The takeaway here is not that masks work or that they don't
Its that public health officials should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, be given the keys to society again, and that individual liberties need to be fortified against such intrusions in the future because THEY WILL KEEP HAPPENING otherwise
Public health - when it has NO POWER - only has truth. The lies are hand in hand with the power
Vinay, I am thrilled you have come away from the "they could be bioplausible" which was the first place I butted heads with you on this subject in one of your earliest pieces. They were never bioplausible -- the Cochrane Study basically uses information that was mostly available before this all began. I admire your ability to change when the facts are as strong as these are -- and I think it has honed the lens through which you view all of this. You have come a long way since you started writing this stack.
The follow-on pieces are clear. We need to dismantle, permanently, the current public health apparatus and rebuild it from scratch using some other paradigm. It has been an abject failure in every way. It has shown itself inimical to public health and, short reconstitution, will never be a trusted modality again...and it needs to be.
As importantly, we need people (I am one, you are one with a much bigger bully pulpit) to get our fellow practitioners to STOP with this idiocy -- your department chair at UCSF is the archetype for what NOT to do. Must be a biatch for you. My patients want to hear the truth. They will over a short time have come to hear of this. Shouldn't we be LEADING in ripping off masks, refusing to wear them in our institutions/clinics and stopping the ridiculous harassment of patients that will not wear them?
I went to visit a friend at the hospital the other day. She was at a large academic medical center (we'll call it Dixie's House of God) for a severe Crohn's flare. The masking game was strong. "Sir, you HAVE to wear a mask."
I wanted to tell them what this article says; I wanted to tell them I hadn't masked in two years except for enclosed spaces with COVID patients; I wanted to tell them to apostatize from the religion of Fear and Irrational Face Amulets. But I didn't. Why?
Because they were just the minimum-wage working class trying to earn their paycheck. The demagogues who handed these rules down were on the back nine at the country club, maskless and jovial that they were in-step with CNN's talking points. Shame on them for not even caring about the truth.
Itโs alarming how easily the institution of science easily churned out ~150 low quality studies where you can plot 1:1 inverse correlation to the quality vs the proposed effect.
The weaker the quality of study, the higher efficacy for masks is found.
And sadly we will continue to see the effects that masking had on children for years to come. I still have students that choose to wear a mask at school purely out of irrational fear, especially since they have already had COVID multiple times...
Iโve seen this report now several times (thanks to Substack and the fact that Iโm literally doing nothing but reading and writing, thanks Cancer) and my husband has as well because - dare I admit - he watches Fox News. But. Whereโs the mainstream coverage? My parents who are too old to find other sources, or even know that they are being manipulated by the algorithm that is the โnewsโ have not seen this report. Iโm outraged by the manipulation and find our world eerily close to living on an Orwellian farm for animals.
Way back in July '21, I did a deep dive into the 2021 Cochrane Ivermectin [IVM] meta-analysis. It was a horribly biased hit-piece on IVM. I noticed that Cochrane buried the results of a study showing 87% prevention of Covid (in a tiny footnote in the summary, and in the Forrest plot at the very end (p. 252) of the paper).
Shoumann [NCT04422561] gave IVM to household members of infected patients. The results: RR 0.13 [0.08 , 0.21] i.e. 87% effective in prevention of Covid! Hard to quipple much with that result, so Cochrane claimed high risk for โmeasurement of outcomeโ and then ignored it since it โreported results .. in a way [?] that we could not include in our analysisโ. Really? Whatever that means!
Last September, Alexandros Marino's wrote a post that discussed another short-coming of the Cochrane IVM meta-analysis: โThe Cochrane Review on Ivermectin Violated Its Own Inclusion Criteria for 76% of the Patients It Includedโ https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-review-on-ivermectin.
In my Comments to Marino's post, I went into more detail about Shoumann (page numbers, etc and quotes) along with his responses. I would highly recommend Marinio's other IVM posts. He (and Pierre Kory who's IVM book will be published soon) have written the best detailed critiques of the RCT's that supposedly proved IVM doesn't work (especially of the much lauded Together trial).
2. They knew from the beginning. Science didnโt change. Health experts started lying.
As to the โwhyโ and โwhoโ we should be mad at, once again Vinay, zoom out. Youโll see it. Itโs obvious.
