You shouldn't be surprised by human behavior. This is well into what is considered functional mental illness; anxiety. Those who are obsessive with fitness, generally have a high level of anxiety about their health before the pandemic and it came out in a variety of ways. Now it comes out for some with masks. My neighbor is a hypochondriac, she still wears a mask everywhere she goes and still tries to get everyone around her to accept her fears and wear masks. Before the pandemic it was EMFs coming from the building next door which houses some communication servers. Then it was mold in the basement. Masks are nothing more than visible evidence of anxiety disorders at this point. And yes, public health officials created this.
Masks remain the security blanket for those with clinical anxiety although for some real dummies it is still about being virtuous. For me, the most disappointing part of this mess, is the failure of our public health officials. They jumped in to drive the bus early on and instead of conveying that they had no clue where to go, they drove on with conviction down an unknown road and just kept going and going. Some of us could see the bus was going to nowhere fast and we got off to live our lives. But the bus drivers just kept driving, no longer talking to anyone, refusing to tell them in clear words that it’s time to get off. So they just continue riding along on the bus. God only knows how long.
I see children with the full Covid series, who just got Covid, whose parents ask me how long after the infection they should wait before getting the kid a booster..
I see 2 year olds glued to their tablets every time I go out to eat..
I see parents insist to me that their recent divorce has nothing at all to do with little Johnny’s sudden behavioral issues at school, that they talked to him about it and he completely understands why dad doesn’t come home anymore…
I could go on… point being, there’s a whole lot of crazy out there and only so much time. I get not delving into it in public.
You didn't spend near enough time probing around at the busy CIDRAP web site because you could have (a) Listened to the most recent weekly Mike Osterholm Podcast and/or (b) Visited the attached SWAG SHOP to purchase (at stunningly high prices) various kinds of truly awful logo junk --- coffee mugs, flimsy tee shirts, stickers, and my favorite item: a plastic, maroon ballpoint pen for 9.95 $ that, honestly, looks to be worth maybe 75 cents on a good day. Some of this crap -- believe it or not -- prominently displays the name of CIDRAP's Big Cigar, an epidemiologist and Regents Professor who is seen often in national media coverage of assorted "pandemic policy experts". It's bad enough that the University of Minnesota has a sketchy football record practically every year, but then this CIDRAP thing emerged from the muck along with its online junk emporium. I'm ashamed and embarrassed, both as an alumnus (MD 1975) and retired professor of surgery in our medical school.
I have been writing about this since Spring 2020. The First Lie was the Worst Lie -- telling people that masks work when they do not (even the N95 cases are very, very limited and this week a decent RCT was published showing N95s no better than surgical masks which we know do not work https://doi.org/10.7326/M22-1966) was the first lie to see if people would be compliant. Fauci noted under oath a few days ago that he had no scientific rationale for changing his mind and going against decades of studies that showed virtually no masking value -- he just did.
It is why I get so passionate about masking. It rapidly became more than a "personal choice" -- it became a badge (mostly of stupidity, but those wearing them did not know it) and a totem and an indicator that "I am a government complier and against Orange Man Bad".
Until more of the medical community stands up and yells loudly about this, the First Lie will continue to haunt us all.
Living in Singapore, I see the masks inside and out in roaring heat and in glacial air conditioning. Although no longer mandatory other than on buses and trains, it seems that many Singaporeans are now more comfortable wearing them no matter the situation. It's pure conditioning.
I don’t always agree with you Vinay, but on this one I am TOTALLY in your camp! People of all economic and social standing have lost their minds, and quite likely for a myriad of reasons...(but we don’t need to go into that at the moment). It is especially prevalent here in coastal CA. I live clear down on the other end of CA from you...by the US-Mexico border, but I see the masking nonsense/insanity going on down here, also.
A couple of nights ago I was out in my front yard around 8 PM putting up the last of some Christmas lights. Two people walked by with hoods up and masks on, one trailing a good 6 feet behind the other. One of the two people spoke to me, and I realized it was some neighbors (a middle aged, long married couple) who live around the corner from me. The wife spoke to me first, then the husband said that they weren’t being “all lovey-dovey, holding hands”, (as they are sometimes want to be on their neighborhood walks), then the wife the wife chimed in “because he has Covid”!
I told them it didn’t matter that they weren’t walking together because they live in same house and share the same bed!
(But now that I think of it, likely the husband was relegated to a separate bedroom.)
