James, I am sure this is important stuff that I want to know. But I will never listen to a podcast as is true of many readers here. Wrong format for us and fundamentally far to inefficient. Most sites to which I have whined have found auto-transcribers for their podcasts which, while not perfect, are good enough. They generally post the transcription with the podcast which is wonderful for all communities of learners, visual or aural.
I hope you can do this. Many of your peers on Substack do this already and it is most appreciated.
Thanks for the good things you are doing. I cannot wait to read this particular dialog, frankly.
James, I understand. But I and many of my peers just do not have an hour to invest in this content -- there are only 24 hours in the day and everyone creating podcasts thinks we should watch THEIR hour. And a podcast, being aural not visual in any case, hardly gives too many behavioral cues.
I am happy to infer the behavior and to read the words. We all may miss 5% of the transactional content in the vocal intonations. But that is far better than missing 100% of it all. Just one man's opinion but shared by many of us.
It isn't worth the effort. Even with all the banning, there is plenty more than I have time for on YouTube, and YouTube not only offers captioning they also have free captioning software which Rumble et al could use if they cared enough to be bothered.
I am missing it ALL because I am hearing impaired. Your lack of concern and that generally pervading alternative sources makes me doubt your sincerity in standing up for the " little guy" since there is no guy littler than a deaf person in society.
Personally, I think it's wrong to re-order society based upon incredibly iffy science.
There is no part of the planet that experienced lower transmission of the virus based upon mask usage. That's where the rubber meets the road.
We were told the science proved that the shots stopped transmission, stopped you from catching the virus, would keep you from getting ill or dying of it in the hospital.
We now know that the pharma companies always knew those scientific "facts" were false.
We knew that lockdowns caused more harm than good, yet we destroyed tens-of-thousands of small businesses while allowing large chain grocery stores to not only operate, but to employ teenagers as bag-boys and clerks.
We allowed the scientific religionists to seize control of our nation and they do not like giving up the power.
I spent my life designing integrated circuits for everything from toys to spacecraft.
If I told clients that the device may or may not work, they'd laugh me out of the business. Now retired, I doubt that has changed.
We should never again, reorder society based upon the bogus models and bad science of these "experts".
When they say they do a cost-benefit analysis, they don't mean how will society be harmed, they mean only will the implementation of their favored thing, change the outcome of the disease progression.
That, is not the only important factor in a society. In this case it was not even the most important factor, yet we ceded control to the bureaucrats...
It convinced me that masks don't work. If this is the best research on masks, I am now firmly behind Steve Kirsch's crusade against masks.
Public health has been directed toward what is possible, mandates, masks, etc., not what will make a difference like early treatment and different protocols in the hospital.
It is fascinating to see a "scientist" go around in circles with statistics.
Also, those of us with hearing impairment are blocked from Rumble and all alternative video sites due to the universal unwillingness to bother captioning the videos.
Abaluck has a really good point at 17:50, "Well, hold on hold on hold on holelelelele."
His apologia for the "masks were working" headline is pure semantic illogic. If a study finds that trucks can carry logs but cars not so much, then the headline "automobiles could carry logs all along!" conveys a meaning (all automobiles can carry logs) that is contradicted by the study. "Some" ≠ "All," and "All" is the default implication of a sentence when a modifier is not added to the subject.
Sad and embarrassing that he can't see how flimsy his own counter-argument is here. But spend enough time in a cult and you forget what real debate consists of.
I was visited by a stranger with family in the FDA a few weeks ago, and the conversation went the same way. If I said severe outcomes from infection were rare, I was told to understand that that is not how I "have to think of it." The same way Abaluck thinks you are "misunderstanding" his study, as in thinking about it in a way different than how he thinks you "have to think about it."
It's a train wreck, really - hard to keep watching. I hope he gets around to specifying what the denominator was for the seropositive rate.
Hey hey, don’t step too hard on him. He’s under immense pressure to prove his points. Didn’t you see how nervous he was? I’m not being totally sarc here although I admit to a tiny bit.
First, if masks really work, the true tests should simply be engineering, those tests have been done. Dr LW made enough good points I don’t have to. We all know virion size vs mask opening size just simply doesn’t work (except P100’s and above) plus poor sealing and voila. The only efficacy I personally see is stopping outright spittle and mucous, not aerosolized. Dr Bridle in Canada has also remarked on that.
But why in heavens name was he so nervous? Who pays him? Poor thing. He’s a scientist who’s only income is from those who MUST prove or force prove the narrative of “masking, vaccines and social distancing” work.
So what if masks work somewhat? To my mind that’s much like “c19 vaccines work.... somewhat”. Sure they do. Not joking. They DO work..... somewhat. But this dude was dead set on nervously demanding that his study proved masks work. Again, to what end and with what motive must we “believe”. I’m a Christian. I understand faith. But I am not in the Covid19 cult. This guy is. He’s pushing the doctrine. Fortunately he wasn’t so much of an acolyte to not acknowledge a few flaws and confounding variables but his nervousness betrayed him. He’s trying desperately hard to hold on to a belief and to prove his (and his funders) hypothesis despite proof against.
I personally found his defense of cloth masks to be laughable.
On a positive note: I went to local big grocery store last night and, at least in Texas (hooray for this), we’ve shamed the mask wearers. I think even our local school may have finally taken the rule off. I saw some signs of easing. Haven’t checked since I don’t have kids.
Sorry Dr LW, I didn’t have the stomach to watch the whole thing, did ya’ll discuss (1) what happens when masks get dirty and (2) hypoxia due to masking. I.e. risk vs reward? (3) The toxicity of the chemicals in surgical and N95s?
The only way they'll ever really be able to tell if any kind of mask has any effect on stopping transmission is to do human challenge studies where different groups of people wearing different types of masks for different lengths of time are purposely exposed to a respiratory virus (as I explain in this blog post: https://beyondspin.wordpress.com/2022/02/08/to-mask-or-not-to-mask-that-really-isnt-the-question-or-necessarily-the-solution ) . For those types of studies, you have to set aside ethical constraints....which obviously is very problematic. Otherwise all these studies, that wait for people to get infected, will always have a myriad of confounders no matter how much the researchers believe that they'e controlling for various variables. The aRR on the particular study you two are debating about isn't the slightest bit compelling, and other meta-analysis of mask studies showing rRR's of much higher rates (53%) have very weak confounded aRR's of around 0.5%. So again, not the least bit compelling. So even these RCT's are pretty much bull shiet.