Talk about force vaccinating the entire planet started before CoVid. Scheming about how to do it started before CoVid. Remember, โNormalcy only returns once everyone is vaccinatedโ? You want to take off that mask and be a human? Roll up your sleeve.
Who? What? When? Why?
Remember the criticism of Agenda 2030? Inventory and Control. Everything. All resources. All PEOPLE. Vaccine passports. What does that accomplish? A digital record which determines if youโre allowed to buy groceries or travel. Who decides? A politician? No. It would be conspiracy if they didnโt achieve already achieve it at a global level. Overnight. The entire world. Locked down.
Have you seen Plandemic 2? I know ZDogg saw the first one and put out harsh criticism. Please revisit because the answer to the question, why did โtheyโ force the entire world to mask when โtheyโ knew from the beginning it didnโt work(?) has a more obvious answer. And while Fauci is a thorn, heโs not the bush.
Event 201, sponsored by WEF and Gates, Oct 18th 2019:
My concern is about the dissemination of this review and the strong possibility it will be ignored by the general medical press [BMJ etc]. I fear there will be a concerted effort to ignore this careful, balanced thorough paper. Will it appear in the BMJ? Vinay please try to publish in a peer reviewed journal - and not just on Substack [wonderful though it is].
No doubt. However, although Cochrane still has a good reputation, it's co-founder was kicked off it's board in 2018. Apparently because it โ... is now run much more as a business with a brand than it was just a few years ago.โ It looks like Cochrane's Pharma big-money doners didn't like Peter Gotzsche's stance on vaccines, etc.:
"As most people know, much of my work is not very favourable to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry," [co-founder Peter] Gรธtzsche said in his statement. "Because of this Cochrane has faced pressure, criticism, and complaints. My [2018] expulsion [from Cochrane board] is one of the results of these campaigns. โฆ Gรธtzsche says the decision is likely related to a frontal attack on a Cochrane review about vaccines against HPV, a cancer-causing virus, that he and two co-authors published..."
It looks like a slam dunk Vinay, but it's also cringeworthy that a celebrated Internet Expert like you repeatedly omits an important contingent issue (even if you say, "Oh hell Jim Bob, that's just nit-picking"): Randomization of enrollee assignments at the front end of any RCT does NOT guarantee balanced distribution of causal variables across compared groups. Correctly performed, it is *an attempt with a very high probability of success* to achieve a desired balance of all putative causal variables. I don't doubt the value of properly designed RCTs. I definitely doubt the wisdom of "dumbing down" what happens in the enrollee assignment phase of any RCT when any expert like you posts stuff that plenty of lay folks are going to read. It is important to pay sharp attention to the composition of your potential audience.
Part III: Part II: "Cochrane is run by smart people. ...โ
. . .
No doubt. But do the people have integrity? Here's an excerpt from Dr. Pierre Kory's post where he explained how Cochrane conducted a fraudulent meta-review of Ivermectin:
โRecognize that the Cochrane library was for decades considered the gold standard amongst academia ... Note that I said โwas the gold standard.โ โฆ Because, you guessed it, they got captured by Pharma and Gates. In 2018, mass resignations of Cochrane Library Board members occurred due to what one said was a โgrowing top-down authoritarian culture and an increasingly commercial business modelโ that โthreatens the scientific, moral and social objectives of the organization.โ๏ปฟ I am sure the fact that Gates becoming a donor two year earlier had nothing to do with it. Yeah right. ...
Tess [Lawrie] knew that a systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence supporting ivermectin published by the Cochrane Library would result in all global health agencies recommending its use and would immediately have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. So, Tess proposed to Cochrane for her team to do a โRapid Review of Ivermectin.โ They initially accepted her proposed study protocol! She had a green light. But not for long. They changed tune fast, likely due to pressure from Gates or one of their Big Pharma funders. My money is on Pfizer.โฆ What happened next is that all of a sudden, the Cochrane editors informed Tess that a โRapid Reviewโ was inappropriate and that a โFull Reviewโ protocol should be followed. She quickly agreed to do so and submitted a Full Review protocol as her team, in anticipation, had actually already completed the work. ...