Some background on these folks...the husband runs a ‘research lab’ up at UCSD in La Jolla. Due to the university of California policy that requires ‘Covid vaxxes & boosters’ for staff, professors, and students, this couple has got the ‘Covid Vaxx’ and the attendant ‘boosters’. And now the husband has COVID! Go figure...and they are out talking a walk at 8 PM at night with masks on in SoCA because they don’t want to give it to the other spouse, nor heaven help them give ‘something’ to me (from 10 feet away), as they walked by! These are reasonably intelligent, ‘science/research’ oriented people. (Or they used to be.) WTF is all I can say.
Mass psychosis indeed. It's crazy-making for the rest of us who haven't (yet) lost our minds. For me, I just feel compassion for the jabbed and move on with my life.
Vinay, thanks for sharing your observations. Your problem, reinforced in medical school, is the belief that heath behaviors reflect rational decision-making. Yes, virtue signaling, misinformation and anxiety all contribute to irrational health behaviors and always will. You and I as members of the medical profession must continue to educate and ask our leaders, educators, members of the media and others to keep emphasizing the known truths while remaining truly humble about the unknowns. Our fellow citizens want us to be honest and transparent but also humble. I read more criticisms of my comments by fellow readers who presume that I desire to impose my expertise on others without qualification. I sincerely try not to.
Vinay, you’re my ultimate hero, the smartest, bravest, most articulate person I have come across in my er...70 years. However I was immediately derailed when you posted “an attractive 20 year old”. Would just love to see the day we stop labeling people accorded to their looks which to a large extent many have no control. It only reminds me how important being attractive is to professionals though it would not have changed the content if you would have left out “attractive”. Am I being nitpicking...probably.
The mask religion is absolutely fascinating. I predict future metaverse archaeologists will pinpoint this Nov 2020 post [1] from Katelyn Jetelina aka Your Local Epidemiologist as the catalyst for mask hysteria infecting rational people. Here, she unwittingly got "Gish Galloped" by presenting 85 poor studies as conclusive evidence that masks work, noting "I’m not entirely sure why the efficacy of mask use is still up for discussion".
From that point forward, any attempt to question how invisible particles, only discovered because something bypassed chamberland filters after Germ Theory discovered, which require electron microscopes to even see, could somehow be deterred by fabric resulted in a "mic drop" of YLE's 85 studies collection.
I can understand why the average person - even highly educated people - would assume that 85 studies showing positive effect MUST be conclusive evidence. You can't expect anyone to actually go through, study by study, and judge the results dispassionately, right?
Well, I did [2], and what we had was the standard collection of mannequin studies, models, HARKING, and promotion of papers without their corresponding retraction requests. [3]
Any study which didn't find mask efficacy was conveniently excluded from the 85. In evaluating pseudoscience we call this "counting your hits but forgetting your misses".
I don't blame YLE, as apparently she just copy-pasted from the ironically named twitter user @nuanceORDEATH [4] and didn't take the time to vet her sources. Otherwise, she might have noticed, for example, that entries #10 and #17 are identical papers from Mueller et al, or, noticed how it would include a Meta Analysis, then double dip to include the studies from the Meta which favored masks, then exclude any from the Meta which disfavored Masks. [5]
Had she or anyone cross-posting this applied some skepticism at such an extraordinary claim, they might have noticed that the further down the pyramid of evidence you go, the stronger the evidence, which should indicate these studies have bias built in and are breaking at least 2 of the Mertonian Norms. That RCTs struggle to find any signal without resorting to presenting small absolute differences into large relative ratios while Mannequins and Models manage to find masks make incredible differences should put to rest any question that "the science" is NOT dispassionate, is not interested in rigor. For Christ's sake the CDC honestly published this. [6]
Note how only studies which don't back masks do people suddenly be concerned with the quality of the study. The hilariously bad Kansas Mask Study gets a pass, but Danmask gets scrutiny. [7]
I finally understood though why she didn't approach this rigor, she gave us the answer the other day when she admitted she believed surgeons wear masks to stop viruses [8]:
"I keep thinking of 'why does my surgeon wear a mask when I am in surgery' you know, it must do something, it has to work. There's that biological plausibility for example"
Hopefully she considers my response she got this wrong. [9]
I've always wondered how bloodletting, mercury treatments, electroshock therapy, and countless other pseudoscience's persisted for decades and even centuries. These past 2 years I finally saw first hand how it all happens. It's utterly fascinating. Even the most brilliant people can be duped by countless counterfeits.