For insight into Abaluck's nervousness, you have to consider the study design, which was structured around the effect of treatment (masking and distancing promotion) on behavior (masking and distancing). He and his team never set out to generate the official "proof" that masks "work," only to look at how they could make people wear more masks. But his study has been elevated to the official proof and so now he must toe the line and say that the study's super-weak evidence for an effect on transmission is worth crafting policy over, or else be thrown into the Science Village Volcano.
I mean they do “somewhat” and for a very limited period of time stimulate the production of antibodies to spike. I personally think the vaccines (mRNA and Viral Vector especially) will be proven, eventually, to be harmful to every single person who took them. So far we have not seen complete evidence that is always the case. God made some pretty amazing bodies. (Or some got saline? I’m not completely sure how far down the rabbit hole I’d like to go on the saline issue. I definitely believe most politicos got saline.)
It boggles my mind, having read what Dr LW has written, what Dr Henrion Caude (France) has stated (I think that was in a Planet Lockdown, still available on Rumble if I recall, highly recommend!) and Dr Yeadon and Dr Malone have said, that so FEW people have shown signs of great harm.
So if you think I was saying they are helpful, no. Simply reiterating the fact they DO produce certain limited results doesnt mean I’m in the vax camp. I’m in the control group. Haven’t even had c19 itself.
That’s fair… but I still contest that I don’t trust anything the “experts” say. Do I think they have harmed A LOT of people? Yes, I have direct, albeit anecdotal evidence they are very harmful. I’ve never met someone with Bella Palsy in my life… certainly not a seemingly health 20 year old that suddenly develops it. Or my sister in law that had to have clots removed from both hemispheres of her brain after suffering strokes. I have a few other work examples that I could cite. This is out of roughy 120-140 vaccinated people…. That’s insane. I, too, am currently in the control group and will always be LoL!
Not that you sound like you need anymore proof but: He or she did a great job compiling the list.
I’m keeping that in backup. It’s crazy. Did you see the 14 tennis players backing out of a major tournament recently? He put that on this list too. It’s crazy.
So sad… the Italian world class swimmer that died this past week. There is simply too many incidents for it to be coincidence and it is absolutely insane that all the MSM are silent. My SIL’s doctors didn’t mention the vaccine either… they diagnosed her with Moyamoya disease…. Guess what I found in the 9 page listing of adverse events in Pfizer’s clinical trial data? It’s in alpha order, easy to find.
Addendum: watch for signs of ALS, Parkinson’s, dementia, MS. Anything brain or neuro. ESP conditions caused by demyelination. I work for eye docs. We are seeing a small uptick but it’s not insignificant. I haven’t seen Bells Palsy yet but we’ve seen it in the past because it can cause dry eye (muscles in face are paralyzed) and sometimes causes other eye issues. But we have recently seen one case of probable MS in a very young person, a resurgence of brain cancer in another young person, a really weird Neuro condition that might have been preexisting in a young person (could not tell for the life of me but that person was jabbed, I confirmed that), I saw one other in a young lady who told me directly “the doctors haven’t been able to figure it out”. I can’t remember her exact condition or symptoms but I do know it involved sight diminishing. I’ve also heard of many older people who cancelled their appointments due to “being in the hospital” and/or just having had a heart attack and one had sudden onset dementia. While the latter older ones aren’t red flags (age), there seem to be excessive numbers of them.
Also, it's proven that the LNP's aka 'Lipid Nano Particles' pass through the blood brain barrier and rewrite the cell's RNA to produce the spikey toxic spike protein which gets embedded in the lining of the endothelium blood vessels all over the body/brain and attack the heart and cause auto immune reaction such that the Tcells end up attacking the spike protein and this doesn't end after after a few weeks or months or even a few years.
What a disaster having had to suffer through 2 + years of a slow recovery from one jab in Feb 2021 and still having some issues.
"Somewhat"? No. Not even a little. Making antibodies to a specific "self-expressed" "designer peptide" does not protect you from any virus. From Moderna's DENIED patent application (USPTO): "These arguments are persuasive to the extent that an antigenic peptide stimulates an immune response that may produce antibodies that bind to a specific peptide or protein BUT IT IS NOT PERSUASIVE IN REGARDS TO A VACCINE. (emphasis added) The immune response produced by a vaccine must be more than merely some immune response, but MUST ALSO BE PROTECTIVE." This Moderna application was denied way before the EUAs and gov/media-induced mass panic steamrolled the process into re-labeling them vaccines -- thereby opening a fraudulent window for use. As we have seen, the countries with the highest vaccination rates have the highest hospitalization, death (all-cause) and infection. This is black and white. There is no somewhat. Give them no quarter. We're not even talking safety (which is abysmal) -- just efficacy -- which is a joke. Absolute risk reduction is statistically insignificant. Not even "somewhat" significant.
43:00 He seems evasive on the issue I wanted the most clarification on. But the paper has been updated with more detail since I first read it. It seems that "Baseline symptomatic seropositivity" was the positivity rate among symptom+ responders on the week 0 survey. But then is it the same people being tested at follow-up, and what kind of valid conclusion can be made from that comparison anyway? It's still the messiest part of the paper and the only one that "supports" any conclusions about efficacy vs SARS-CoV-2 as opposed to efficacy against "saying you feel sick on a survey."
If the "baseline" is a symptom+ group then the difference in follow-up should be huge regardless of the intervention, because most symptom+ will be pre-IgG-seroconversion. So it doesn't really matter if the treatment made a difference here because the signal is way too weak. This was my guess before the video and remains my guess now. There were very low case rates in Bangladesh during the study period (rolling from November 2020 to March 2021) so they were measuring a whole lot of nothing.
32:30 Here he's trying to have+eat his cake. A clear association between effect and treatment wouldn't rule out an indirect effect (i.e. from behavior changes). But he backs off before tripping up.
33:30 "Particles in the universe" lol. One obvious possible non-controlled confounder is listed in the study text, "We also do not yet have data on distance to nearby city." Matching was based on case rates in June/July 2020 and wouldn't ensure equal case rates in Nov-March, and wouldn't address changes in seropositivity driven by work migration anyway. The number of seasonal urban workers returning to or leaving villages could have driven differences in seropositivity by adding / depleting donors who got infected in Dhaka / Chittagong (where previously-reported seropositivity rates were very high). This isn't even necessarily distance-based.
