By Greg Piper
November 2020 was a busy month for published scientific research that could have undermined developing COVID-19 policies, if released a few months sooner.
That’s when the CDC divulged that Red Cross blood samples from the previous winter revealed that 2% of donors from the West Coast had COVID antibodies in mid-December 2019, raising the question of how “15 days to slow the spread” could work in March 2020.
The researchers behind a Danish randomized controlled trial (RCT) of mask-wearers that ended in June 2020 finally reported their findings — no effect on infection rates — five months later after struggling to find a major publisher.
The first update of mask meta-research in nine years, covering studies through January 2020, also finally came out 10 months later, likewise showing no effect on respiratory infections.
That review’s findings were reaffirmed in an update last week by the same group of specialists in charge of “acute respiratory infections” for Cochrane, an international research collaborative often deemed the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine.
An ARI group member had harsh words for Cochrane in an interview Sunday with medical scientist-turned-journalist Maryanne Demasi, accusing the U.K.-based medical charity of stifling and undermining his group’s 2020 review to minimize its impact on developing COVID policies.
Even as it inexplicably held the group’s study for seven months and subjected it to additional scrutiny, at a time when credible mask research was desperately needed, Cochrane published “unacceptable pieces of work … that gave the ‘right answer'” on masks, University of Oxford epidemiologist Tom Jefferson said.
When the Danish mask study finally came out, Jefferson wrote that the paucity of research on masking and COVID suggests a “total lack of interest from governments in pursuing evidence-based medicine.” Instead of the U.K. and Italy randomizing half their populations to masking, they “ran around like headless chickens,” he told Demasi.
Randomized control trials "are imperative for recommendations that span years, or longer."
More than two years after the start of the pandemic, some schools are still requiring masks. https://t.co/yqe0tpi9sE
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) February 6, 2023
That official disinterest in RCTs more than two years later has sustained mask mandates in a handful of U.S. settings, especially educational and medical, with varying justifications.
Two major hospitals in the same Kentucky city reversed roles on mask mandates the same day last week, CBS affiliate WKLY reported.
The University of Louisville dropped its mandate due to a “holistic” approach based on vaccination rates, low hospitalizations and declining transmission, while Norton Hospital reinstated its mandate because Jefferson County was in the CDC’s “red” zone for transmission.
Daniela Jampel, fired by New York City’s Law Department for posing as a journalist to question Mayor Eric Adams about a broken promise to unmask children, noted that the LensCrafters location she visited only mandated masks for eye tests — a medical function — not eyewear sales. LensCrafters didn’t answer a Just the News query on whether this is a top-down policy or store-by-store, but it’s not mentioned as such on the chain’s COVID page.
I recently got my eyes checked at a LensCrafters. One side of the store is an eyeglass shop, where you don't have to mask. The other side of the store is where your eyes are checked, which is healthcare & therefore masks required. The difference in flooring is the dividing line. pic.twitter.com/wBlF6dE95W
— Daniela (@daniela127) February 6, 2023
The updated Cochrane review found enough RCTs to fully exclude observational studies, a favorite of public health authorities because they often show masks have some effect on COVID rates. The CDC repeatedly hawked an Arizona school mask study with a host of methodological problems, for example.
Rather than publish the 2020 review when mask policy was being hashed out worldwide, “for some unknown reason, Cochrane decided it needed an ‘extra’ peer-review” and “unnecessary text phrases” emphasizing the reviewed studies didn’t include COVID-19 trials, Jefferson told Demasi, his former Cochrane collaborator.
The seven-month review period “just happened to coincide with the time when all the craziness began, when academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks,” he said. “They are activists, not scientists.”
The lengthy delay and extra process, combined with a parallel Cochrane editorial cautioning that “most of the evidence” considered by the ARI group was “from studies examining effects in wearers” rather than transmission effects, showed the organization was trying to undermine his group, Jefferson believes.
