Sad, but true.
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I don’t think so. It wasn’t even close to a unanimous vote at 9/6. She could easily align with the 6 more than the 9. Many, many knowledgeable doctors I’ve read or heard about feel the same way and reading on here about how many systems are going ahead anyway before the decision I don’t think it’s limited to what I’ve seen.
Yes, when the study is a RCT - do you know of one that shows differently? Would love to see it. This has been an evolving area but that hasn’t prevented the CDC from making the recommendation and political leaders from imposing masking anyway for over a year. Observations of masking in the community are not RCT’s. They don’t control for behavior changes, type of mask worn/how it’s worn, other NPI’s in place, etc. CDC has primarily relied on observations about masking in the community for their recommendations.
We have on many occasions throughout our human history observed “bubble behavior” where people read cues from each other rather than the conflicting and more objective indicators. In terms of asset pricing, such behavior can contribute to stock market corrections, recessions, and other unpleasantness. Why are we assuming that the same can’t happen w/r/t vaccine boosters? We’ve seen universities now follow one another not only w/r/t vaccine mandates but asymptomatic testing on top of that. Where is the science to suggest that the latter is necessary once the former has been established as policy? In the early stages of the pandemic, we saw shortages not only of TP but of bottled water - now what is the rational basis for the latter? No one was remotely suggesting that our drinking water had been contaminated! There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that psychology is driving a lot of the individual and collective decision-making in this pandemic. Not sure vaccine boosters are an exception.
The story in the Washington Post, but here’s a summary with no paywall. Granted, this is for surgical masks.
Results from a massive study in Bangladesh unequivocally show that surgical masks reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2, scientists say.
The results — from the highest-quality, gold-standard type of clinical trial, known as a randomized controlled trial — should “end any scientific debate” on whether masks are effective in battling the spread of COVID-19, Jason Abaluck, an economist at Yale and one of the authors who helped lead the study, told The Washington Post.
“This is an incredibly challenging but important study to pull off,” Megan Ranney, an emergency medicine physician and a professor at Brown University who was not part of the study, told the Post. “Anti-mask people keep saying, ‘Where’s the randomized controlled trial?’ Well, here you go.”
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Why are you assuming it’s happened to the 6 (and those who align with them) and not the 9 (and their followers)?
In that study, the mask intervention resulted in an increase of mask wearing from 13.3% to 42.3%. Symptomatic seroprevalence was 0.76% in control villages, 0.74% (5.0% reduction, not statistically significant) in cloth mask villages, and 0.67% (11.2% reduction) in surgical mask villages. For WHO-defined COVID-19 symptoms, it was 8.6% in control villages, 7.9% (8.5% reduction) in cloth mask villages, and 7.5% (13.6% reduction) in surgical mask villages.
Age did make a significant difference in symptomatic seroprevalence reduction from surgical masks, with 60+ seeing a 34.7% reduction, 50-60 seeing 23.0% reduction, but 40-50 and <40 seeing no statistically significant decrease.
Note that they also told people given the surgical masks that the surgical masks could be washed and reused. They also estimated filtration efficiency at 37% for cloth masks, 95% for new surgical masks, and 76% for surgical masks that have been washed 10 times with bar soap.
Preprint from which the above came from: https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Mask_RCT____Symptomatic_Seropositivity_083121.pdf
LOL - whoever said that something “should end the scientific debate” knows nothing about science. However, I appreciate the very recent study. Perhaps it’ll lend some clarity to the issue. A few things to point out:
- Score another point for the economists, who helped conduct this study. RCT is the new thing in economic research. Unfortunately they do experiment on populations in under-developed societies so the method is of questionable ethics. Offsetting that suspicion is that one of the researchers is from the area which may have been the primary driver for location. (eta: funding possibilities also played a role, apparently).
- There are also behavior changes that complicated the conclusions. The researchers found that people wearing masks tended to social distance more. This completely dovetails with everything we already know about masking - it might raise minute-by-minute awareness of proper Covid protocols. Thus, masking on its own - or social distancing on its own - may not be all that effective. The two together reinforce one another. Not sure they needed to conduct a large-scale RCT to understand that!
- The insight here is that the two populations were presumably all else equivalent - one just got more information, education and support than the other. Masking has been mandated in Bangladesh since last year with apparently far less success. So, what does this RCT tell us about the most effective strategy: intervention, education and support - or mask mandates? Recall: my concern is that in this pandemic suggestions and recommendations morph quickly into mandates.
- The scale of the project contributes to credibility and they seem to have solid numbers: when you have close interventions on a large population, you may be able to increase masking by around 30% and decrease the incidence of Covid by a little under 10% through a combination of masking and social distancing. Societies would need to consider the cost of such an intervention and whether these results are worth it.
Yup. And now, please, the study about how often you can reuse these things so that we don’t wind up with more landfills’ worth of mask trash unnecessarily. (The answer is “a lot, air it out or brush your teeth or go to the dentist already to fix your stank problem”.)