I think Jason did a good job of defending his position. My takeaway was that there was some, but little benefit to masking, but it was hard to tell the degree because the controls were not as aggressive as desirable. Sounds like more studies are needed. That said, his call for the less knowledgeable to accept the consensus belied his remark that he did not take either side in the argument and simply sought the truth. I suspect he was biased going in and there is a good likelihood that skewed his work in interpreting some of the study areas with weaker controls.
This interview was challenging to listen to. There was so much interrupting and talking over that it wasted time and took away from the value of the debate.
I listened to it while driving, otherwise would have given up. I need to go to the actual study now to see what was being debated. I did learn a lot though. As always thank you James.
This showed how easy ti can be to misrepresent a study. So many factors and considerations go into building a viable study. Dr. Abaluck's study was a huge under taking and is to be commended for it. But his defensive posture made it difficult to listen to even if he was making a valid point. This suggests he had some kind of preconceived notion about how it would go down. Had he let his guard down he would have made his points more effectively to layman's like me because he's clearly competent. Still, he deserves credit coming on to discuss it. We need more of these debates.
That all being said. I'm not convinced masks work.
When I was a stock broker I'd hear all sorts of reasons and explanations form a company justifying their quarterly results. Or read about why a company posted a result but we needed to read the details. For sure, that was at times necessary but at the end of the day I asked a simple question, despite all the qualifications, do you make money? Are you profitable? Yes? No? Science has p-value, investments P/E multiple. And like Abaluck expressed not being a fan of p-value, there were investors who took P/E with a grain of salt or at least cautioned interpreting data based on it alone.
I apply the same thing here with the masks. I note that it's the rule and not the exception that data shows masks have marginal benefits. Yet, we always have to hear about caveats. Bottom line is do they work or not?
As for my impression of the types of masks, cloth masks are akin to t-shirts around our mouths. Useless. So enough of this cloth nonsense. As for surgical masks, we've had decades worth of studies - in both hospital and community settings - that showed they're ineffective. The talk about N-95 is also somewhat misplaced because they're simply not feasible in community settings. I wore those in construction and you'd better change them every coupe of hours....
So it's ludicrous to even suggest these for mass community wearing. Never mind about costs. These things are expensive. What are you going to do? Tell people to buy four masks per day at $6 a pop? Some semblance of practicality here please.
I also notice where past studies (1920-2019) never qualified their studies with 'masks are essential but our data shows insignificant results'. Yet, we see a lot of this post-2020.
And we never seem to talk about the psychological and physical trade-offs to masks. These are more useful to ensure people are reminded there's a virus out there than actually preventing anything. They will not protect you from getting sick. Any industrial hygienist or PPE expert will tell you this. Moreover, Health Canada issued recalls on a couple of occasions due to the toxicity of masks. But we allowed kids to wear them anyway for little benefit for a demographic least in danger. But that's another topic.
That all being said, the bottom line is does the evidence back up MANDATES for masks? It would appear to me culling and perusing over the data the answer is a clear no. That they could, kinda, maybe, sorta doesn't cut it for me. .03 is .03 and that's marginal period. Common sense has to kick in here.
At best, we've seen studies say they can help cut transmission by 10%-18% in tandem with other NPIs. Sure, better than nothing but not data that justifies mandates.
Masks should be strongly encouraged and recommended at best. Coercion is always counter-productive and bound to not achieve results desired. No one likes to be forced to do something against their free will. That goes for anything and anyone in a free society.
As mandates, the onus is on those who impose them to prove empirically they work as well as the potential trade-offs. As recommendations, the stress of doing so is removed as we allow society to calculate the risk-reward benefits to masks thus avoiding angst and division.
The evidence, no matter how you dice it, show the latter is the more prudent and enlightened approach. Like they did in Sweden. They left it to the individual to decide whether they should wear them.
I looked up Dr. Abaluck and see he is a professor of economics. Economics is the art of obfuscation and getting any data to say what you want or exclude it as an externality or some other construct useful for deception. It is not a science just as political science is not a science. I find it preposterous that anyone could possibly think they can barge into a third world country and get people to conduct some kind of behavior for the purposes of your study and then measure accurately the result of that behavior especially for something as nebulous as covid prevalence measuring. I really wonder how many people wore those masks as they were trained to do (surely they were trained just like medical professionals get trained in ppe usage). Did they make sure they fit well? Remember all it takes is openings greater than 3.2% of total mask area and a mask filters nothing. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02786826.2020.1817846) His vaunted surgical mask never fits well with openings all around the mask, just look at people wearing them(see the interviews with industrial hygienists). So we have professionals (Industrial Hygienists) whose job is the protection of people from airborne hazard and has a mature and stable base of principles and practices for achieving this. They say cloth masks don't work for viral particles, they say surgical masks don't work either. Now we have an economist who gets a bunch of people in Bangladesh to wear masks around and measures covid rates and sees if he can find a correlation. I have an even better one to study which is analogous to masking. The State of Utah has one of the lowest rates of Covid deaths per million in the country. Most people in Utah are Mormons, Mormons wear a particular garment as a part of practicing their religion. They believe that garment protects them and I am not here to say they are wrong or demean their religion. A mask is also a garment that people wear because they think it protects them even though the people whose job it is to figure out how to protect people from breathing in bad things say they don't. So, if some other economist out there decided that he wanted to prove the Mormon garment absolutely does protect from Covid I'm sure he could; just as Dr. Abaluck went to Bangladesh and got a bunch of people to wear masks and purported to be able to glean some sketchy data saying it protected them from Covid. Bottom line, if you want some tobacco science done get an economist to do it, they are so good at getting any data to fit any theory they might come up with. A better debate would have been between Industrial Hygienist Steve Petty and the co-authors on the study who Dr Abaluck referred to as "knowing more than you about masks". Then we could get some meat into the debate, does a given mask filter out virus? Can you get people to wear them properly for long periods of time given how uncomfortable it is?
Of course you can do simplistic mechanical studies (cited by Dr. Abaluck of coughing into a petri dish masked and unmasked) that don't really study how a mask is used but that is what economists are good at citing as externalities the fact that users don't follow their strict models and so are excluded. The fact is most people wear masks as clothing and are just complying and are not going to go to the trouble of wearing these things 'properly'. They are constantly messing around with them because they are uncomfortable and so their hands are constantly contaminated as is everything they touch. This is especially true of children.
