The Good
We were mistaken about how long our reply referenced in the last post stayed up. Small kudos to the bloghost at least, for engaging that much with strange new ideas. For about 3 hours.
The Bad
But then, the same bloghost plopped this Special Olympics-level reply, citing SCIENCE, BITCHEZ!!!!!!!!!
Protect everone (sic) else? Jesus christ. If your mask won’t protect you, my mask won’t protect you. Fauci and the cdc says that one mask doesn’t work , wear two; even after being vaccinated. Your cloth piece of crap protects no one. Not me , not you. Unless you are coughing, spitting and snotting particles the size of a baseball. Scientifally (sic) stupid? Re-read what you just wrote. Find out the particle sizes of the SARS2 Virus (So named COVID 19 by the media) and see what a mask will do for you. It is airborne for up to 30 feet and will enter through your eyes if they are uncovered. In a study in a German hospital the highest concentration of viral load was found on the shoes of employees. Fuck the stupid mask, fuck the stupid sheep and if you ever accuse me of being unscientific I will ban your ass permenantly (sic) from my site. You need to show me scientific information that some dombfuck (sic) wearing a bandanna (sic) in the grocery store is beneficial before you post it as science .Enough said
The Ugly
Which retort we are forced to fisk, as follows:
1) I've been telling people Fauci and the CDC were idiots not working for your best interest since 2014. You could look it up. Stop listening to them. The media is even worse at explaining science. As your grasp of it ably demonstrates.
2) COVID viruses don't sit dry, suspended in air, like they were Nestle's cocoa dust. They're coming from mucus membranes in your upper airway, therefore flying outward in water droplets of your own saliva and snot. This is why COVID (and Ebola, like many other viruses) requires droplet precautions.3) The snot mask keeps your cough and sneeze particles loaded with virus on your side of the mask, instead of flying outwards at 100-200MPH, for 10-30 feet, as they would unencumbered.If you can find so much as a single mask study anywhere in the First World scientific or medical literature that's looked at that, by putting petri dishes at 6', 10', 20', and 30' away, and comparing viral load deposited with and without a simple snot mask from coughs and sneezes, feel free to cite it, post, and shout it from the rooftops. I'll link it on my blog if you can find so much as one such study thusly conducted, and I daresay my daily view count is probably a bit larger than yours.4) If you can't find one such study, but conduct such a study yourself, on your own or in conjunction, with even so much as a local high school science class, independently verified and peer-reviewed for repeatability and scientific accuracy, I'll pay you real cash money to subsidize your efforts. If you did that, yours would be the first such study, AFAIK, in the last 100 years. I triple-dog-dare you to do one.5) The reason the highest viral load is found on shoes is that people cough and sneeze, and the viral particles eventually hit the floor, where your shoes pick them up. QED. Unless you were suggesting that infections are spread by shoe-licking or something equally spurious, what's your point?Sorry if the realities of how masks do and don't work upsets anyone or their narrative, but physics isn't impressed with anyone's self-opinion.
We're serious about subsidizing actual mask research, because the point is evidently so settled in medical and scientific circles that no one's bothered to see if the masks do what I'm saying they do since Louis Pasteur was alive. It's also so settled there isn't a single hospital in the entire U.S., or most of the developed world, where the surgeons and nurses don't wear masks in surgery to protect the patient from the wearers, precisely as noted, because that works.
We even dug into the so-called mask studies with house trolls Tweedledum and Tweedledumber over at Mike's Cold Fury blog a month or two back, and about 15 seconds' careful research revealed that not a single one of 17 alleged mask studies cobbled together by some third-party lackwit had actually studied the precise point at issue, because apparently no one has conducted any such study in living memory.
No one does such a study because it would be the epidemiological equivalent of seeing if plain water at sea level and 1 Atm. freezes at 32° F.
But, hey, 6000 hospitals could all have been getting it totally wrong for 150 years, right?
With the level of repartee noted thus far, it's 99:1 more likely that rather than conduct a study forcing another mask genius to eat sh*t, we're instead far more apt to be "permenantly bandannaed" from Ike Clanton's site.
Proof, if you needed it, that mere possession of a keyboard and a cut and paste function with other people's memes does not a good blog make, but that Dunning-Kruger is still a thing.
Unless he has the balls to conduct such a study, we're done soiling our paws burying another bumpkin in the kitty litter casket he so richly deserves.
But as we noted earlier, people this savvy is why, if you like your pandemic, you can keep your pandemic.
We thus sadly, and with excruciating disappointment, note our suspicion that Kung Flu hasn't yet culled nearly enough Gilligans for society to be rid of this annoying pestilence, and the co-morbid stupidity and governmental overreach it elicits, like a dungheap drawing flies.
