Bad News Thread

A large portion of our society are using the 3ply and/or KN/N95’s which are made of 100% polyester. Polyester does NOT biodegrade and in the spun bonded and or melt lien form that are used for masks, it is not recyclable either. They will just fill our landfills and oceans.

Where are all the Single Use plastic crusaders?

I'm old enough to remember when plastic straws were an issue. I still get a chuckle now days when a waiter wearing a mask brings me a drink with a paper straw.
 
Natural immunity far exceeds vaccine-induced immunity.

BTW, if this holds up, that's one prong of the test for whether the UK approach is the correct one. The other is how effective are the vaccines really against severe illness.

 
On the Gazit et al preprint that got linked I think on this thread, although maybe it was the other one. Compared to the previous MedXriv preprint, this one, IMO is pretty much a dud. There is probably not much point to bringing it up, but since I read it there are two obvious problems. The first is in the design of the study. The second is that the authors do not do due diligence in insulating their work from the infodemic.

The first problem kind of illustrates how with statistics sometimes you try to avoid a problem but it pops up again in a different way. With the Israeli data the thing is you are up against is the fact that the vaxx % of the population is high, so vaxxed people will be the most frequently challenged for delta infection, and that colors everything with respect to analysis of the efficacy of vaccination. One way to get around that is to do a cohort study, which is what this work is. They go into a government medical database and do a number of comparisons by making matched cohorts, the most relevant of which is that they match an equal number of double vaxxed people with virally infected people and ask, how often to they get delta. The result, in a nutshell, is that out of ~32000 people in the cohorts they see about 250 delta infections. Thus, the principle observation is that, either with double pop or viral infection, the risk of infection with delta is low. Immunity works pretty damned good. The other thing they should then bring to the fore is that when the outcome of interest (ie delta infection) is low, a cohort study is subject to statistical artifacts with respect to how the relatively few outcomes observed bin between the two cohort groups. But they don't address that, and calculate that the few infection events that they observe bin with an ~13X bias towards vaxx individuals. If the authors were challenged on that, as I suspect they will be during review, they'd say well our CI. That's fine, but the CI only has relevance to the group of people selected to be in the cohorts, not the broader population more generally. Which then calls the relevance of their study into question. And so the initial statistical problem pops back out again.

There are things they could do. They almost certainly wrote an algorithm to scan the database to generate their cohorts. They could easily do it multiple times to see if their small number of delta infections bin the same way each time. They could take their 13X value and see if it is predictive for a broader, random sampling (certainly in the case of the much more granular and higher statistically powered REACT data from the UK this would not be true). But much more relevantly, they should simply do comparisons where they compare double pop and viral priming of immunity cohorts to cohorts of unifected, immunologically naieve, individual in the database. And then look at relative protection. That's is the almost unexplicable part of the study, why they don't do that.

As it is, this study is statistically questionable, and, even worse, designed in such a way as to make it a prime candidate for misappropriation in the infodemic. There are paid (and probably unpaid too) people who scan MedRriv, Rsquare, etc servers for titles and abstracts that can be pumped directly into that digital caldron. This one is easy pickings.
 
This one is making the rounds around some con circles trying to prove that masking doesn't do anything because 80% of the students near the teacher came down with COVID despite wearing masks, and 50% of the class overall came down with COVID. We already know that basic masks do virtually nothing to protect the wearer and we knew that already. But it notes that the teacher took off the mask to read, which is the fly in this particular argument, because it doesn't address the my mask protects others argument. But what's worse, the teacher came to school with symptoms in the time she was waiting for the COVID test. If anything, this seems to stand for the proposition that the highest risk factor in the classroom is having an unvaccinated teacher that is stupid enough to come to school with symptoms.

 
This one is making the rounds around some con circles trying to prove that masking doesn't do anything because 80% of the students near the teacher came down with COVID despite wearing masks, and 50% of the class overall came down with COVID. We already know that basic masks do virtually nothing to protect the wearer and we knew that already. But it notes that the teacher took off the mask to read, which is the fly in this particular argument, because it doesn't address the my mask protects others argument. But what's worse, the teacher came to school with symptoms in the time she was waiting for the COVID test. If anything, this seems to stand for the proposition that the highest risk factor in the classroom is having an unvaccinated teacher that is stupid enough to come to school with symptoms.


When you start with the premise that you are attempting to prove, the work is much easier. Am I right?
 
This one is making the rounds around some con circles trying to prove that masking doesn't do anything because 80% of the students near the teacher came down with COVID despite wearing masks, and 50% of the class overall came down with COVID. We already know that basic masks do virtually nothing to protect the wearer and we knew that already. But it notes that the teacher took off the mask to read, which is the fly in this particular argument, because it doesn't address the my mask protects others argument. But what's worse, the teacher came to school with symptoms in the time she was waiting for the COVID test. If anything, this seems to stand for the proposition that the highest risk factor in the classroom is having an unvaccinated teacher that is stupid enough to come to school with symptoms.

Yeah, she came to work because she thought the mask would protect others. That's the problem with masks as their effectiveness has been grossly exaggerated. (aka the policies that imply masks are better than vaccines).

The other problem is the execution of proper mask wearing which is going to be poor with children, for that matter the public in general. That's why lab studies of mask filtering and plume redirection are not that relevant.

I wear a mask in public when required, which for me is just airplanes or doctors office. I'm avoiding LA not because of their Covid rules but because it has turned into a shithole.
 
RIP Brave Warriors!!!
Check this out you guys. Two men by the name of Hunter that we can think about. One Hunter is selling art work for $500,000 a piece and has THREE LAPTOPS FROM HELL with so much evil it will make you puke. The other Hunter just died for our country. Why did he die? We also lost a few others from the IE. My son's best friend Zack is serving. As you drive past Camp Pendleton to watch kids play soccer or Silver Lakes, keep the 13 in your thoughts and Prayers and their loved ones.

 
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