When it comes right down to it, it is everyone's right to breathe freely without obstruction. The process of respiration is not defecation. This idea of required face garment is extreme and brutal and those who push it are despots.
Long comment but solid. The one thing that jumped out at me though, and correct me if I'm wrong I'm not a scientist, but aren't petri dishes used to grow bacteria? Using the example of coughing into a petri dish masked vs not masked seems to me to be a non sequitur as viruses are not bacteria and do not behave in a similar manner especially with respect to petri dishes.
My takeaways are pretty straightforward. I have very little expertise with statistics or designing/executing/evaluating scientific studies. That disclaimer aside, it seems to me that:
1) Your point regarding the language used to characterize the results of the study in the media are well-founded. The headlines you chose were actually the somewhat less bombastic and triumphant examples that were paraded about. Words have meaning and too often have the impact of distorting perception—the gymnastics Abaluck went through in qualifying his support of the headlines you cited were very revealing.
2) The primary findings of the study seem relatively weak, especially in light of ‘symptoms’ and the huge overlap between Covid-19 and other relatively common conditions. The applicability of this study’s findings to the Covid pandemic—specifically—doesn’t seem strongly supported, especially as it relates to the question of whether or not masks reduce infection or transmission of SARS-CoV2.
3) The social aspects, especially cultural factors, seem understudied. The specifics of Bangladeshi culture, norms, behaviors, customs, etc., are only vaguely understood. Given that masking is such a socially-entwined intervention, it begs the question of extent of applicability of this study to other cultures (the US, for example). This isn’t a question that is adequately addressed, but would seem to be fairly pivotal.
Though it was a long debate, I found it very worthwhile to watch in its entirety. You, Dr. Jack, did a great job of staying cool as a cucumber and patiently (persistently) teasing out the dialogue despite his initial defensive posture. I think there was a kind of (rickety) bridge built here, which is encouraging. Thank you!
None of the masks studied are for PATHOGEN PROTECTION. I think that is all we have to say here IMO. I would ask Dr. Abaluck: were any of the masks used in the study actually graded for pathogens? The answer is simply: NO. The rest is blah blah blah. The petri dish??? Isn't that bacteria???? He mentions at the beginning the cost-benefit ratio of masking. Now, I didn't read the study, but intend to. My question is, did they actually take into account reduced immune function etc etc from masking? Was it true cost-benefit analysis? If so, what affect did this have on findings? My guess is that they didn't and it does. So again, researching for just the spread of coV-2 and not reduced health outcomes....hmmm....reminds me of another debate.
Searching out this study showed me the clear bias in the science world as compared to real critical thinking. If this study only showed a 1% decrease in symptomatic cases between cohort, I find that result a nothing burger. How are the other percentages calculated....another question for Dr. Jack.
"The proportion of individuals with COVID-like symptoms was 7.62% (N=13,273) in the
intervention arm and 8.62% (N=13,893) in the control arm. Blood samples were collected
from N=10,952 consenting, symptomatic individuals"
So 10,952 were tested......from?? and of 300,000 individuals for 5 months, only 10,952 tested positive?? Were there other treatments administered? (HCQ, Ivermectin etc). Also, how many were already immune? I have more questions than answers. Another bogus study.
I was also wondering in this huge number of people in villages in Bangladesh exactly how the study managed to prevent covid treatment variables from affecting the study. While I’m sure that’s true in other studies too and I’m willing to see that, it seems naive or disingenuous at best to think that there weren’t other factors in play.
Didnt they cluster by family group? Did they do that for the blood tests also, i.e. presume that a test of an individual represented a family group fully tested?
The only way they'll ever really be able to tell if any kind of mask has any effect on stopping transmission is to do human challenge studies where different groups of people wearing different types of masks for different lengths of time are purposely exposed to a respiratory virus (as I explain in this blog post: https://beyondspin.wordpress.com/2022/02/08/to-mask-or-not-to-mask-that-really-isnt-the-question-or-necessarily-the-solution ) . For those types of studies, you have to set aside ethical constraints....which obviously is very problematic. Otherwise all these studies, that wait for people to get infected, will always have a myriad of confounders no matter how much the researchers believe that they'e controlling for various variables. The aRR on the particular study you two are debating about isn't the slightest bit compelling, and other meta-analysis of mask studies showing rRR's of much higher rates (53%) have very weak confounded aRR's of around 0.5%. So again, not the least bit compelling. So even these RCT's are pretty much bull shiet.
If I'm getting this right, Dr. Abaluck is saying that the likelihood of any confounder in the study occurring is so low that it is pointless to consider it. Such as where another factor, like last names ends up correlating with the positive mask outcomes nearly perfectly. What you're saying is that a confounder occurring ( whatever it may be ) is far more likely than is usually assumed.
So there could be something else along with mask wearing that lead to the appearance of a statistically significant result for surgical masks. Last name ( genetics ), change in behavior of either the wearer, or the people they interact with, etc. Abaluck is saying there is virtually no chance this happened with enough overlap to the results to make it worthwhile to consider. Would that be a fair summary?
I personally find it very hard to believe that this study had the proper controls in place to make any result meaningful. There are far too many other factors involved. You would need to have both groups be so similar in nearly every aspect while at the same time conducting the study in the real world as to make the ability to do the study itself basically impossible.
James, I am sure this is important stuff that I want to know. But I will never listen to a podcast as is true of many readers here. Wrong format for us and fundamentally far to inefficient. Most sites to which I have whined have found auto-transcribers for their podcasts which, while not perfect, are good enough. They generally post the transcription with the podcast which is wonderful for all communities of learners, visual or aural.
I hope you can do this. Many of your peers on Substack do this already and it is most appreciated.
Thanks for the good things you are doing. I cannot wait to read this particular dialog, frankly.
Text does not capture behavior. You're missing a lot.
James, I understand. But I and many of my peers just do not have an hour to invest in this content -- there are only 24 hours in the day and everyone creating podcasts thinks we should watch THEIR hour. And a podcast, being aural not visual in any case, hardly gives too many behavioral cues.
I am happy to infer the behavior and to read the words. We all may miss 5% of the transactional content in the vocal intonations. But that is far better than missing 100% of it all. Just one man's opinion but shared by many of us.
