Andy Paquette, Mask Science, Big Lie? |523|

A word on relative vs absolute risk.

Let’s say I can perform cataract surgery one of two ways.

Method 1 has a serious complication rate of 1 in 1000 but method 2 is $300 cheaper but has a serious complication of 2 in 1000.

Should I not tell my patient that method 2 is 2x the risk, even if the absolute risk is still very small?

I find this an odd thing to get hung up on, notwithstanding other potential issues with the mask study.
ok, I think most people would be in favor of being told all of it... i.e.

Method 1 has a serious complication rate of 1 in 1000. method 2 is $300 cheaper but has a serious complication of 2 in 1000.

this study only tells one story.
 
Here is more context on that 1% number with link to original study in article:
https://truthsnitch.com/2017/10/24/...upgrading-vaccine-safety-surveillance-system/
When Harvard finished the study they were surprised that the CDC would no longer answer their emails or phone calls to implement the system they were paid $1,000,000 to design and test.

It takes 30 minutes to complete the vaers entry. And if you dilly dally it will reset your form with no option to save. As an IT person, I can tell you this was by design, as it is trivial to implement. Del Bigtree had a recent interview with a former-nurse (vax mandate casualty) Deborah Conrad and she said it was a full time job just to keep a few doctors current with VAERS, and they were provided no training or directive to use it. Interesting times indeed.
nice. knew about the prob, but not this interesting background.

great example of revealing the method... e.g. attach the Harvard brand to the project then make sure they do a really shitty job.

==
By far, the most dire failure of the VAERS system is the vast underreporting of vaccine adverse effects which leads to a dangerous false security in vaccine safety and an erroneous assumption that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks.
 
If they had reported it as, "our study shows that for non-mask wearers, there is an increased risk of .0564%", it would be more accurate. If they had followed that statement with, "this translates to a 9% increase relative to mask wearers", there would be less to complain about. As it is, by only mentioning the relative number, and highlighting it, they disguise the very low difference in risk. From an academic perspective, that is not the right way to report the data. Keep in mind that this paper is intended (supposedly) for inclusion in a peer-reviewed journal. As such, it should adhere to the more rigorous standards of those journals.

A reader should be able to fully understand the discussion from the numbers presented there. This study doesn't allow that to happen because they have chosen to ignore their small observed effect, to then magnify it to make it seem more important than it is, and then to ignore all the rest of the literature, which comes to opposite conclusions. All of that is bad practice when writing this type of article. I would recommend against publication for those reasons.
I think we risk falling for the .076% versus .069% head fake.

this is about big lie science-ism.

let's not forget these guys went on the major media outlets and proclaimed this was the "nail in the coffin"... " should in scientific debate."

There's a lot more going on here beneath the surface.
 
This helps to explain everything.

haha... great... and the more serious point is that everything health science related is a numbers game.

Of course the other issue is right to choose. I really don't care if you wear a mask. but if you're going to mandate... if you're going to force kids to wear them at school... you better bring some strong strong evidence... not big lie science
 
Can you point me to documentation of exactly what you're referring to
The actual paper was published in March of 2011. He released it at least six months earlier. Wagemakers makes this comment in his criticism of the paper "The preprint on which this article was based was downloaded September 25, 2010, from http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf". It started showing up for discussion on skeptical forums in October of 2010.

And none of this is unusual. There are many papers released before publication or peer-review, including parapsychology papers, with preprint sites and services dedicated to this - Arxiv, Medrxiv, etc. The authors of the mask paper were criticized for not using one of the standard preprint servers, but other than that, putting it out there wasn't unusual or suspicious.

The way they reported the results isn't a "head-fake" or suspicious, either. It's a common, straightforward, useful way to report the numbers - give the percent affected in each group, then the relative size of that difference. They do this in parapsychology papers too.
 
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e.g. attach the Harvard brand to the project then make sure they do a really shitty job....By far, the most dire failure of the VAERS system is the vast underreporting of vaccine adverse effects which leads to a dangerous false security in vaccine safety and an erroneous assumption that the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks.

Alex you are correct on your conclusion but not on quality of study. Sorry if my post was unclear. I will edit it. The CURRENT ACTIVE system sucks. Takes forever to add a VAERS record.

The Harvard study on the other hand did a good job. I will quote from the article and final report:

'After a one million dollar grant was paid and three years of research conducted on what appeared to be a very successful upgrade to the passive VAERS system, the team’s CDC contacts went MIA. The ESP:VAERS final report states, “Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.”'
 
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what do you think about the " big lie" thing. I think they overhype this story/study in order to bury it.

