[JustTheNews] As public and private institutions resume or consider mask mandates in the wake of a small uptick in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants, an international research collaborative funded by the National Institutes of Health is facing new scrutiny for how it came to publicly downplay its 17 years of research finding that masks make "little to no difference."
U.K-based nonprofit Cochrane, often described as the "gold standard" of evidence-based medicine, heavily redacted its internal discussions on how to respond to questions about alleged conflicts of interest that may have shaped its March statement deeming the systematic review's results "inconclusive" without changing its content.
It turned over largely unreadable documents to former Senate Finance Committee investigator Paul Thacker, now an independent journalist, in response to his request for the "personal data" Cochrane holds on Thacker under Article 15 of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
The State Department did roughly the same in a Freedom of Information Act production in August, prompted by litigation. It heavily redacted discussions of how to respond to reporters asking about its funding of a group that tries to starve conservative publishers of ad revenue.
"They have no justification" for the redactions, Thacker told Just the News, asking rhetorically why Congress wasn't scrutinizing a taxpayer-funded organization whose mask research — or perception thereof — has played a pivotal role in U.S. policy. Cochrane says it has received £500K to 1 million from NIH.
Cochrane spokesperson Harry Dayantis said it was "usually illegal" to disclose information "about individuals other than the requester" under this "very specific and limited type of request," pointing Just the News to the U.K. Information Commissioner's office.
The Cochrane systematic review, which has evaluated masking first against influenza and then COVID since 2006, posed a problem for the federal government’s ongoing pro-mask guidance, but so does an increasing body of research that questions whether sustained mask use is benign.
Then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told Congress the Cochrane study was suspect because it relied on randomized controlled trials rather than the observational evidence the CDC favors, but she also inaccurately claimed Cochrane had "retracted" it. The House Appropriations Committee later fixed the hearing record at the authors' request.
#1
Early on the simple facts quickly & flatly disproved the ability of the masks sold to the general public be effective. Simply using the CDC and other COVID-19 Information sites we learned the Virus was much smaller than those masks were design to filter at.
Depending who is providing data.
The diameter of the virus has been found to range between 50 nanometers to 140 nanometers. Typical Paper and cotton masks filter at 300 to 600nm.
At best the masks reduce the droplet travel distance by infected persons to 12ft +, or 2x for the designated social distancing.
COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) 0.1-0.5μm
A sneeze pushes particles thru typical public used paper masks at about 1.5m per 0.4 sec. and can float depending on the disburst environment as long at 10 to 45+/- sec.
ref: a handful of Laser / infrared based R&D studies like "RCAM", "Researchgate" and others
Conclusion:Updated evidence suggests that masks may be associated with a small reduction in risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in community settings. Surgical masks and N95 respirators may be associated with similar infection risk in routine patient care settings, but a beneficial effect of N95 respirators cannot be ruled out.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/07/2023 10:13 Comments ||
Top||
#5
And if that's not wobbly enough for you, consider the limitations of the study:
Few randomized trials, studies had methodological limitations and some imprecision, suboptimal adherence and pragmatic aspects of randomized trials potentially attenuated benefits, very limited evidence on harms, uncertain applicability to Omicron variant predominant era, meta-analysis not done due to heterogeneity, unable to formally assess for publication bias, and restricted to English-language articles.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/07/2023 10:15 Comments ||
Top||
#6
I expect some big leftist political donors have not yet recouped their investments in personal protection gear and pharma stocks. So, there will be efforts to renew "mandates" for masks and vaccines.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
09/07/2023 10:43 Comments ||
Top||
#7
We've been assured that the only source of truth is a double blind, placebo controlled study. Never mind that medicine has made great progress in the past without these. The net effect is that only governments and huge corporations can proclaim what is true, because only they can fund these studies.
#8
There are too many corrupt yahoos to put them all in jail. Maybe we can dump them in a swath of Alaska and just jail the ones that make it through winter. Someone can round them up in the spring after the bears wake up and snack.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/07/2023 20:30 Comments ||
Top||
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
09/07/2023 12:28 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Joe never discussed business with Hunter, but those discussions are covered by executive privilege. That would better if Robert Peters was president.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/07/2023 20:14 Comments ||
Top||
[RT] Helping Kiev means weakening "strategic adversary" Russia, Senator Mitch McConnell has said
The US Congress should approve an additional $20 billion in funding for Ukraine, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday. The Republican senator from Kentucky argued that the aid provided by Washington to Kiev has been weakening Moscow "without firing a shot." Yep. Their defense industry is growing (I've actually seen adds in my mom's Russiaan language Israeli newspaper for people who used to work in Russian defense - and not just defence - industry). Their unemployment goes down. And their ties with China are strengthening.
I guess, they never heard about "not waking up a sleeping bear" in Kentucky.
Posted by: Grom the Reflective ||
09/07/2023 04:08 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
E-Mail||
[14 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
A sad day when Mitch McConnell is a "top Republican."
#2
Ah, but shots are being fired and people are dying by the untold thousands. Mitch must think that's OK as long as they're only Russians and Ukrainians.
Last night I was watching a TV show about famous American mobsters like Al Capone and Dutch Schultz who could murder people in cold blood and not think twice about it, without ever the slightest twinge of guilt. How are Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell any different?
They must think that somehow America gains some strategic benefit from "weakening Russia" but they don't say what it is. I sure as hell don't see how it benefits me to have that kind of chaos and instability in the world.
Hitler and Napoleon thought they would weaken Russia too but it didn't work out that way, did it?
And never mind that Joe has sent upwards of a hundred billion dollars to fund all this bloodshed with billions more to come and no light at the end of the tunnel. But it kinda makes me wonder, with our own economy in such a shambles and our latest wunderwaffen getting burned, who is being weakened?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/07/2023 13:04 Comments ||
Top||
#3
The US Federal GIVERNMENT is the disaster; give us relief. Shut it down. We will not miss it. The terrible things they say will happen, will not happen; the world and people will adjust.
#2
I don't see anything inconsistent about liberal places getting what they voted for - good and hard, of course. I just wish somehow the rest of us could elect people who will make sure we who did not vote for it don't have to pay for it.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
09/07/2023 10:36 Comments ||
Top||
#3
/\ Other than the cardio to and from the polling place, why have I concluded 'voting' no longer matters ?
#6
He's worried about the 110,000 colonists New York has accumulated todate.
What about the same number arriving in a year to southern Texas, Arizona and New Mexico areas that have only a small percentage of the Big Apple's resources?
Oh, wait. Those are flyover areas.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
09/07/2023 12:29 Comments ||
Top||
#7
Other than the cardio to and from the polling place, why have I concluded 'voting' no longer matters ?
And with Mail-In and Thumb Drive voting, don't even need that, other than CosPlay.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