It isn't worth the effort. Even with all the banning, there is plenty more than I have time for on YouTube, and YouTube not only offers captioning they also have free captioning software which Rumble et al could use if they cared enough to be bothered.
I am missing it ALL because I am hearing impaired. Your lack of concern and that generally pervading alternative sources makes me doubt your sincerity in standing up for the " little guy" since there is no guy littler than a deaf person in society.
Personally, I think it's wrong to re-order society based upon incredibly iffy science.
There is no part of the planet that experienced lower transmission of the virus based upon mask usage. That's where the rubber meets the road.
We were told the science proved that the shots stopped transmission, stopped you from catching the virus, would keep you from getting ill or dying of it in the hospital.
We now know that the pharma companies always knew those scientific "facts" were false.
We knew that lockdowns caused more harm than good, yet we destroyed tens-of-thousands of small businesses while allowing large chain grocery stores to not only operate, but to employ teenagers as bag-boys and clerks.
We allowed the scientific religionists to seize control of our nation and they do not like giving up the power.
I spent my life designing integrated circuits for everything from toys to spacecraft.
If I told clients that the device may or may not work, they'd laugh me out of the business. Now retired, I doubt that has changed.
We should never again, reorder society based upon the bogus models and bad science of these "experts".
When they say they do a cost-benefit analysis, they don't mean how will society be harmed, they mean only will the implementation of their favored thing, change the outcome of the disease progression.
That, is not the only important factor in a society. In this case it was not even the most important factor, yet we ceded control to the bureaucrats...
This was an important interview.
It convinced me that masks don't work. If this is the best research on masks, I am now firmly behind Steve Kirsch's crusade against masks.
Public health has been directed toward what is possible, mandates, masks, etc., not what will make a difference like early treatment and different protocols in the hospital.
It is fascinating to see a "scientist" go around in circles with statistics.
It's aim is Social Control, health is not a concern.
Also, those of us with hearing impairment are blocked from Rumble and all alternative video sites due to the universal unwillingness to bother captioning the videos.
Abaluck has a really good point at 17:50, "Well, hold on hold on hold on holelelelele."
His apologia for the "masks were working" headline is pure semantic illogic. If a study finds that trucks can carry logs but cars not so much, then the headline "automobiles could carry logs all along!" conveys a meaning (all automobiles can carry logs) that is contradicted by the study. "Some" ≠ "All," and "All" is the default implication of a sentence when a modifier is not added to the subject.
Sad and embarrassing that he can't see how flimsy his own counter-argument is here. But spend enough time in a cult and you forget what real debate consists of.
I was visited by a stranger with family in the FDA a few weeks ago, and the conversation went the same way. If I said severe outcomes from infection were rare, I was told to understand that that is not how I "have to think of it." The same way Abaluck thinks you are "misunderstanding" his study, as in thinking about it in a way different than how he thinks you "have to think about it."
It's a train wreck, really - hard to keep watching. I hope he gets around to specifying what the denominator was for the seropositive rate.
Hey hey, don’t step too hard on him. He’s under immense pressure to prove his points. Didn’t you see how nervous he was? I’m not being totally sarc here although I admit to a tiny bit.
First, if masks really work, the true tests should simply be engineering, those tests have been done. Dr LW made enough good points I don’t have to. We all know virion size vs mask opening size just simply doesn’t work (except P100’s and above) plus poor sealing and voila. The only efficacy I personally see is stopping outright spittle and mucous, not aerosolized. Dr Bridle in Canada has also remarked on that.
But why in heavens name was he so nervous? Who pays him? Poor thing. He’s a scientist who’s only income is from those who MUST prove or force prove the narrative of “masking, vaccines and social distancing” work.
So what if masks work somewhat? To my mind that’s much like “c19 vaccines work.... somewhat”. Sure they do. Not joking. They DO work..... somewhat. But this dude was dead set on nervously demanding that his study proved masks work. Again, to what end and with what motive must we “believe”. I’m a Christian. I understand faith. But I am not in the Covid19 cult. This guy is. He’s pushing the doctrine. Fortunately he wasn’t so much of an acolyte to not acknowledge a few flaws and confounding variables but his nervousness betrayed him. He’s trying desperately hard to hold on to a belief and to prove his (and his funders) hypothesis despite proof against.
I personally found his defense of cloth masks to be laughable.
On a positive note: I went to local big grocery store last night and, at least in Texas (hooray for this), we’ve shamed the mask wearers. I think even our local school may have finally taken the rule off. I saw some signs of easing. Haven’t checked since I don’t have kids.
Sorry Dr LW, I didn’t have the stomach to watch the whole thing, did ya’ll discuss (1) what happens when masks get dirty and (2) hypoxia due to masking. I.e. risk vs reward? (3) The toxicity of the chemicals in surgical and N95s?
The only way they'll ever really be able to tell if any kind of mask has any effect on stopping transmission is to do human challenge studies where different groups of people wearing different types of masks for different lengths of time are purposely exposed to a respiratory virus (as I explain in this blog post: https://beyondspin.wordpress.com/2022/02/08/to-mask-or-not-to-mask-that-really-isnt-the-question-or-necessarily-the-solution ) . For those types of studies, you have to set aside ethical constraints....which obviously is very problematic. Otherwise all these studies, that wait for people to get infected, will always have a myriad of confounders no matter how much the researchers believe that they'e controlling for various variables. The aRR on the particular study you two are debating about isn't the slightest bit compelling, and other meta-analysis of mask studies showing rRR's of much higher rates (53%) have very weak confounded aRR's of around 0.5%. So again, not the least bit compelling. So even these RCT's are pretty much bull shiet.
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I read one like that back at the beginning. It was a small cohort, but it was a complete study and it did show no significant difference.
I forget who published it, but they made the author's withdraw it, and refused to let them re submit.
Sorry I don't have details but it has been a lot of info since then and I should have made a written note at the time.
For insight into Abaluck's nervousness, you have to consider the study design, which was structured around the effect of treatment (masking and distancing promotion) on behavior (masking and distancing). He and his team never set out to generate the official "proof" that masks "work," only to look at how they could make people wear more masks. But his study has been elevated to the official proof and so now he must toe the line and say that the study's super-weak evidence for an effect on transmission is worth crafting policy over, or else be thrown into the Science Village Volcano.
Thanks for your reply. He’s self justifying. Yes. But thanks for your well worded synopsis of his obvious angst.