Wave 3.0 was much worse hereabouts than Wave 2.0, so please believe us when we express the sincere hope that Wave 4.0 never happens, let alone surpasses the last go-around. It would be a pleasant surprise if it works out that way. We just wish folks wouldn't run headfirst into the brick wall of Stupid, and validate all of Gropey Dopey's socialist nannyism.
(UPDATE: Color me shocked: Bumpkin got all butthurt after the second reply, and wiped out my comments and his own. {"That will show him!"} I'm hoping I'm "permenantly bandannaed" too, otherwise I'd feel short-changed.
So I leave it to readers:
All you have to do is find me one study that shows as much or more virus hits a petri dish at 6', 10', 20', and 30' with a face mask than does without any mask, and you win. Easy-peasey.
Or, run the test yourself.
Too cheap to spring for actual lab tests? Try it with a white bedsheet and a mouthful of grape kool-aid. Show all work. Photo and video proof, or it never happened.
Otherwise, masks perform exactly as you've been told (and told, and told), and I win. QED.
You'd think if it was so obvious that "masks don't work", people would be falling all over themselves to not only do this, but to post the results on YouTube. Sh'yeah, when monkeys fly outta my butt.
So far, the only video there that applies on this question is this one.)
Aesop I know from an earlier posting you were personally slightly inclined towards the J&J vaccine I am interested in your reasonings.
ReplyDeleteEven my beloved lady is starting to push me about this as it's the "least Bad" option as I'm a caregiver.
Very interested in your thoughts here friend.
One less shot for openers, and not as temp sensitive as the sub-zero Pfizer or ultra-cold requiring Moderna versions.
ReplyDeletePfizer's has also had an annoying number of sudden deaths after getting it.
Not many (out of tens of millions of people who've gotten it), unless you're one of the unlucky dead folks.
OTOH, a colleague has been doing a school project to give the vaxx, and his report is that the J&J version is truly painful, after giving hundreds of them and hearing the same reaction over and over.
Its other selling point is that while it's less effective in preventing the disease, it's highly effective in making sure that even if you get the Kung Flu, death from it is virtually not happening, because it drastically reduces the severity of symptoms from it.
The Moderna vaxx is so sensitive they can't even flick the syringe to get air bubbles out, which sounds pretty shady from where I sit.
I am thus far in no great hurry to get any of them, as I'm in no haste to be an unpaid beta-tester for any of the Big Pharma companies.
I also suspect that future versions will have a lot more bugs worked out, and no longer will be given as "experimental".
Time will tell if that's a good idea, but it's my choice, and my @$$.
This is one IPO where I'm content to not be an early adopter.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: the same people going into hysterics over having to wear a mask to avoid spreading germs are the same people who would be screaming thier heads off about suing for medical malpractice if a medical professional refused to wear a mask while treating them. Doublethink is always so fascinating to watch.
ReplyDeleteI just got the J&J shot yesterday and it did hurt quite a bit more than I thought it would have. My arm is still sore, 16+ hours out and following a good night's sleep. I don't recall my flu vaccine having that same effect.
I did think it was interesting that they just had the syringes all pre-drawn and lying out on the table. I just thought that was interesting. Of course, I don't know if Moderna/Pfizer vaccines would have been pre-drawn as well. I guess I always figured Pfizer at least couldn't be since it had to stay so cold.
No side effects yet. Hopefully it stays that way.
~Rhea
"I am thus far in no great hurry to get any of them, as I'm in no haste to be an unpaid beta-tester for any of the Big Pharma companies."
ReplyDeleteI agree with that.
One more thing. I know 6 people who have gotten the 2nd Modera shot. Every one of them has had a rough 24 - 72 hours after the shot. High temp, body aches, coughing. They all describe it as having very bad flu....
Me. I going to wait. YMMV
Video got me. I thought it was an ad. 10/10.
ReplyDelete@fitzhamilton,
ReplyDeleteAll 5 of your info-dump messages received. I'm sure you're offering them in good faith, or you wouldn't have taken the time to type that much text. They're in the "hold" bin for the time being.
I hate to break it to you, but you're still not getting it, just like Tweedledum and Tweedledumber over at Cold Fury didn't get it, so try to grasp what I'm telling you:
NOT ONE SINGLE STUDY LOOKED AT THE MASKS' ABILITY TO PREVENT OUTBOUND TRANSMISSION (which is the ONLY thing - wait for it THAT THEY'RE SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO DO).