The editorial argued that policymakers “must act on incomplete evidence” in response to COVID because “[w]aiting for strong evidence is a recipe for paralysis.”
The Cochrane editors insisted that “lack of evidence of effectiveness is not evidence that the interventions are ineffective” but rather that it’s hard to measure specific behavioral interventions that are often deployed “in combination in a general population.” (Jefferson faulted one of the new RCTs his group considered, the Bangladesh mask study, for this reason.)
Jefferson dubbed the editorial’s reasoning “a complete subversion of the ‘precautionary principle’ which states that you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that benefits outweigh the harms.”
He disavowed the notion that he’s an “expert,” a term he associates with low-value predictions and modeling. “You just have to look at the so-called ‘experts’ that have been advising government.”
Harry Dayantis, spokesperson for the Cochrane Central Executive Team, told Just the News the 2020 review “went through our editorial process which includes external peer review, technical editing and copyediting,” and was not unusual by peer-review standards. He said the 2023 review was no different and “took roughly the same amount of time.”
Responding point by point to Jefferson’s allegations was not possible Monday because Dayantis couldn’t reach “the people who’d be in a position to provide this level of detail,” he said.
"The Gov't thought it owned the truth. It didn’t like criticism of modelling & lockdown policies, particularly pointing out the collateral harms, any opposition to vax passports and evidence underpinning the vax."
Tom Jefferson and @carlheneghan.https://t.co/V4kU4vujo1— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) February 1, 2023
The updated review is drawing wide attention in the evidence-based medicine community. “When groups aren’t chosen at random, one group may do better because it has healthier characteristics,” cardiac electrophysiologist John Mandrola wrote in the Sensible Medicine newsletter.
What had I been saying?
The masks don’t work, but are a symbol of how malleable the public is.
The shots don’t work and are worse than nothing.
The hospital protocol didn’t work unless you wanted to kill patients.
The things that research showed worked were called “misinformation,” for years.
Their proponents were banned from social media and MSM.
Remember “Natural Immunity?”
It was demonized by NIH, CDC and Fauci/Birx.
Now, a November 2022 study in The Lancet that found natural infection far more protective against reinfection than Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
Now that the threat of Nurmberg Trials are coming for all this death-dealing, all these liars are pretending the science changed, so they must too.
(They tried to convince their victims to “forgive” them, but that isn’t flying.)
COVID vaccines funder Bill Gates is now calling for “an inhaled blocker” that stops infection early.
And, his foundation is “sitting on millions of doses” of Pfizer’s oral antiviral Paxlovid that can’t be deployed because it only works in early intervention.
Paxlovid’s main problem is it is only available by prescription.
Ivermectin is over-the-counter.
Everyone can have their full dosages of ivermectin at home for use when the sickness strikes.
Paxlovid’s other main problem is it doesn’t work well, even causing the immune system to fail enough for “break thru” covid cases after dosings.
Ivermectin doesn’t do that, either.
And, instead of masking, daily use of inhaled virus blockers actually works.
Read up on Betadine’s gargle and their nasal spray.
Mucosal protection.
Been on the over-the-counter market for years!
Aw, cmon. If it was that good, Democrats and leftist propaganda would have denounced it.
Instead the ploy was to denigrate them as “herbal” remedies that never have been proven.
Iodine, from kelp, is the main active ingredient in Betadine’s gargle and in its nasal spray.
Iodine has long been known to kill viruses.
100% of them.
Stores that used to carry them dropped them.
Why was never explained.
Stores that do carry them are always out of them because they work so well.
You can still get them online.
There is evidence that a simple saline nasal rinse does the same thing along with gargling with saline.
The left has gone from making science-based decisions to making politics-based decisions and ideology-based decisions. The results are almost always wrong.
You know when a demonic display is sponsored by Pfizer we all must come dressed as blood clots. Oh not the only Grammys that were killed. Isnt that right Cuomo?