The Masks, Like Goggles, They Do Nothing

I've been putting together my own meta-analysis of the medical usefulness of masks in the area of aerosolized infectors, particularly coronavirus virions, but frankly there are others who've done so better than I could and HAVE done so.

Here's one. Some of you will hum through the math bits while others will eagerly dig into the referenced analysis, break out your R interpreters, and have a grand old time.

Masks Don't Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy

Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy

[...]

Conclusion

By making mask-wearing recommendations and policies for the general public, or by expressly condoning the practice, governments have both ignored the scientific evidence and done the opposite of following the precautionary principle.

In an absence of knowledge, governments should not make policies that have a hypothetical potential to cause harm. The government has an onus barrier before it instigates a broad social-engineering intervention, or allows corporations to exploit fear-based sentiments.

Furthermore, individuals should know that there is no known benefit arising from wearing a mask in a viral respiratory illness epidemic, and that scientific studies have shown that any benefit must be residually small, compared to other and determinative factors.

I decided to cut to the chase for the folks not into reading the papers themselves.

That's plenty bad enough and you're not likely to run into it being kicked around

Why Masks Don't Work: A Revealing Review

But it put me in mind of a wholly different meta-study that I actually have marked up in my older notes that I came on while doing some research around mid-March, called Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review.

The primary reason for mandating the wearing of face masks is to protect dental personnel from airborne pathogens. This review has established that face masks are incapable of providing such a level of protection. Unless the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, national and provincial dental associations and regulatory agencies publically admit this fact, they will be guilty of perpetuating a myth which will be a disservice to the dental profession and its patients. It would be beneficial if, as a consequence of the review, all present infection control recommendations were subjected to the same rigorous testing as any new clinical intervention. Professional associations and governing bodies must ensure the clinical efficacy of quality improvement procedures prior to them being mandated. It is heartening to know that such a trend is gaining a momentum which might reveal the inadequacies of other long held dental infection control assumptions. Surely, the hallmark of a mature profession is one which permits new evidence to trump established beliefs. In 1910, Dr. C. Chapin, a public health pioneer, summarized this idea by stating, “We should not be ashamed to change our methods; rather, we should be ashamed not to do so.” Until this occurs, as this review has revealed, dentists have nothing to fear by unmasking.

You'll notice that I've referenced it off the Wayback Machine.

That's because the whole study has been un-personed. It no longer exists in our world.

Instead, you see ...

If you are looking for “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review” by John Hardie, BDS, MSc, PhD, FRCDC, it has been removed. The content was published in 2016 and is no longer relevant in our current climate.

Please note that the content from Oral Health Group is primarily intended to educate and inform dental professionals.

If you are looking to further educate yourself on the topic of PPE in the dental industry, we invite you to read the articles below:

• Understanding Personal Protective Equipment
• Federal Government Creates Web Hub For Organizations Buying and Selling PPE

-- https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face-masks-dont-work-revealing-review/

Pointedly not "we have a newer, more recent study that comes to better-justified conclusions" or "there are arguments about the methodology in this study put forward by X, Y, and Z which we believe are persuasive, refer to them to see a better realized motivation for Oral Health Group policy."

No, that study and everything it carried simply went down the Memory Hole.

I don't even have to tell most of you good folk that's not how science works because that's not how science works and you all know it.

In science, we look for dissent and refer to it, we don't vanish it. We look for contention as a source of further knowledge. The first phase of value-testing for a scientific idea is to come up with the best arguments against your work that you can, then to test it to destruction and beyond. If your opinion changes, you talk about that change, document why it changed, and leave open the chance it could change later.

You don't just destroy the records of your ideas and pretend they never happened. It's not "no longer relevant in our current climate" or you wouldn't have disappeared it! That's not only a lie, it's a bad lie.

This isn't the first research I've referenced that's ever become a victim of ideological rescission but it is the most recent one. And the whole thing stinks of -- well, something you just don't want to have stinking near you.

It's the most obvious one, though. And because of the tools I have at hand, it's the one I can document right before your eyes.

The Lady Disappears

This is the Wayback Machine record for the article in question. You can see the number of times it was updated over the last year or so, with the size of a blue circle representing how many times it was updated that day. This represents a heat map and a bar graph, but you can see a very clear uptick in the number of updates occurring late in 2020, which largely corresponds to what we see. Remember, I originally found this article back in March and thought it important enough to add to my collection of references.

