surgical masks had a small reduction in the rate of laboratory confirmed COVID-19.[4] The group advised to wear a surgical mask had a 0.68% risk of COVID, and the group assigned not to wear them had a 0.76% risk of COVID. This minuscule difference — one COVID case averted among 1,250 people — was seen in experimental conditions in the throes of the pandemic, and when motivated adults wore the mask. The effect will surely be smaller, perhaps approaching zero, in toddlers, and notably, the NYC mandate does not specify a surgical grade mask.
In a devastating article from the journal Public Health in Practice, entitled, ”Making pre-school children wear masks is bad public health,”[5] the authors write, “The importance of early childhood for the rest of a person’s life is now well understood; what happens in those early moments really matters, and changing the beginning has the potential to change the whole story — including learning, earning and happiness.” As such, not only is the mayor doubling down on a likely ineffective policy; he is doing so in the age group that stands to lose the most.
The policy is especially bizarre given that kids of this age face the least risks of the virus. Their risk of death is hundreds of times lower than older individuals. [6] A healthy unvaccinated toddler faces lower risks than a vaccinated older adult. [7] Both of course can spread the virus, and yet in New York City today, only the youngest ones remain masked.
If you zoom out on the policy, the decision is especially baffling. Bars and restaurants are now open in New York City to unmasked patrons. Professional basketball players — vaccinated or unvaccinated — can play. Stadiums can be packed with unmasked spectators, vaccinated or not.
As New York tries to return to some semblance of normal life, which is what Adams has repeatedly said he wants, the last COVID-19 containment policy is masking toddlers? It seems like the plot of a dystopian novel, not the policy of a progressive, vibrant, cosmopolitan city.
When the history books are written, nearly everything we did to children in the course of this pandemic will look excessive, heavy-handed and harmful. That is true for school closures, the single greatest domestic policy failure. And that is true for aggressively masking the youngest amongst us.
We did so without robust evidence that it helped, in contrast with most European nations, including social democracies that routinely spend more on early childhood enrichment, care and development than we do. New York City’s current policy is regressive and futile. It represents the many ways in which the COVID-19 response hit hardest those with the least power, and the least ability to fight back. When history judges us, we will look as primitive as our ancestors who battled the plagues of Europe with superstitions and rituals, victims to their own ignorance and fear.
Prasad is associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco, and a practicing physician."
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/q-a-children-and-masks-related-to-covid-19
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4046809
[3] https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94399
[4] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666535221001221
[6] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/briefing/covid-age-risk-infection-vaccine.html
Thank you.