Or maybe I am completely wrong?
_________________
[1] "Masks...work. And we have the scientific evidence to back it up. In fact, we have over 85 peer reviewed, scientific studies. 35 have been published in 2020 alone."
became the most cited study in summer 2020, every single article which invoked the hymn "masks" hyperlinked this one to the responsorial "which we know work", yet YLE didn't bother to include the retraction request, notice how easy the results change by slight alteration to the regression analysis dates, or that it was already falsified by Fall 2020. Retraction: https://metrics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj13936/f/files/pnas_loe_061820_v3.pdf
[5] This META for example reviews 7 studies, then YLE includes the 5 which affirmed masks and excluded the 2 which did not, so it double dipped. Excluded: "In various sensitivity analyses, we did not identify any trend in the results suggesting effectiveness of facemasks."
Yes, this is truly ridiculous, but I have to admit participation. Just to avoid the Karen-sideways-dirty-looks (or a verbal confrontation), since I've had a cough for four weeks and I'll probably cough in the grocery store, I've put on a mask to shop. These fearful people are all over the place, especially in MN. The land of 10,000 lakes also has 10,000 experts everywhere you go. 3M marketing to the students is disgusting but not unexpected. I've talked to two people who intend to move elsewhere recently, after voters apparently forgot about the National Guard troops having to defend our neighborhoods a year ago, but where to go? Anyone have any viable alternative?
You shouldn't be surprised by human behavior. This is well into what is considered functional mental illness; anxiety. Those who are obsessive with fitness, generally have a high level of anxiety about their health before the pandemic and it came out in a variety of ways. Now it comes out for some with masks. My neighbor is a hypochondriac, she still wears a mask everywhere she goes and still tries to get everyone around her to accept her fears and wear masks. Before the pandemic it was EMFs coming from the building next door which houses some communication servers. Then it was mold in the basement. Masks are nothing more than visible evidence of anxiety disorders at this point. And yes, public health officials created this.
Masks remain the security blanket for those with clinical anxiety although for some real dummies it is still about being virtuous. For me, the most disappointing part of this mess, is the failure of our public health officials. They jumped in to drive the bus early on and instead of conveying that they had no clue where to go, they drove on with conviction down an unknown road and just kept going and going. Some of us could see the bus was going to nowhere fast and we got off to live our lives. But the bus drivers just kept driving, no longer talking to anyone, refusing to tell them in clear words that it’s time to get off. So they just continue riding along on the bus. God only knows how long.
I see children with the full Covid series, who just got Covid, whose parents ask me how long after the infection they should wait before getting the kid a booster..
I see 2 year olds glued to their tablets every time I go out to eat..
I see parents insist to me that their recent divorce has nothing at all to do with little Johnny’s sudden behavioral issues at school, that they talked to him about it and he completely understands why dad doesn’t come home anymore…
I could go on… point being, there’s a whole lot of crazy out there and only so much time. I get not delving into it in public.
That’s San Francisco for you, baby! You are a fish out of water. I live in Boston not much better. Keep poking the bear.
You didn't spend near enough time probing around at the busy CIDRAP web site because you could have (a) Listened to the most recent weekly Mike Osterholm Podcast and/or (b) Visited the attached SWAG SHOP to purchase (at stunningly high prices) various kinds of truly awful logo junk --- coffee mugs, flimsy tee shirts, stickers, and my favorite item: a plastic, maroon ballpoint pen for 9.95 $ that, honestly, looks to be worth maybe 75 cents on a good day. Some of this crap -- believe it or not -- prominently displays the name of CIDRAP's Big Cigar, an epidemiologist and Regents Professor who is seen often in national media coverage of assorted "pandemic policy experts". It's bad enough that the University of Minnesota has a sketchy football record practically every year, but then this CIDRAP thing emerged from the muck along with its online junk emporium. I'm ashamed and embarrassed, both as an alumnus (MD 1975) and retired professor of surgery in our medical school.
I have been writing about this since Spring 2020. The First Lie was the Worst Lie -- telling people that masks work when they do not (even the N95 cases are very, very limited and this week a decent RCT was published showing N95s no better than surgical masks which we know do not work https://doi.org/10.7326/M22-1966) was the first lie to see if people would be compliant. Fauci noted under oath a few days ago that he had no scientific rationale for changing his mind and going against decades of studies that showed virtually no masking value -- he just did.