Pressure was on. The corrupted Cochrane Library was in a bind. Unsurprisingly, they then started accusing her of โconflicts of interestโ because of her video plea to Boris Johnson โฆ Her defense to Cochrane editors fell on deaf (or dumbed) ears. They simply told her to go publish in another journal and instead assigned the Full Review work to a German team led by Popp et al.
I donโt know Popp but donโt have to. Popp proceeded to employ the identical tactics that the WHO research team did, a brazenly manipulated review which came to a very different conclusion than Tessโs team, i.e. instead, after dismissing most of the evidence base, they concluded that the evidence for ivermectin was of โvery low certaintyโ and thus insufficient to support a recommendation. โฆ
Tessโs team masterfully tore apart theย fraudulent Cochrane review here. Itโs a must read for science and stat geeks. Note it remains on a pre-print server. โฆ โGold standardโ eh? Whatever. Clown world.
P.S. Pierre Kory's book "The War on Ivermectin" will be published on April 4th.
I like the dig on Ranney, who does like 2 shifts a month in the ER but spewed endless anecdotal shit about life in the Covid trenches. Proved that you should never let a serious crisis go to waste.
Bash wrote exactly what I was going to say. Iโve watched public health do such a disservice for addiction that I wonder if there will ever be a good quality of life for recovering opiate addicts now that the โevidence basedโ best treatment is buprenorphine. Sad. And itโs the same with masking and disempowering all humans by the โelitesโ - interesting how many ignored and got caught, but few consequences for them. The next pandemic will be different I suspect.
The takeaway here is not that masks work or that they don't
Its that public health officials should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, be given the keys to society again, and that individual liberties need to be fortified against such intrusions in the future because THEY WILL KEEP HAPPENING otherwise
Public health - when it has NO POWER - only has truth. The lies are hand in hand with the power
Vinay, I am thrilled you have come away from the "they could be bioplausible" which was the first place I butted heads with you on this subject in one of your earliest pieces. They were never bioplausible -- the Cochrane Study basically uses information that was mostly available before this all began. I admire your ability to change when the facts are as strong as these are -- and I think it has honed the lens through which you view all of this. You have come a long way since you started writing this stack.
The follow-on pieces are clear. We need to dismantle, permanently, the current public health apparatus and rebuild it from scratch using some other paradigm. It has been an abject failure in every way. It has shown itself inimical to public health and, short reconstitution, will never be a trusted modality again...and it needs to be.
As importantly, we need people (I am one, you are one with a much bigger bully pulpit) to get our fellow practitioners to STOP with this idiocy -- your department chair at UCSF is the archetype for what NOT to do. Must be a biatch for you. My patients want to hear the truth. They will over a short time have come to hear of this. Shouldn't we be LEADING in ripping off masks, refusing to wear them in our institutions/clinics and stopping the ridiculous harassment of patients that will not wear them?
If not us, who? If not now, when?
I went to visit a friend at the hospital the other day. She was at a large academic medical center (we'll call it Dixie's House of God) for a severe Crohn's flare. The masking game was strong. "Sir, you HAVE to wear a mask."
I wanted to tell them what this article says; I wanted to tell them I hadn't masked in two years except for enclosed spaces with COVID patients; I wanted to tell them to apostatize from the religion of Fear and Irrational Face Amulets. But I didn't. Why?
Because they were just the minimum-wage working class trying to earn their paycheck. The demagogues who handed these rules down were on the back nine at the country club, maskless and jovial that they were in-step with CNN's talking points. Shame on them for not even caring about the truth.
This is why it's sad to see people in Japan (where my family is from and where I used to live) are masking at near 100% rates, even outdoors.
Case in point why the CDC can't be trusted, the likes of Dr. Fauci can't be trusted... its sad really...
Itโs alarming how easily the institution of science easily churned out ~150 low quality studies where you can plot 1:1 inverse correlation to the quality vs the proposed effect.
The weaker the quality of study, the higher efficacy for masks is found.
And sadly we will continue to see the effects that masking had on children for years to come. I still have students that choose to wear a mask at school purely out of irrational fear, especially since they have already had COVID multiple times...