Obviously I am not the only person who thought this was important enough to tell archive.org to back up the content. For the most part, Archive does not manually seek out pages to update. That is a paid service that they offer. Instead, they depend on interested parties with access to the content via the normal web browser to say, "hey, I think this needs to be updated in your database as a snapshot."

What's important to note here is the activity around June 2 and June 9 because those dates represent times when the Wayback Machine could not resolve the URL. That looks to be a period of about a week where this entire article disappeared off the face of the net (at its source) and was not accessible. Obviously it was crawled multiple times before then or else it wouldn't be in the archive for us to retrieve.

Afterwards you can look at snapshots of the site and very clearly see the altered and removed content reference.

This is just one example of something that I can point to, give you reference to, and access to with a clear chain of events and what is clearly ideological reason to revoke a scientific paper for reasons which are obviously not scientific.

How many more times has this happened a day? A week? How many things that you depend on to make good decisions about how to live your life are just the ideological whimsy of the moment? How much are you being kept from knowing.

I actively hate to write articles like this.

This started out as a simple Facebook post about an article that I thought really ran down good statistical, analytical reasons for something that I believe. It was going to be short, sweet, and done. I may have poked a hornet nest a little bit, but nothing more than I usually get up to.

I didn't want to write what has turned into an 1100 word paranoid rant which probably qualifies me for the tinfoil hat brigade, at this point.

But what can you do?

Public policy decisions are no longer being made on the basis of science. They're not even being made on the basis of economics, or even philosophy. Instead – COVID 19 has become a religious crusade for a lot of people, with all that entails.

Religion provides people with a sense of comfort about things they cannot control. It provides an easy enemy when things go poorly. It provides a framework for decision-making when doubt about what is "the right decision" is extremely high. These aren't necessarily strong negatives for religion, despite the fact that they usually lead to people making worse decisions for themselves and thus having worse outcomes.

We all know I'm a militant atheist for good reasons – but I'm willing to allow others to make their own decisions.

The COVID 19 reaction is a religious one. The absolute terror of an uncontrollable, "invariably lethal" (if you listen to media) enemy immediately creates the desire for ritual activity which has nothing to do with actual cause and effect results; instead, it's public ritual theater, and those who do not want to engage in the public ritual get the claimed as heretics and declared anathema, cut off from the body politic.

Even though there are perfectly good reasons to disagree. Even though science provides really good reasoning about why certain activities are not effective, not useful, and possibly even detrimental to the one thing you're supposed to be engaging in the ritual to preserve: your health.

Organizations and groups who have a religious belief about public policy, who may have previously been staunchly scientific, have no hesitation about removing ideologically opposed heresies for no better reason than "it is no longer relevant in our current climate."

"It is inconvenient that we came to a scientific position that differs from our current religious inclination, so we will pretend that the science never happened and continue the worship as we have been directed and will continue to direct you."

Frankly, I'm uncomfortable with that. I think maybe you should be uncomfortable with that.

Whaddaya Gonna Do?

I haven't quite come up with what we should do as a result all this clear awareness, but I think that we, as community members, as people of fellowship, as common travelers – what have you – should take the time to think about the position that we're in and maybe bring a little more skepticism to the table.

I'm not telling you what to do with your life. You can make decisions based on whatever criterion you deign acceptable. I'm just saying that perhaps it's time to consider that being able to tell me what I should do is inappropriate.

Once upon a time, science was based on the idea that research should be reproducible and that uncomfortable results are the result of asking important questions. This is an Enlightenment-era thought. It is one of the key linchpins that helped transform the world from a place where crushing, agonizing oppression and cruel poverty was the norm to a place where nearly the sum total of human knowledge is available in your pocket for a low monthly fee.

Maybe it's time to think about recommitting yourself to at least the idea that these organizations don't have your best interest at heart and that you, as an individual, should devote at least a part of your daily energy to inquiring after the things that you're told, sometimes that you've been told your whole life and sometimes the things that you've just been told yesterday. See if they make sense. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.

Ask questions. Dream dreams. Keep your laser handy.

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[[COVID 19]] [[censorship]]

• [[Why Masks Dont Work (article)]]
• [[Masks Dont Work (article)]]

#blog