It is why I get so passionate about masking. It rapidly became more than a "personal choice" -- it became a badge (mostly of stupidity, but those wearing them did not know it) and a totem and an indicator that "I am a government complier and against Orange Man Bad".
Until more of the medical community stands up and yells loudly about this, the First Lie will continue to haunt us all.
It never ceases to amaze me. After a career in health care, I see this stuff and just shake my head........
Living in Singapore, I see the masks inside and out in roaring heat and in glacial air conditioning. Although no longer mandatory other than on buses and trains, it seems that many Singaporeans are now more comfortable wearing them no matter the situation. It's pure conditioning.
I don’t always agree with you Vinay, but on this one I am TOTALLY in your camp! People of all economic and social standing have lost their minds, and quite likely for a myriad of reasons...(but we don’t need to go into that at the moment). It is especially prevalent here in coastal CA. I live clear down on the other end of CA from you...by the US-Mexico border, but I see the masking nonsense/insanity going on down here, also.
A couple of nights ago I was out in my front yard around 8 PM putting up the last of some Christmas lights. Two people walked by with hoods up and masks on, one trailing a good 6 feet behind the other. One of the two people spoke to me, and I realized it was some neighbors (a middle aged, long married couple) who live around the corner from me. The wife spoke to me first, then the husband said that they weren’t being “all lovey-dovey, holding hands”, (as they are sometimes want to be on their neighborhood walks), then the wife the wife chimed in “because he has Covid”!
I told them it didn’t matter that they weren’t walking together because they live in same house and share the same bed!
(But now that I think of it, likely the husband was relegated to a separate bedroom.)
Some background on these folks...the husband runs a ‘research lab’ up at UCSD in La Jolla. Due to the university of California policy that requires ‘Covid vaxxes & boosters’ for staff, professors, and students, this couple has got the ‘Covid Vaxx’ and the attendant ‘boosters’. And now the husband has COVID! Go figure...and they are out talking a walk at 8 PM at night with masks on in SoCA because they don’t want to give it to the other spouse, nor heaven help them give ‘something’ to me (from 10 feet away), as they walked by! These are reasonably intelligent, ‘science/research’ oriented people. (Or they used to be.) WTF is all I can say.
Mass psychosis indeed. It's crazy-making for the rest of us who haven't (yet) lost our minds. For me, I just feel compassion for the jabbed and move on with my life.
And the world continues to be crazy.
Vinay, thanks for sharing your observations. Your problem, reinforced in medical school, is the belief that heath behaviors reflect rational decision-making. Yes, virtue signaling, misinformation and anxiety all contribute to irrational health behaviors and always will. You and I as members of the medical profession must continue to educate and ask our leaders, educators, members of the media and others to keep emphasizing the known truths while remaining truly humble about the unknowns. Our fellow citizens want us to be honest and transparent but also humble. I read more criticisms of my comments by fellow readers who presume that I desire to impose my expertise on others without qualification. I sincerely try not to.
Vinay, you’re my ultimate hero, the smartest, bravest, most articulate person I have come across in my er...70 years. However I was immediately derailed when you posted “an attractive 20 year old”. Would just love to see the day we stop labeling people accorded to their looks which to a large extent many have no control. It only reminds me how important being attractive is to professionals though it would not have changed the content if you would have left out “attractive”. Am I being nitpicking...probably.
I apologize in advance.
The mask religion is absolutely fascinating. I predict future metaverse archaeologists will pinpoint this Nov 2020 post [1] from Katelyn Jetelina aka Your Local Epidemiologist as the catalyst for mask hysteria infecting rational people. Here, she unwittingly got "Gish Galloped" by presenting 85 poor studies as conclusive evidence that masks work, noting "I’m not entirely sure why the efficacy of mask use is still up for discussion".
From that point forward, any attempt to question how invisible particles, only discovered because something bypassed chamberland filters after Germ Theory discovered, which require electron microscopes to even see, could somehow be deterred by fabric resulted in a "mic drop" of YLE's 85 studies collection.
I can understand why the average person - even highly educated people - would assume that 85 studies showing positive effect MUST be conclusive evidence. You can't expect anyone to actually go through, study by study, and judge the results dispassionately, right?
Well, I did [2], and what we had was the standard collection of mannequin studies, models, HARKING, and promotion of papers without their corresponding retraction requests. [3]
Any study which didn't find mask efficacy was conveniently excluded from the 85. In evaluating pseudoscience we call this "counting your hits but forgetting your misses".