Iโve seen this report now several times (thanks to Substack and the fact that Iโm literally doing nothing but reading and writing, thanks Cancer) and my husband has as well because - dare I admit - he watches Fox News. But. Whereโs the mainstream coverage? My parents who are too old to find other sources, or even know that they are being manipulated by the algorithm that is the โnewsโ have not seen this report. Iโm outraged by the manipulation and find our world eerily close to living on an Orwellian farm for animals.
Part II: "Cochrane is run by smart people. ...โ
โฆ
Way back in July '21, I did a deep dive into the 2021 Cochrane Ivermectin [IVM] meta-analysis. It was a horribly biased hit-piece on IVM. I noticed that Cochrane buried the results of a study showing 87% prevention of Covid (in a tiny footnote in the summary, and in the Forrest plot at the very end (p. 252) of the paper).
Shoumann [NCT04422561] gave IVM to household members of infected patients. The results: RR 0.13 [0.08 , 0.21] i.e. 87% effective in prevention of Covid! Hard to quipple much with that result, so Cochrane claimed high risk for โmeasurement of outcomeโ and then ignored it since it โreported results .. in a way [?] that we could not include in our analysisโ. Really? Whatever that means!
Last September, Alexandros Marino's wrote a post that discussed another short-coming of the Cochrane IVM meta-analysis: โThe Cochrane Review on Ivermectin Violated Its Own Inclusion Criteria for 76% of the Patients It Includedโ https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-review-on-ivermectin.
In my Comments to Marino's post, I went into more detail about Shoumann (page numbers, etc and quotes) along with his responses. I would highly recommend Marinio's other IVM posts. He (and Pierre Kory who's IVM book will be published soon) have written the best detailed critiques of the RCT's that supposedly proved IVM doesn't work (especially of the much lauded Together trial).
P.S. Just found Pierre Kory's Substack about the difficulty Shouman had getting his paper published. (see "Rejection #4): https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-criminal-censorship-of-ivermectins
Yes. Letโs review:
1. Masks donโt work
2. They knew from the beginning. Science didnโt change. Health experts started lying.
As to the โwhyโ and โwhoโ we should be mad at, once again Vinay, zoom out. Youโll see it. Itโs obvious.
Talk about force vaccinating the entire planet started before CoVid. Scheming about how to do it started before CoVid. Remember, โNormalcy only returns once everyone is vaccinatedโ? You want to take off that mask and be a human? Roll up your sleeve.
Who? What? When? Why?
Remember the criticism of Agenda 2030? Inventory and Control. Everything. All resources. All PEOPLE. Vaccine passports. What does that accomplish? A digital record which determines if youโre allowed to buy groceries or travel. Who decides? A politician? No. It would be conspiracy if they didnโt achieve already achieve it at a global level. Overnight. The entire world. Locked down.
Have you seen Plandemic 2? I know ZDogg saw the first one and put out harsh criticism. Please revisit because the answer to the question, why did โtheyโ force the entire world to mask when โtheyโ knew from the beginning it didnโt work(?) has a more obvious answer. And while Fauci is a thorn, heโs not the bush.
Event 201, sponsored by WEF and Gates, Oct 18th 2019:
https://rumble.com/vbwbxd-event-201-the-dry-run-for-the-covid-plandemic-and-origin-of-the-psyop.html
Plandemic 2 Indoctrination
https://thehighwire.com/videos/the-highwire-presents-plandemic-indoctornation/
Go to minute 8. Yuval Harari of WEF. โCoVid is criticalโ
https://thehighwire.com/videos/humans-are-now-hackable-animals/
My concern is about the dissemination of this review and the strong possibility it will be ignored by the general medical press [BMJ etc]. I fear there will be a concerted effort to ignore this careful, balanced thorough paper. Will it appear in the BMJ? Vinay please try to publish in a peer reviewed journal - and not just on Substack [wonderful though it is].
"Cochrane is run by smart people. ...โ
. . .
