18 Comments
founding

Vinay, Everything you say is true. In March 2020 I noted that masking, which despite your caution early on in expressing this known fact has long been known to be largely ineffective vis-à-vis respiratory viruses (and which was the long-standing, well rooted in RCTs policy of both the US and the WHO until April 2020) was the FIRST LIE and that if they got away with that, they would just pile them on.

That is exactly what characterizes virtually all of the reporting ("scientific" and press) on Covid since. Very few truths have been out there and most of the truth-tellers have been squelched. It is only now when the damage is becoming un-hideable, that people are modestly retreating. But the masking has always been ridiculous for ANYONE -- most of all children. But so were virtually all of the other NPIs. All a fraud perpetrated by a politically captured bureaucracy, press, and academia.

I am thrilled you keep exposing this. Masks were NEVER bioplausible...their failure to perform was well documented in RCTs with influenza over many decades. But there are now religious believers in masking who will impose it on anyone they can. Many of them are irremediable as are most religious zealots. The remainder will pay virtually no attention to any public health announcement ever again -- and they are probably right.

The saddest part is many patients will now also pay far less attention to their own physicians who dutifully in service to the government parroted the untruths. Luckily, there is a far greater spectrum in the practitioner class, and some of us have stridently opposed most of this in our own little corners (and you more widely, eventually) but many patients will never forget nor forgive. This will have endlessly bad implications for health care (not just public health) for generations. And this is beyond the learning disabilities that we are foisting on children because loud-mouthed, medically wrong people have been supported by a captured public health apparatus in suborning virtually all of education.

Keep speaking out. Get more strident. Anything that gets anyone's attention will be a leap forward at this point.

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Saw this quote the other week and it just keeps being relevant. 'Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.' --Robert A. Heinlein, Assignment in Eternity

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Thank you Vinay! I am an SLP and have sent many emails during the pandemic trying to get the "powers that be" to stop the insane mask mandates on kids. I actually reached out to my governing agency about it and their response was that we do not have studies proving they impact language development and they also referred to the study you mentioned regarding individuals with visual impairments. I actually responded back saying obviously we don't have studies because we would never create a study on kids that we know would cause harm!! Needless to say they did not reply back. It is just common sense to me that by blocking half a persons face will impact communication and development that we really don't need to waste time on a study. Now the CDC has changed the developmental guidelines, specifically around 2 year olds and language development but that seemed to only spark outrage for about a week. Glad you continue to speak out!

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Even Leanna Wen, the mask mandate nazi, admits now, masks are not useful and actually harmful in kids

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"No one is stupid enough," may be taken as a challenge by some....

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Dr V - setting aside some particularly insane places in the US, consider parts of the world where masks are and will forever be - permanent.

Its not about covid anymore. It hasn't been for a while now. Its about compliance.

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Still going on about masks? Until our leaders in the NIH apologize and admit their guidance was ill informed it won't matter. The min-tyrants requiring masks will not look at evidence. We can lament and complain about harms only to receive shrugs and dismissals.

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Thank you for saying this. Even studies that show learning losses often dodge mentioning the exact cause. They just say "covid mitigation measures" or "born during the pandemic" and then mask proponents say, "But it doesn't mention masks as a cause." OK, genius, a baby born in 2020 who spent 2 years with masked daycare workers surely couldn't have been affected. Or already-disadvantaged kids in federally funded Head Starts (pre-k) with mask mandates couldn't possibly have lost more developmental ground. And the feds are extending that mask mandate for this school year, too! As a teacher, with dozens of teacher friends, everyone I talk to mentions increased speech referrals, poorer social development, more behavior issues, etc. Parents, too, whose kids had past speech delays have mentioned their kids reverting, and losing skills they had previously gained.

I know it's all anecdotal, but as both a parent and teacher, I can't possibly believe this harms no child. Not to say it's 100% due to masks or that it affects every kid, but it's definitely not a big fat nothing!

As you say often VP, they should have to prove something helps before mandating it.

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Vinay,

I'm a pulm/ccm physician who lived the pandemic for a couple of years. I recently got interested in this issue because the CDC has continued to recommend masks in children and basically mandate them in large healthcare institutions with very little transparency into their decision making.

I tried to find data, but was less than expressed since most of it that was actually supportive were case control trials and some retrospective regression stuff that looked like they tortured the mathematical modeling till it gave them the answer they wanted.

