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Question Authority, Especially on Face Masks
I own two face masks; my fetching spouse of 36 years, at least two or three. Our Governor here in Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, long commanded us under his virtually unlimited emergency powers to wear “face diapers” in public places, indoors. Outdoors is “optional,” but “recommended.” Virginia’s Governor, quite belatedly, has just followed suit.
I see no need to wear a mask on my outdoor runs and bike rides. After all, science shows that the risk of contracting the coronavirus outdoors is about zero.
If it makes you feel better that you’re protected from my possibly tainted droplets and spittle, great. I am especially sensitive to our grocery story workers and my local pizza maker. I want everyone to “feel” safe, and I’m mindful that many people, including friends, have underlying chronic conditions that make them especially vulnerable to this novel virus. After all, I’m 63, so I’m sort of on the cusp.
But former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson (also the author of a great book, Tell Your Children, about the effects of marijuana consumption) has it right.
Our governor, his team, and many others elsewhere claim to “follow the science” and “the data.” Well, so do I, but unlike him, I follow it all, not just that which fits into my worldview or political agenda. And it says something very different.
There are recent studies suggesting that wearing face masks outside of surgical and related medical settings is not very effective, including one as recent as April.
The same government experts who tell us to wear masks today were the same ones, in March, extolling us not to wear masks. Something changed. Sadly, they’re the same people who totally ignored the science from a team of epidemiologists in 2006, led by the doctor credited for eradicating Smallpox (D.A. Henderson), which asserted that quarantines were ineffective.
One of my favorite bumper stickers from the 1980s was “Question Authority.” There is no better time to do that than now.
Published in General
It was odd that Fauci, the surgeon general and all the others were originally saying not to wear masks. Then they changed their message. Were they wrong then or wrong now? It seemed to me that they were just going with the groupthink. It was just a matter of inertia and no one person wanted to be the one to recommend a giant change, even if it was the right thing to do.
I have lots of scientists that say masks are wrong, because they are preventing us from getting to herd immunity as quickly as possible.
That you are not actually fighting the virus by using masks but prolonging its existence and making us weaker against other virus’s.
Are they right or wrong. I dont know but the assumption that there is one answer to this problem and that we should be allowed to have a healthy debate about it is one of the big issues of our day.
Herd immunity is ugly-it means many more deaths. It is the about the next to last choice in fighting the virus (last 2 choices are giving too much/too long power to the government, and prolonged lockdowns). It is estimated we need 60-70% of the population to have recovered from COVID to achieve herd immunity-even with a death rate of 0.1-04% that is >200K deaths. Our goal should be to reopen AND avoid a spike in deaths. At this point it appears the effective tools we have are limited to: masks, social distancing, avoiding mass gatherings. The reason I push back against claims that masks don’t work is that a] the weight of evidence is that they work (And almost every claim otherwise misinterprets the cited study) & b]they have a less deleterious effect on the economy than the other tools we have. With some luck we can utilize some combination of the aforementioned tools & summer weather to buy us time for vaccine & medication development. The administration has wisely moved to fund private efforts to create a vaccine (&get 1st dibs at it) and a number of pharmaceutical companies are teaming up to ensure large scale production capacity.
Hey @mimac are you going to be the first in line to take that vaccine? It seems a bit dangerous to rush a vaccine to market, but I hope you are right and we have that well-tested vaccine before our country goes into a deep, unrecoverable decline. As for other treatments, there certainly doesn’t seem to be any rush to complete honest testing of the only drug that front-line doctors have been using regularly with success throughout the world. Somehow it’s been made verboten to even say the name: cough, cough, hydroxy, cough, cough. But I have just accepted that for the time being I will be polite and wear the mask inside of stores while I wait for the next “study” to tell me how useless they are.
Because I am a healthcare provider I will probably be in the early cohort of vaccine recipients. We should have better data soon on HCQ b/c several large studies have been in progress (including using it prophylactically in healthcare workers). Unfortunately, the early data hasn’t been good- but I expect the more recent studies to be more definitive. Remember, the studies from China are suspect b/c they have lied about much of the pandemic so far & the Italian data might not be reliable b/c their system was overwhelmed(and overwhelmed systems perform poorly). There are about a half dozen other antivirals in the “pipeline” which could potentially be mass produced this year (IIRC there was a good Ricochet podcast with Scott Gottlieb about this) if trials with them are positive.