How do C19 vaccines work “somewhat?” How are infections/deaths rising in majority vaxxed countries? You have a weird definition of “somewhat”
I mean they do “somewhat” and for a very limited period of time stimulate the production of antibodies to spike. I personally think the vaccines (mRNA and Viral Vector especially) will be proven, eventually, to be harmful to every single person who took them. So far we have not seen complete evidence that is always the case. God made some pretty amazing bodies. (Or some got saline? I’m not completely sure how far down the rabbit hole I’d like to go on the saline issue. I definitely believe most politicos got saline.)
It boggles my mind, having read what Dr LW has written, what Dr Henrion Caude (France) has stated (I think that was in a Planet Lockdown, still available on Rumble if I recall, highly recommend!) and Dr Yeadon and Dr Malone have said, that so FEW people have shown signs of great harm.
So if you think I was saying they are helpful, no. Simply reiterating the fact they DO produce certain limited results doesnt mean I’m in the vax camp. I’m in the control group. Haven’t even had c19 itself.
That’s fair… but I still contest that I don’t trust anything the “experts” say. Do I think they have harmed A LOT of people? Yes, I have direct, albeit anecdotal evidence they are very harmful. I’ve never met someone with Bella Palsy in my life… certainly not a seemingly health 20 year old that suddenly develops it. Or my sister in law that had to have clots removed from both hemispheres of her brain after suffering strokes. I have a few other work examples that I could cite. This is out of roughy 120-140 vaccinated people…. That’s insane. I, too, am currently in the control group and will always be LoL!
I would also add that “somewhat” should means it works a certain percentage of time, not FOR a certain percentage of time… big difference.
Agree. And I’m very sorry for your sister-in-law.
I also would point you to the
https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/930-athlete-cardiac-arrests-serious?s=r
Not that you sound like you need anymore proof but: He or she did a great job compiling the list.
I’m keeping that in backup. It’s crazy. Did you see the 14 tennis players backing out of a major tournament recently? He put that on this list too. It’s crazy.
So sad… the Italian world class swimmer that died this past week. There is simply too many incidents for it to be coincidence and it is absolutely insane that all the MSM are silent. My SIL’s doctors didn’t mention the vaccine either… they diagnosed her with Moyamoya disease…. Guess what I found in the 9 page listing of adverse events in Pfizer’s clinical trial data? It’s in alpha order, easy to find.
Addendum: watch for signs of ALS, Parkinson’s, dementia, MS. Anything brain or neuro. ESP conditions caused by demyelination. I work for eye docs. We are seeing a small uptick but it’s not insignificant. I haven’t seen Bells Palsy yet but we’ve seen it in the past because it can cause dry eye (muscles in face are paralyzed) and sometimes causes other eye issues. But we have recently seen one case of probable MS in a very young person, a resurgence of brain cancer in another young person, a really weird Neuro condition that might have been preexisting in a young person (could not tell for the life of me but that person was jabbed, I confirmed that), I saw one other in a young lady who told me directly “the doctors haven’t been able to figure it out”. I can’t remember her exact condition or symptoms but I do know it involved sight diminishing. I’ve also heard of many older people who cancelled their appointments due to “being in the hospital” and/or just having had a heart attack and one had sudden onset dementia. While the latter older ones aren’t red flags (age), there seem to be excessive numbers of them.
Hi Laura J,
i was just going thru the comments for this post and came across your comment so thought you would like to know that:
'COVID vaccines have likely caused over 25,000 new cases of multiple sclerosis (MS)'
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/covid-vaccines-have-likely-caused
Also, it's proven that the LNP's aka 'Lipid Nano Particles' pass through the blood brain barrier and rewrite the cell's RNA to produce the spikey toxic spike protein which gets embedded in the lining of the endothelium blood vessels all over the body/brain and attack the heart and cause auto immune reaction such that the Tcells end up attacking the spike protein and this doesn't end after after a few weeks or months or even a few years.
What a disaster having had to suffer through 2 + years of a slow recovery from one jab in Feb 2021 and still having some issues.
It is a big difference, but both statements appear to be true.
Somewhat is that they do appear to block the virus for a brief window post injection, and the window briefly reopens after each booster.
Some masks do have Graphene, it says so on the box.
I bet it isn't healthy to breathe, either.
Wonder what it's for?
"Somewhat"? No. Not even a little. Making antibodies to a specific "self-expressed" "designer peptide" does not protect you from any virus. From Moderna's DENIED patent application (USPTO): "These arguments are persuasive to the extent that an antigenic peptide stimulates an immune response that may produce antibodies that bind to a specific peptide or protein BUT IT IS NOT PERSUASIVE IN REGARDS TO A VACCINE. (emphasis added) The immune response produced by a vaccine must be more than merely some immune response, but MUST ALSO BE PROTECTIVE." This Moderna application was denied way before the EUAs and gov/media-induced mass panic steamrolled the process into re-labeling them vaccines -- thereby opening a fraudulent window for use. As we have seen, the countries with the highest vaccination rates have the highest hospitalization, death (all-cause) and infection. This is black and white. There is no somewhat. Give them no quarter. We're not even talking safety (which is abysmal) -- just efficacy -- which is a joke. Absolute risk reduction is statistically insignificant. Not even "somewhat" significant.
I guess I hadn’t seen this. What date is on this patent denial?
Dr Abaluck's "science" is summed up perfectly, by him, at 06:15. "uuuuummmmmmyeah".
The study shows that mask do virtually nothing for this application, as have virtually ALL studies for, um, several decades. Period.
43:00 He seems evasive on the issue I wanted the most clarification on. But the paper has been updated with more detail since I first read it. It seems that "Baseline symptomatic seropositivity" was the positivity rate among symptom+ responders on the week 0 survey. But then is it the same people being tested at follow-up, and what kind of valid conclusion can be made from that comparison anyway? It's still the messiest part of the paper and the only one that "supports" any conclusions about efficacy vs SARS-CoV-2 as opposed to efficacy against "saying you feel sick on a survey."
If the "baseline" is a symptom+ group then the difference in follow-up should be huge regardless of the intervention, because most symptom+ will be pre-IgG-seroconversion. So it doesn't really matter if the treatment made a difference here because the signal is way too weak. This was my guess before the video and remains my guess now. There were very low case rates in Bangladesh during the study period (rolling from November 2020 to March 2021) so they were measuring a whole lot of nothing.