Or, you know, you could read the last comment. Although: why wash them at all, why not just leave them out in the sun to air? I’ve never washed a surgical mask, and I’d estimate I use each mask 50 or 60 times before the elastic connection breaks.
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You are right. I wasn’t around in 1905 so wasn’t aware of the laws then, but there have been a lot of Supreme Court cases since then concerning privacy (Griswald v. Connecticut) that could be argued to have overturned Jacobsen. Have there been any public health vaccine mandate laws in the last 100 years? Even for polio, measles, chickenpox, flu, all diseases that cause public health concerns? I don’t believe the city of Cambridge still requires Smallpox vaccinations for its residents.
No state has even suggested that they’ll make vaccines (any vaccines, not just covid) mandatory if all you want to do is live in your own bubble. The only restrictions are on lifestyle choices such as going to school in person, eating in restaurants, going skiing, going to work. No laws have been introduced saying ‘get vaccinated or you are committing a crime.’
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Actually, I’m not making any assumptions. I haven’t read the opinions of either the six or the nine, although I am slightly perturbed - and hopefully wrong! - that our country’s top public health officials are starting to partake of the division we’ve come to expect from our highest court in the land. I’m more concerned about how this will be interpreted by potential bubble-thinkers running our institutions.
One month ago you made this post (and others) comparing your fear of Rabies for your family and noting you haven’t experienced anything bad with Covid. Later posts showed that the “gentleman not too long ago” who died was back in 2007, so quite long ago for most of us, yet it still affects how you act/react because it was closer to you than (you think) Covid is. (I bet Covid deaths are at least as close to you as this guy was assuming you didn’t know the man personally.)
Now consider front line workers. Those working with Covid cases in hospitals, EMTs, those working Covid recovery like my son’s GF, or similar have seen both the “expected” cases due to age and co-morbidities and the really short straw cases that they can’t explain. They’ve seen multiples of these and far, far, more recently than 2007. They see the data from Israel and elsewhere about viral loads and boosters.
Can you really blame any of them if they want to take their chances with a booster?
You say we need US-only data. Why? That makes no sense at all to me.
We have a lot of data showing fear of watching bats under a bridge isn’t a problem at all for rabies, yet it still bothers you due to the one case near you that didn’t even come from a bat under a bridge. Nonetheless, people can avoid bats under bridges if they have an irrational fear.
There’s a lot of data from the world showing boosters might help and don’t hurt. Wouldn’t you think it’s perfectly fine if those who can’t “for certain” avoid exposure to Covid choose what they think is the most protection they can if they want to - based upon how they see the data?
Or are you so adamant about a 9/6 vote that got overridden in a way you don’t like that you’re comfortable denying others that opportunity fearing the whole sky will fall if they get that right?
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I’m assuming those in charge of our institutions are also trying their best to provide the most protection possible for those under their charge. Few want to be known as the one who allowed/caused X or multiple Xs to die when there was potentially a better way that was demonstrated not to cause harm.
I’d be far more wary of those who don’t realize how dangerous and deadly Covid can be - and is - everywhere around us.
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Here’s the reasoning from 2 of the “no” votes, pretty weak IMO
“We may just as well say give it to everyone 18 and older,” said Dr. Pablo Sanchez, a professor of pediatrics at Ohio State University.
“I feel very uncomfortable about this,” said Dr. Wilbur Chen, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “The implementation part of this is going to be fraught with such complexity that the people with the best health literacy will get boosters.”
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The reasoning by those 2 which you quoted sounds pretty flawed to me. I see no problem with allowing folks who want boosters to get them. Our state had
T had a problem doing so. Nearly all pharmacies have them and allow both walk-in and appointments for covid shoys 1, 2 or 3.
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Wow, as if that’s a problem… (sigh).
If that’s the best they can do I totally understand why the doctors I’ve heard from and read about were against that vote - and are getting (or already got) boosters.
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here’s a better (and more detailed) discussion of some of the voter’s thinking:
Reading that doesn’t change my opinion one bit TBH. I definitely feel the individuals involved in high risk jobs should have the right to choose a booster if they want one.
The Pandemic Experiment is ongoing and people ought to be able to choose if they want to be in the booster group at this point.
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That’s a very insightful remark. And behind it are a whole lot of social correlates.
@creekland, to my way of thinking it’s a problem because of those correlates. “Choice” only goes so far – if you’re born into a particular kind of community, grow up there, are discouraged from leaving and seeking education that (from inside the community) is going to “turn your head” somehow, or just don’t have the money or liberty…what he says is true. There are real reasons why you see so much vax refusal among nurses, not so much among docs. (And maybe a surprising incidence among dentists.) And if you’re a minor child, you’re helpless in this situation. While I don’t think that this is a reason to deny boosters, I think he’s absolutely right about the complexity and who’s going to navigate it successfully.
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I hope we can also understand that part of why the messaging seems so crap is that we’re not used to seeing so much happening in public, in realtime or close to it, from massive public health agencies. They’re not really built for public dithering, but the dithering has to go on, especially when the science is so new and we still in many important ways don’t know what we’re dealing with or how people are responding, either socially or medically.
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