If I understand you, the big lie flies because "we" can't conceive of an audacity that would hide something scandalous in plain view and "we" feel disoriented and uncertain in the presence of mass ignorance? The more I think about this the more compelling it is however the big factor is still only 50% of a twofer where it functions directly as an essential element of spreading the message in the first place (rather than as pure smokescreen). I've gone cross-eyed now.

Really interesting point. I totally agree with you it is different... but I definitely think some of these folks derive pleasure from the power trip... maybe the carnage along the way amps up the pleasure
No doubt and that's the attitude I take in my daily life on my crusade to defeat the new normals but if I'm really honest, the only thing I know for sure about these shadow people is that they love money and power. They could be way worse than that, I just don't want to go there if I don't have to.
 
I wonder sometimes how the good people of Germany, not to be confused with the bad people of Germany, were persuaded to go along with the atrocities leading up to WWII. In many ways, the portrait of government and corporate messaging from that era resembles our own fairly closely.
.

The main mistake they did was to democratically elect a leader who quickly and effectively dismantled the democratic institutions of Germany. One of the first atrocities being the burning of the Reichstag. In fact not too differently to what we saw in the US on the 6. of January including the attempts to undermine the democracy leading up to this event.
 
IMO it's a moral panic and doesn't necessarily have to be a conspiracy at the highest levels. At most im willing to bet that many researchers that push out shaky science anyways decided to jump onto the covid train for a free ride until the pandemic ends, and they are heavily incentivized to do so because of the publish or die format they're held under. Furthermore no one is going to point out if a covid study is faulty if it supports the narrative because they dont want to be slammed as being a covid-denier, so this also increases the chances of junk studies being produced. I think after the pandemic hit, and people panicked, the wheels of industry quickly came to recognize how profitable a pandemic could be and we've seen the richest people in the nation make 1.2 trillion dollars while the rest of the nation lost 20 million jobs. At the most sinister level of this is the division of the country into those who trust the government and those who dont (broadly speaking), and here I suspect this is probably the most intentional part of the panic on behalf of the media and elites. In the modern age, fourth generational warfare is dominant. When you can't invade your enemies, you get them to revolt and overthrow their own government and this division that has been highlighted will serve to identify those who are most vulnerable to a fourth generational attack on the US government. This is a technique that America loves, and recently we've gotten our hands caught in the cookie jar in Crimea with Russia, Isis in Syria and Hong Kong with China so it's probably about time for a similar level of reprisal - the draconian lock down measures are a way to pre-empt this.
 
Which is 9.21%. How'd they get 9.3% They were so specific with their 3 tenths it seems like it was intentional and not a mistake.
It’s just rounding. If you use 3 digits for the percentages instead of 2 (by going back to the original data), then it works out to 9.3%.
 
So forced compliance issues, new world order, evil, etc aside. Isn't mask usage common knowledge amongst medical professionals? It's called a surgical mask for a reason. Mask usage has been around for a long time. Whats the beef with this study?

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
It isn’t the study. It’s that ‘somebody’ turned masking into a culture war. I’ve no idea who or why, though. It seems like the dumbest, most trivial thing out there to pick on, so I’m also confused about why this is even a thing.
 
They're calling it a "relative reduction". The word "relative" is the problem. For instance, if you have 100 blue balls and 100 red balls, but lose 2 blue balls and 3 red balls, what do you have? You've lost 2% of the blue balls and 3% of the red balls. The difference between the two loss rates is one ball, or 1%. However, if you look at the "relative" difference, you don't pay attention to the original ball population. Instead, you only look at the lost balls. Looked at that way, the red balls lost 50% more than the blue balls, for a 50% increase in their loss rate. However, that is a dishonest way to look at these numbers if you then apply the relative value of a 50% increase in loss rate to the general population of red balls, because that would create the false expectation of losing 50 balls, not 3. That is what the authors of the mask study did by talking about a "relative" improvement. It effectively exaggerated the negligible actual value to something that looked significant.
sounds like statistical sophistry

"Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected, and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world if diluted in a quarto volume."
(Richard Whately, Elements of Logic, 7th ed. 1831)

When buried in an 80 page study (quarto volume), the 'Relative Risk Deception' is obscured, and when simply stated, as Andy has done here, a child can easily see the lie.

Moderna used the same relative risk deception in touting its injection as being 95% effective.
Vaccine Makers Claim COVID Shots Are ‘95% Effective’ — But What Does That Mean? • Children's Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)
 
I think Alex is careful about a full tilt attack for at least one of the reasons you mentioned. Fauci et al are psychopaths & don't practice restraint typically when challenged. Dr. Tom Cowan has changed his attitude a bit now months later, but when he appeared in an early collection of anti-vaxxers making anti-vaccine statements, he was noticeably circumspect, as if he had been made to reconsider his position due to threats or actual consequences. As he's said before, we're only here to entertain each other. Don't get too serious.
I can understand the need to protect oneself, and if Alex really knows that contagion is a lie and he is restraining himself from speaking the truth to avoid being attacked, I can't fault him for that.