I also saw some strange trends in how the recommendations were promoted early in the pandemic with some very aggressive media blitzes by a number of "experts" in conjunction with sophisticated social media campaigns to promote them and to deprioritize and discredit dissent. It almost looked like how I'd imagine an authoritarian propaganda campaign looks with consistent messaging around the clock in all the outlets and promotion of social pressure strategies against members of the public who didn't comply and members of the medicine and the academy that spoke out. The literature and media did not look like any other healthcare issue I'd seen before.

In the process of looking at this stuff I found the PNAS Howard who is a data science and AI type paper from 2020 that layed out a justification for masks that in my view was shakey at best. It relied on some case control studies, a handful of RCTs that had combined mask and hand washing some of which failed to meet their primary end points, a fact glossed over in the piece. That gem led me to another paper published by Trischa Greenhaugh at Oxford. Seemingly she was a member of the early pressure campaign to get people and public health officials to take up the intervention.

That paper disturbed me even more than the Moore paper. The essential argument it lays out is that while the evidence is weak that since we have made a mathmatical model in which masks could work we can justify the intervention on a population basis because it "could" save lives even if it didn't in the trials. She dismissed any possible harms stating they are irrelevant to the issue because her intervention is for cloth face masks instead of surgical ones (how that makes sense to anyone is beyond me.

She then goes on to make a concerning epistemic and moral argument. She essentially argues that evidence doesn't move fast enough. She advocates a move to a "science based medicine" in which modeling, theory and anecdote can be used to promote an intervention. She complains that some of the EBM papers on the topic are undermining the rhetoric to promote masks by confusing the public with messaging relating to expected benefit and risk.

So at this point I was blown away already. We can ignore the evidence because it doesn't agree with what I want society to do. Then we can make a model that can suggest a benefit while ignoring any possible harms. Finally we can message this out to the population in a large and targeted way to change their behavior.

Finally she ends with an argument that none of this needs to be subject to medical or political review because it has the potential to save lives.

So what I see happening here is this.

1. Find your intervention you want to test

2. Come up with a reason it could work

3. Denigrate any inconvenient data that doesn't promote the your viewpoint as anti science, because after all you were able to model a reason it could work.

4. Aggressively repeat to the public and academy that the intervention works across media outlets, academia, and social media.

The strategy can work for anything and what it means is that not only is public health as an authority no longer constrained by concerns for other aspects of human life, but that it no longer needs to provide evidence to make an argument to the people or their representatives. Rather they use theory, which they define.

Even if the intervention works, the preservation of lives alone cannot be the determinant of policy. Furthermore modeling alone is not a sufficient argument to justify imposing an intervention, because as we all know, modeling can show whatever the modeler wants it to.

This movement wants to free itself from both the contraints of evidence and the constraints of open debate, the impulse is fundamentally authoritarian. In my view it is both a morally and intellectually bankrupt way of seeing the world.

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“ the burden to recommend interventions is not that you lack evidence of harm, but you have evidence of benefit.” This was the key argument that parents should have used when begging school boards to stop masking their kids. They shouldn’t have even let them start without some evidence!

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Ok so I just read you Common Sense piece this morning 8/27. Since I don’t have subscription to that I have to comment here🙄😬 ( I’d go broke if I had paid subscriptions to all the great writings I like to follow) anyway..

Dr Prasad,

Respectfully, May I ask why you are still a democrat? Today’s Democrat party is not what it was 50 years ago (even 10 years ago, as demonstrated by Vid clips of Biden,Obama, and further back by Clinton and Pelosi from yesteryear). I know you believe in a fairer health system with access for all. I think everyone can agree healthcare can and should be made less expensive, more accessible etc. but with your intelligence and exposure to doctors and healthcare systems all over the world, you must realize “universal healthcare” paid by the government (us the tax payers at least) is not the answer and ends up with long wait times, less innovation and is not sustainable with eventual bankruptcy. I could go on and on about many other issues, but look at current administration’s policies and ask yourself, who are they helping? The poor and minority folks? Or the elites and rich (which were supposedly the Republican Party??!) With your intellect and common sense, how do you not see that the Democratic Party is so opposite to these two traits of yours? I know you’re not a political person, but perhaps write a substack on your thoughts? Or discuss at the next VPZD show? ;). Thanks for your writings, enjoy them immensely!

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founding

OH SNAP.

Killin’ it as usual, Vinay. No doubt this tragicomic episode in our history will be viewed by future generations as an affront not merely to sound medical practice, but to humanity itself.

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