A big thanks to co-authors, @sameo416.bsky.social@juliamwright.bsky.social@jmcrookston.bsky.social@dfisman.bsky.social and Corinna Nielson.
Just updated our preprint assessing the 2022 study that claimed medical masks to be noninferior to N95s for COVID. In addition to issues identified previously, a closer examination of the data revealed unexpected patterns unlikely to occur in nature: osf.io/preprints/me...
So apropos of absolutely nothing I asked Perplexity AI what the worst medical error of all time was, and how it relates to the WHO's failure to recognize airborne transmission of COVID. Even the machines know what's up. Link to results (with references): www.perplexity.ai/search/What-...
The whole airborne thing for sars-2 has been pretty depressing, and WHO still seems to be spending ink, capital, and resources to allow a small group of old men to attain plausible deniability. That said:
It would be wrong to see this as just a prudish or Victorian or even sincerely religious attitude about sex. It’s about control. It’s about the authority of the state intruding into more and more parts of life, and about making more and more people complicit in the abuse of power. /1
They don't even work for doctors. Just stepping stones for a few political types, on their way to bigger and better things - while the actual health care workers they sold out get long COVID and burn out trying to hold healthcare together. Integrity requires this: www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-s...
IMO the biggest problem that medicine faces is that it consistently picks the worst human beings in the profession for leadership roles. The second biggest is culture, and the collusion that enables the harm those leaders do. Cheers to those fighting back! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Like a hammer, RCTs can be effective tools under the right circumstances. But not everything is a nail. 🧵
So all a trial that finds otherwise at the community level can tell us is that the team running the trial did not choose and effectively communicate appropriate protocols for their use. There is no magical property of RCTs that can change that fact.
With adequate training, workers in a broad range of industries know from experience that they are quite capable of wearing their PPE consistently. And a well-fitting N95 can stop transmission - at this point all but the most fanatical airborne-deniers have accepted that fact.