32:30 Here he's trying to have+eat his cake. A clear association between effect and treatment wouldn't rule out an indirect effect (i.e. from behavior changes). But he backs off before tripping up.
33:30 "Particles in the universe" lol. One obvious possible non-controlled confounder is listed in the study text, "We also do not yet have data on distance to nearby city." Matching was based on case rates in June/July 2020 and wouldn't ensure equal case rates in Nov-March, and wouldn't address changes in seropositivity driven by work migration anyway. The number of seasonal urban workers returning to or leaving villages could have driven differences in seropositivity by adding / depleting donors who got infected in Dhaka / Chittagong (where previously-reported seropositivity rates were very high). This isn't even necessarily distance-based.
I think Jason did a good job of defending his position. My takeaway was that there was some, but little benefit to masking, but it was hard to tell the degree because the controls were not as aggressive as desirable. Sounds like more studies are needed. That said, his call for the less knowledgeable to accept the consensus belied his remark that he did not take either side in the argument and simply sought the truth. I suspect he was biased going in and there is a good likelihood that skewed his work in interpreting some of the study areas with weaker controls.
This interview was challenging to listen to. There was so much interrupting and talking over that it wasted time and took away from the value of the debate.
I listened to it while driving, otherwise would have given up. I need to go to the actual study now to see what was being debated. I did learn a lot though. As always thank you James.
My impression.
This showed how easy ti can be to misrepresent a study. So many factors and considerations go into building a viable study. Dr. Abaluck's study was a huge under taking and is to be commended for it. But his defensive posture made it difficult to listen to even if he was making a valid point. This suggests he had some kind of preconceived notion about how it would go down. Had he let his guard down he would have made his points more effectively to layman's like me because he's clearly competent. Still, he deserves credit coming on to discuss it. We need more of these debates.
That all being said. I'm not convinced masks work.
When I was a stock broker I'd hear all sorts of reasons and explanations form a company justifying their quarterly results. Or read about why a company posted a result but we needed to read the details. For sure, that was at times necessary but at the end of the day I asked a simple question, despite all the qualifications, do you make money? Are you profitable? Yes? No? Science has p-value, investments P/E multiple. And like Abaluck expressed not being a fan of p-value, there were investors who took P/E with a grain of salt or at least cautioned interpreting data based on it alone.
I apply the same thing here with the masks. I note that it's the rule and not the exception that data shows masks have marginal benefits. Yet, we always have to hear about caveats. Bottom line is do they work or not?
As for my impression of the types of masks, cloth masks are akin to t-shirts around our mouths. Useless. So enough of this cloth nonsense. As for surgical masks, we've had decades worth of studies - in both hospital and community settings - that showed they're ineffective. The talk about N-95 is also somewhat misplaced because they're simply not feasible in community settings. I wore those in construction and you'd better change them every coupe of hours....
(con'ed)
So it's ludicrous to even suggest these for mass community wearing. Never mind about costs. These things are expensive. What are you going to do? Tell people to buy four masks per day at $6 a pop? Some semblance of practicality here please.
I also notice where past studies (1920-2019) never qualified their studies with 'masks are essential but our data shows insignificant results'. Yet, we see a lot of this post-2020.
And we never seem to talk about the psychological and physical trade-offs to masks. These are more useful to ensure people are reminded there's a virus out there than actually preventing anything. They will not protect you from getting sick. Any industrial hygienist or PPE expert will tell you this. Moreover, Health Canada issued recalls on a couple of occasions due to the toxicity of masks. But we allowed kids to wear them anyway for little benefit for a demographic least in danger. But that's another topic.
That all being said, the bottom line is does the evidence back up MANDATES for masks? It would appear to me culling and perusing over the data the answer is a clear no. That they could, kinda, maybe, sorta doesn't cut it for me. .03 is .03 and that's marginal period. Common sense has to kick in here.
At best, we've seen studies say they can help cut transmission by 10%-18% in tandem with other NPIs. Sure, better than nothing but not data that justifies mandates.
Masks should be strongly encouraged and recommended at best. Coercion is always counter-productive and bound to not achieve results desired. No one likes to be forced to do something against their free will. That goes for anything and anyone in a free society.
As mandates, the onus is on those who impose them to prove empirically they work as well as the potential trade-offs. As recommendations, the stress of doing so is removed as we allow society to calculate the risk-reward benefits to masks thus avoiding angst and division.
The evidence, no matter how you dice it, show the latter is the more prudent and enlightened approach. Like they did in Sweden. They left it to the individual to decide whether they should wear them.
I looked up Dr. Abaluck and see he is a professor of economics. Economics is the art of obfuscation and getting any data to say what you want or exclude it as an externality or some other construct useful for deception. It is not a science just as political science is not a science. I find it preposterous that anyone could possibly think they can barge into a third world country and get people to conduct some kind of behavior for the purposes of your study and then measure accurately the result of that behavior especially for something as nebulous as covid prevalence measuring. I really wonder how many people wore those masks as they were trained to do (surely they were trained just like medical professionals get trained in ppe usage). Did they make sure they fit well? Remember all it takes is openings greater than 3.2% of total mask area and a mask filters nothing. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02786826.2020.1817846) His vaunted surgical mask never fits well with openings all around the mask, just look at people wearing them(see the interviews with industrial hygienists). So we have professionals (Industrial Hygienists) whose job is the protection of people from airborne hazard and has a mature and stable base of principles and practices for achieving this. They say cloth masks don't work for viral particles, they say surgical masks don't work either. Now we have an economist who gets a bunch of people in Bangladesh to wear masks around and measures covid rates and sees if he can find a correlation. I have an even better one to study which is analogous to masking. The State of Utah has one of the lowest rates of Covid deaths per million in the country. Most people in Utah are Mormons, Mormons wear a particular garment as a part of practicing their religion. They believe that garment protects them and I am not here to say they are wrong or demean their religion. A mask is also a garment that people wear because they think it protects them even though the people whose job it is to figure out how to protect people from breathing in bad things say they don't. So, if some other economist out there decided that he wanted to prove the Mormon garment absolutely does protect from Covid I'm sure he could; just as Dr. Abaluck went to Bangladesh and got a bunch of people to wear masks and purported to be able to glean some sketchy data saying it protected them from Covid. Bottom line, if you want some tobacco science done get an economist to do it, they are so good at getting any data to fit any theory they might come up with. A better debate would have been between Industrial Hygienist Steve Petty and the co-authors on the study who Dr Abaluck referred to as "knowing more than you about masks". Then we could get some meat into the debate, does a given mask filter out virus? Can you get people to wear them properly for long periods of time given how uncomfortable it is?