I don't blame YLE, as apparently she just copy-pasted from the ironically named twitter user @nuanceORDEATH [4] and didn't take the time to vet her sources. Otherwise, she might have noticed, for example, that entries #10 and #17 are identical papers from Mueller et al, or, noticed how it would include a Meta Analysis, then double dip to include the studies from the Meta which favored masks, then exclude any from the Meta which disfavored Masks. [5]
Had she or anyone cross-posting this applied some skepticism at such an extraordinary claim, they might have noticed that the further down the pyramid of evidence you go, the stronger the evidence, which should indicate these studies have bias built in and are breaking at least 2 of the Mertonian Norms. That RCTs struggle to find any signal without resorting to presenting small absolute differences into large relative ratios while Mannequins and Models manage to find masks make incredible differences should put to rest any question that "the science" is NOT dispassionate, is not interested in rigor. For Christ's sake the CDC honestly published this. [6]
Note how only studies which don't back masks do people suddenly be concerned with the quality of the study. The hilariously bad Kansas Mask Study gets a pass, but Danmask gets scrutiny. [7]
I finally understood though why she didn't approach this rigor, she gave us the answer the other day when she admitted she believed surgeons wear masks to stop viruses [8]:
"I keep thinking of 'why does my surgeon wear a mask when I am in surgery' you know, it must do something, it has to work. There's that biological plausibility for example"
Hopefully she considers my response she got this wrong. [9]
I've always wondered how bloodletting, mercury treatments, electroshock therapy, and countless other pseudoscience's persisted for decades and even centuries. These past 2 years I finally saw first hand how it all happens. It's utterly fascinating. Even the most brilliant people can be duped by countless counterfeits.
Or maybe I am completely wrong?
_________________
[1] "Masks...work. And we have the scientific evidence to back it up. In fact, we have over 85 peer reviewed, scientific studies. 35 have been published in 2020 alone."
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=202002698114314&id=101805971467321
[2] I took her initial 85 and added to it over the last 2 years, my comments removed from public view though. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ahaJui6Af0kGYMwHgAtnKCE6-bHbCLxnrQxuMC0kygA/edit?usp=sharing
[3] This one by Zhang et al https://www.pnas.org/content/117/26/14857
became the most cited study in summer 2020, every single article which invoked the hymn "masks" hyperlinked this one to the responsorial "which we know work", yet YLE didn't bother to include the retraction request, notice how easy the results change by slight alteration to the regression analysis dates, or that it was already falsified by Fall 2020. Retraction: https://metrics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj13936/f/files/pnas_loe_061820_v3.pdf
Regression issues: https://roadtolarissa.com/regression-discontinuity/
[4] https://threader.app/thread/1279144399897866248
[5] This META for example reviews 7 studies, then YLE includes the 5 which affirmed masks and excluded the 2 which did not, so it double dipped. Excluded: "In various sensitivity analyses, we did not identify any trend in the results suggesting effectiveness of facemasks."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013998 and "nfluenza-like illness was reported in 24/148 (16.2%) of the contacts in the intervention arm and in 25/158 (15.8%) of the contacts in the control arm and the difference between arms was 0.40% (95%CI: −10% to 11%, P = 1.00)." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013998
[6] Hairstylists wearing cloth masks didn't infect the people who responded to CDC request to be interviewed
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/masking-science-sars-cov2.html
[7] Dansmask study doesn't agree with mask hypothesis? Now suddenly we are concerned by population demographics, antibody testing accuracy, and confounders! https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=206293624351888&id=101805971467321
But this study of people wearing belt sensors on sidewalks? It's science and make the 85 cut!
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.12446.pdf
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu4rK8dAgnU&t=1980s
[9] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-state-of-covid-and-the-triple/comment/10895219
Yes, this is truly ridiculous, but I have to admit participation. Just to avoid the Karen-sideways-dirty-looks (or a verbal confrontation), since I've had a cough for four weeks and I'll probably cough in the grocery store, I've put on a mask to shop. These fearful people are all over the place, especially in MN. The land of 10,000 lakes also has 10,000 experts everywhere you go. 3M marketing to the students is disgusting but not unexpected. I've talked to two people who intend to move elsewhere recently, after voters apparently forgot about the National Guard troops having to defend our neighborhoods a year ago, but where to go? Anyone have any viable alternative?
Incredible story. I think some people will be wearing masks for the rest of their lives.
The only thing that can stop this madness is the same thing that caused it: a saturation media campaign.