Is There Any “Science” Behind Covid Mask Mandates? Francis Menton
https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a05e044bdd
I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.
As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.
The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.
Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:
CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
This piece of “guidance” is not a small deal. The numbers of students and teachers in K-12 schools in this country is enormous: some 50.6 million kids in K-12 public schools, another 5.8 million in K-12 private schools, some 3.5 million public school teachers, and a few million more of staff of various kinds. So under this “guidance,” the number of people trapped behind these masks all day every day for months on end would be well over 60 million, the large majority of them kids 17 and younger. Meanwhile, according to CDC data here, the number of kids 17 and under who have died of the virus inception to date is all of 478. That is way fewer kids than die of the flu in a normal flu season.
Granted, not everyone is following the CDC “guidance” on this issue. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is one of several who have refused to go along. But plenty are going along. Here in New York, the City announce back in June that it would have a mask mandate for the upcoming school year, and our brand new Governor Kathy Hochul made that statewide as one of her first acts in office on August 28. New York State by itself has about 2.6 million public school students.
Anyway, the CDC is filled with highly credentialed scientists, and surely they have only issued their “guidance” after giving the subject due and deliberate consideration. Isn’t going along with their advice “following the science”?
The other approach to the “science” — the Manhattan Contrarian approach — would be to look for the results of efforts to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that mask wearing lowers the rate of infection and/or death among children 17 and younger. Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that before issuing an edict that would impose all-day mask wearing on tens of millions of children at little risk from this disease, the CDC would have done a large and serious randomized and controlled study to demonstrate that this intervention actually works, if only just a little. You would be absolutely wrong. As far as I can determine, there has been no such study.
What’s the closest we can find on this subject? Looking around today, I find a long and thoughtful piece from the City Journal on August 11, 2021, by a guy named Jeffrey Anderson. The title is “Do Masks Work? A review of the evidence.” Anderson is identified as former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, so at least someone who knows something about statistics.
Anderson identifies a total of 14 what he calls “RCTs” (Randomized Controlled Trials) studying the effectiveness of mask wearing on reducing the spread of respiratory viruses. Almost all of them pre-date the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and none focus on school-age children. OK, we’ll take what we can get. It turns out that there is exactly one large RCT dealing specifically with the effect of mask wearing on the transmission of Covid-19:
The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.
4,862 participants, and a tiny, not-statistically-significant effect. It actually gets worse from there. Anderson goes through every one of the 14 RCTs studying the effectiveness of mask-wearing on respiratory virus transmission, and finds essentially none demonstrated significant effectiveness. Some actually had negative results, where the mask wearers were more likely to be infected than the non-wearers. The speculation is that touching the mask, or not cleaning it, could actually make it a vector for the spread of viruses.
Here is Anderson’s summary of all 14 RCTs:
In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.
In simple terms, it’s nothing, nothing and nothing. Not a single one of the 14 RCTs showed a statistically-significant benefit from mask wearing.
But surely the CDC must have some kind of studies to support its edict to subject tens of millions of innocent schoolchildren to all-day mask wearing. Yes. What they have is not RCTs, but rather so-called “observational” studies of restricted time periods and relatively small numbers of people. Here is a CDC release from September 24, trumpeting some of these latest studies. Healthy Skeptic (Kevin Roche) on September 28 calls these studies “CDC Garbage,” which they are. These studies are properly characterized as non-science. Instead of attempting to falsify the hypothesis under consideration, they attempt to confirm it, with complete freedom to truncate time periods, cherry-pick data, and ignore confounding factors to get the pre-determined answer. And Roche puts his finger right on the key issue, which is that the CDC is under enormous pressure from the White House and its masters in the teachers unions to get the “right” answer:
The White House has been turned into slave quarters for its teachers’ union masters, and therefore must do whatever those unions want, and in turn the CDC is ordered to produce (i.e., make up) research findings to justify the policies the teachers’ unions want, regardless of what the data says, so the agency does its desperate best to sate the insatiable lust of those unions for masking every child for the rest of their lives. One garbage study after another, with the most recent coming at the end of this week.
Roche refers us over to this September 25 post by a guy named Vinay Prasad, going through obvious flaw after obvious flaw with the study on which CDC relies most heavily, coming out of the Phoenix area of Arizona. Excerpt:
First, schools with mask mandates were fundamentally different. It should not be surprising given political differences in mask acceptance that districts with masking are different than those without in ways apart from masking policies. Specifically, schools with mandatory masking policies were more likely to be in Pima county; Maricopa county mostly did not have mask policies. As illustrative of political differences, Pima county voted more strongly in favor of Joe Biden than Maricopa county. Schools with masking requirements included younger kids (greater % elementary, fewer middle/ high), and had fewer students enrolled—also suggestive we may be comparing schools for younger kids vs. those for older kids. The endpoint of the study were not cases attributable to school spread, but rather the number of schools with 2 or more cases. This weighs equally a school with 4 cases vs. 400 cases.
And that’s only the beginning. It goes on and on from there. The study made no effort at all to deal with many, many confounding factors. If you’ve got time, read some more. It’s sad, but you can’t trust a word that comes out of the government “scientists.”
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