Of course you can do simplistic mechanical studies (cited by Dr. Abaluck of coughing into a petri dish masked and unmasked) that don't really study how a mask is used but that is what economists are good at citing as externalities the fact that users don't follow their strict models and so are excluded. The fact is most people wear masks as clothing and are just complying and are not going to go to the trouble of wearing these things 'properly'. They are constantly messing around with them because they are uncomfortable and so their hands are constantly contaminated as is everything they touch. This is especially true of children.
When it comes right down to it, it is everyone's right to breathe freely without obstruction. The process of respiration is not defecation. This idea of required face garment is extreme and brutal and those who push it are despots.
Long comment but solid. The one thing that jumped out at me though, and correct me if I'm wrong I'm not a scientist, but aren't petri dishes used to grow bacteria? Using the example of coughing into a petri dish masked vs not masked seems to me to be a non sequitur as viruses are not bacteria and do not behave in a similar manner especially with respect to petri dishes.
Har. Economics, the dismal science.
My takeaways are pretty straightforward. I have very little expertise with statistics or designing/executing/evaluating scientific studies. That disclaimer aside, it seems to me that:
1) Your point regarding the language used to characterize the results of the study in the media are well-founded. The headlines you chose were actually the somewhat less bombastic and triumphant examples that were paraded about. Words have meaning and too often have the impact of distorting perception—the gymnastics Abaluck went through in qualifying his support of the headlines you cited were very revealing.
2) The primary findings of the study seem relatively weak, especially in light of ‘symptoms’ and the huge overlap between Covid-19 and other relatively common conditions. The applicability of this study’s findings to the Covid pandemic—specifically—doesn’t seem strongly supported, especially as it relates to the question of whether or not masks reduce infection or transmission of SARS-CoV2.
3) The social aspects, especially cultural factors, seem understudied. The specifics of Bangladeshi culture, norms, behaviors, customs, etc., are only vaguely understood. Given that masking is such a socially-entwined intervention, it begs the question of extent of applicability of this study to other cultures (the US, for example). This isn’t a question that is adequately addressed, but would seem to be fairly pivotal.
Though it was a long debate, I found it very worthwhile to watch in its entirety. You, Dr. Jack, did a great job of staying cool as a cucumber and patiently (persistently) teasing out the dialogue despite his initial defensive posture. I think there was a kind of (rickety) bridge built here, which is encouraging. Thank you!
None of the masks studied are for PATHOGEN PROTECTION. I think that is all we have to say here IMO. I would ask Dr. Abaluck: were any of the masks used in the study actually graded for pathogens? The answer is simply: NO. The rest is blah blah blah. The petri dish??? Isn't that bacteria???? He mentions at the beginning the cost-benefit ratio of masking. Now, I didn't read the study, but intend to. My question is, did they actually take into account reduced immune function etc etc from masking? Was it true cost-benefit analysis? If so, what affect did this have on findings? My guess is that they didn't and it does. So again, researching for just the spread of coV-2 and not reduced health outcomes....hmmm....reminds me of another debate.
Searching out this study showed me the clear bias in the science world as compared to real critical thinking. If this study only showed a 1% decrease in symptomatic cases between cohort, I find that result a nothing burger. How are the other percentages calculated....another question for Dr. Jack.
"The proportion of individuals with COVID-like symptoms was 7.62% (N=13,273) in the
intervention arm and 8.62% (N=13,893) in the control arm. Blood samples were collected
from N=10,952 consenting, symptomatic individuals"
So 10,952 were tested......from?? and of 300,000 individuals for 5 months, only 10,952 tested positive?? Were there other treatments administered? (HCQ, Ivermectin etc). Also, how many were already immune? I have more questions than answers. Another bogus study.
https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf
I was also wondering in this huge number of people in villages in Bangladesh exactly how the study managed to prevent covid treatment variables from affecting the study. While I’m sure that’s true in other studies too and I’m willing to see that, it seems naive or disingenuous at best to think that there weren’t other factors in play.
Didnt they cluster by family group? Did they do that for the blood tests also, i.e. presume that a test of an individual represented a family group fully tested?
The only way they'll ever really be able to tell if any kind of mask has any effect on stopping transmission is to do human challenge studies where different groups of people wearing different types of masks for different lengths of time are purposely exposed to a respiratory virus (as I explain in this blog post: https://beyondspin.wordpress.com/2022/02/08/to-mask-or-not-to-mask-that-really-isnt-the-question-or-necessarily-the-solution ) . For those types of studies, you have to set aside ethical constraints....which obviously is very problematic. Otherwise all these studies, that wait for people to get infected, will always have a myriad of confounders no matter how much the researchers believe that they'e controlling for various variables. The aRR on the particular study you two are debating about isn't the slightest bit compelling, and other meta-analysis of mask studies showing rRR's of much higher rates (53%) have very weak confounded aRR's of around 0.5%. So again, not the least bit compelling. So even these RCT's are pretty much bull shiet.
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If I'm getting this right, Dr. Abaluck is saying that the likelihood of any confounder in the study occurring is so low that it is pointless to consider it. Such as where another factor, like last names ends up correlating with the positive mask outcomes nearly perfectly. What you're saying is that a confounder occurring ( whatever it may be ) is far more likely than is usually assumed.
So there could be something else along with mask wearing that lead to the appearance of a statistically significant result for surgical masks. Last name ( genetics ), change in behavior of either the wearer, or the people they interact with, etc. Abaluck is saying there is virtually no chance this happened with enough overlap to the results to make it worthwhile to consider. Would that be a fair summary?
I personally find it very hard to believe that this study had the proper controls in place to make any result meaningful. There are far too many other factors involved. You would need to have both groups be so similar in nearly every aspect while at the same time conducting the study in the real world as to make the ability to do the study itself basically impossible.
So I assume that Dr. Abaluck did not get the $1 million.
IMHO he's too defensive and overly animated with some responses which kinda shows maybe he doesn't even believe what's in the study. Too emotional.
Thanks so much for making this information available!