No doubt. However, although Cochrane still has a good reputation, it's co-founder was kicked off it's board in 2018. Apparently because it โ... is now run much more as a business with a brand than it was just a few years ago.โ It looks like Cochrane's Pharma big-money doners didn't like Peter Gotzsche's stance on vaccines, etc.:
https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-based-medicine-group-turmoil-after-expulsion-co-founder
"As most people know, much of my work is not very favourable to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry," [co-founder Peter] Gรธtzsche said in his statement. "Because of this Cochrane has faced pressure, criticism, and complaints. My [2018] expulsion [from Cochrane board] is one of the results of these campaigns. โฆ Gรธtzsche says the decision is likely related to a frontal attack on a Cochrane review about vaccines against HPV, a cancer-causing virus, that he and two co-authors published..."
It looks like a slam dunk Vinay, but it's also cringeworthy that a celebrated Internet Expert like you repeatedly omits an important contingent issue (even if you say, "Oh hell Jim Bob, that's just nit-picking"): Randomization of enrollee assignments at the front end of any RCT does NOT guarantee balanced distribution of causal variables across compared groups. Correctly performed, it is *an attempt with a very high probability of success* to achieve a desired balance of all putative causal variables. I don't doubt the value of properly designed RCTs. I definitely doubt the wisdom of "dumbing down" what happens in the enrollee assignment phase of any RCT when any expert like you posts stuff that plenty of lay folks are going to read. It is important to pay sharp attention to the composition of your potential audience.
Part III: Part II: "Cochrane is run by smart people. ...โ
. . .
No doubt. But do the people have integrity? Here's an excerpt from Dr. Pierre Kory's post where he explained how Cochrane conducted a fraudulent meta-review of Ivermectin:
https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/the-criminal-censorship-of-ivermectins
โRecognize that the Cochrane library was for decades considered the gold standard amongst academia ... Note that I said โwas the gold standard.โ โฆ Because, you guessed it, they got captured by Pharma and Gates. In 2018, mass resignations of Cochrane Library Board members occurred due to what one said was a โgrowing top-down authoritarian culture and an increasingly commercial business modelโ that โthreatens the scientific, moral and social objectives of the organization.โ๏ปฟ I am sure the fact that Gates becoming a donor two year earlier had nothing to do with it. Yeah right. ...
Tess [Lawrie] knew that a systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence supporting ivermectin published by the Cochrane Library would result in all global health agencies recommending its use and would immediately have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. So, Tess proposed to Cochrane for her team to do a โRapid Review of Ivermectin.โ They initially accepted her proposed study protocol! She had a green light. But not for long. They changed tune fast, likely due to pressure from Gates or one of their Big Pharma funders. My money is on Pfizer.โฆ What happened next is that all of a sudden, the Cochrane editors informed Tess that a โRapid Reviewโ was inappropriate and that a โFull Reviewโ protocol should be followed. She quickly agreed to do so and submitted a Full Review protocol as her team, in anticipation, had actually already completed the work. ...
Pressure was on. The corrupted Cochrane Library was in a bind. Unsurprisingly, they then started accusing her of โconflicts of interestโ because of her video plea to Boris Johnson โฆ Her defense to Cochrane editors fell on deaf (or dumbed) ears. They simply told her to go publish in another journal and instead assigned the Full Review work to a German team led by Popp et al.
I donโt know Popp but donโt have to. Popp proceeded to employ the identical tactics that the WHO research team did, a brazenly manipulated review which came to a very different conclusion than Tessโs team, i.e. instead, after dismissing most of the evidence base, they concluded that the evidence for ivermectin was of โvery low certaintyโ and thus insufficient to support a recommendation. โฆ
Tessโs team masterfully tore apart theย fraudulent Cochrane review here. Itโs a must read for science and stat geeks. Note it remains on a pre-print server. โฆ โGold standardโ eh? Whatever. Clown world.
P.S. Pierre Kory's book "The War on Ivermectin" will be published on April 4th.
I like the dig on Ranney, who does like 2 shifts a month in the ER but spewed endless anecdotal shit about life in the Covid trenches. Proved that you should never let a serious crisis go to waste.
Bash wrote exactly what I was going to say. Iโve watched public health do such a disservice for addiction that I wonder if there will ever be a good quality of life for recovering opiate addicts now that the โevidence basedโ best treatment is buprenorphine. Sad. And itโs the same with masking and disempowering all humans by the โelitesโ - interesting how many ignored and got caught, but few consequences for them. The next pandemic will be different I suspect.