However, the 'Big Lie' is Contagion.

Contagion is the foundation upon which the biosecurity state is built.

When we scientifically falsify contagion, which I am convinced has been done repeatedly, we undermine the technocratic takeover of the world.
 
ROFL. That article doesn't show that it's misleading to use a relative risk reduction. All it shows is that two pieces of information are useful - a baseline absolute risk, and a relative risk reduction with the intervention. Which is exactly what the authors of the mask study gave us. Absolute risk reductions are useless information, because nobody is ever at the identical baseline absolute risk (which is the only time you could try to use the number).

Even the guy criticizing the "95% effective" calculation thought the number should be reported as a relative risk reduction. He just gave his own version of that relative risk reduction based on including all the symptomatic people who didn't have COVID in that calculation (which is a pretty weird way to measure effectiveness against COVID).
 
I can understand the need to protect oneself, and if Alex really knows that contagion is a lie and he is restraining himself from speaking the truth to avoid being attacked, I can't fault him for that.

However, the 'Big Lie' is Contagion.

Contagion is the foundation upon which the biosecurity state is built.

When we scientifically falsify contagion, which I am convinced has been done repeatedly, we undermine the technocratic takeover of the world.
That's gonna be tough.
I know only personally of (2) Covid Deaths and both were acquaintances.
1. A good old man with a severe pre-existing respiratory condition
2. A co worker in his late 50's who was infected after working around another coworker who had recently returned sick from visiting Mexico and was trying to get by working without reporting being sick. (2) employees became very ill with Covid like symptoms after working around another who contracted it (whatever it is.)

I'm not saying this proves contagion, but if it doesn't, there's still something very similar to contagion happening in this instance.
 
That's gonna be tough.
I know only personally of (2) Covid Deaths and both were acquaintances.
1. A good old man with a severe pre-existing respiratory condition
2. A co worker in his late 50's who was infected after working around another coworker who had recently returned sick from visiting Mexico and was trying to get by working without reporting being sick. (2) employees became very ill with Covid like symptoms after working around another who contracted it (whatever it is.)

I'm not saying this proves contagion, but if it doesn't, there's still something very similar to contagion happening in this instance.
Covid Deaths?

How do you know they were Covid Deaths?

Were they reported as Covid because they took the PCR test?

The PCR test is fraudulent use of the the PCR method developed by Kary Mullis.

Were they reported as Covid because they had Covid symptoms, which could be from anything?

They could have had respiratory illness from breathing jet fuel on the airplane from Mexico.

As Biden would say, "C'mon, man!".

We have to think critically when considering cause of illness, and instead of assuming contagion, consider toxemia first.
 
When I heard Arthur Firstenberg talking about this study, I jumped out of my seat and yelled at the TV.

WHAT!!!


https://principia-scientific.com/unmasked-revealing-a-shocking-medical-truth/
Arthur Firstenberg on Facial Masks:
"As a person who went to medical school, I was shocked when I read Neil Orr’s study, published in 1981 in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Dr. Orr was a surgeon in the Severalls Surgical Unit in Colchester. And for six months, from March through August 1980, the surgeons and staff in that unit decided to see what would happen if they did not wear masks during surgeries. They wore no masks for six months and compared the rate of surgical wound infections from March through August 1980 with the rate of wound infections from March through August of the previous four years. And they discovered, to their amazement, that when nobody wore masks during surgeries, the rate of wound infections was less than half what it was when everyone wore masks."


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf
A quote from the study:
"It would appear that minimum contamination can best be achieved by not wearing a mask at all but operating in silence. Whatever its relation to contamination, bacterial counts, or the dissemination of squames, there is no direct evidence that the wearing of masks reduces wound infection."
...
"The conclusion is that the wearing of a mask has very little relevance to the wellbeing of patients undergoing routine general surgery and it is a standard practice that could be abandoned."



Although the doctors doing this study were believers in germ theory and contagion, I believe the results are consistent with other evidence that contagion is a myth.

It's hard to imagine what TV shows and movies about doctors and hospitals would look like without everyone wearing their surgical scrubs! LOL
 
It isn’t the study. It’s that ‘somebody’ turned masking into a culture war. I’ve no idea who or why, though. It seems like the dumbest, most trivial thing out there to pick on, so I’m also confused about why this is even a thing.

IMO this particular episode is just perpetuating the war. The Bangladesh study does seem like bad science. But masking as a precaution against infection seems solid. Anecdotally, my kid who's required to wear a mask at school and has been distancing and such has resulted in far fewer colds and flu like symptoms compared to years past.
 
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