ALL of those studies were of the ability of surgical/snot-catcher masks to protect the WEARERS from infection which is exactly what they were NEVER DESIGNED TO DO NOR EVER BILLED AS DOING. And even those tests were logically flawed in any number of ways, in every "study" I examined.
That's so bassackwards it's like doing a study to see how well windshields protect bugs from getting squashed. One has to be a total fucktard to publish such a study. And there are over a dozen of them. Draw your own conclusions about the mental acumen of the study designers.
There is not one single study looking at whether and how well the mask you wear protects the guy 6', 10', 20', or 30' away from your snot-borne viral load, because those studies were done 100 years ago, and the masks worked like gangbusters.
All the studies you linked studied whether simple masks protect the wearers, which is so far beyond retarded that if they were firing at it with artillery, retarded people couldn't hear it.
Let me know when the penny finally drops.
If you think one (or more) of those studies you linked to looked at what I'm telling you none of them did, identify it. I already waded through 17 of them with the chuckleheads elsewhere, and that's 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back. That glaring flaw took all of less than a minute apiece to identify, each and every time, and I'll wager some of the ones you're linking are the exact ones I already looked over.
If you find one that's looking the other way, and was actually a valid test, and you're sure enough about it to put your head on the chopping block about that, let me know which one(s) do that, and I'll slog through them to see. But look long and hard before you try. My patience for surveys conducted by total assclowns has been worn quite thin.
Baby diapers aren't there to protect your nose from smelling baby shit.
They're there to keep Junior's shit in his pants, rather than all over the place.
Surgical and snot-catcher masks serve the exact same function.
Now, imagine I told you I had a dozen surveys that "proved" baby diapers "didn't work", because *I* could still smell baby shit. Never mind that the actual effluvia was all still safely contained inside the nappies, precisely as designed.
And that level of "proof" is what you're waving at me to try and explain that masks "don't work".
It's not any more complicated than that.
"Byron
ReplyDeleteHere you go:
1 for https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2
1 against https://www.arglebargle.somecollectionofrandomhorseshitandopinionthatsoundsvaguelyscienceish.com
I can do this all day. The science is not conclusive. The correct studies have not been done and/or replicated. You can easily get what you want. Science is becoming a religion. Use some sense and you will probably do OK."
Dear Boy,
Science isn't a vote.
The first study, which link I left intact, was actual science, coming close to a study such as I suggested in the OP. For Common Core grads who chose to visit that site, surgical and simple snot masks provided a reduction of virus transmissions of orders of magnitude, i.e. from hundreds and thousands, without a mask, to essentially no virus.
The second link, accurately characterized in my edit, is what happens when someone types "masks don't work" into their browser and burps all the links up in a blog, then incorrectly summarizes them because he was too lazy to read them, too stupid to comprehend them, or likely both, failing all the while to note that unlike the first link, none of them examines the essential point at issue, nor disproves the study linked first. They are therefore invalid, inaccurate, pointless, worthless, and deliberately misrepresented. At best.
Perhaps to some keyboard commandos it looks like I do this by simply typing whatever I guess to be the case, and therefore anyone else thinks they can guess too, and get things right, because it's so easy. It doesn't work like that, and neither does science.
You posted one study that looks at whether masks allow virus to pass through in exhaled breath, sneezes, and coughs. Pro tip:That's the central question under discussion.
They answer to that question per that study, "Do masks stop viral droplets?" was not just "Yes" it was "O HELL YES!". You could look it up.
The eructations of another blogger, who accumulated 7 irrelevant studies, some of them studies of other studies, none of which simply examined the efficacy of masks to decrease the shedding of viral load, and thus all invalid, contain not one single study that shows results contrary to the first study, nor has any one of them documented any such results. the studies themselves are dubious, and were looking at whether mask-wearing of completely different type of masks helped the wearers, which is altogether a different question, and leads one to wonder how in hell they could ever control for the 500 variables of transmission enough to ever focus on mask-wearing alone as helpful, harmful, or neutral.
{IOW, you could work in a BL-IV lab in a Level A Encapsulating Suit all day, but if you lick handrails on the subway, your disease incidence isn't going to go down, and any survey that doesn't control for that - that would be all the ones cited - is worth less than a bushel of used toilet paper from the honeywagon at an Amarillo chili contest in deciding whether or not Level A Encapsulating Suits work.}
This is therefore akin to asking 7 drunken bums on Skid Row whether they agree with Galileo about heliocentrism: utterly pointless and meaningless.
Actual science isn't a religion.
And actual science isn't interchangeable with sideshow gypsy fortune tellers just because one of them puts on a lab coat.
I laid out how to prove masks don't work. Anyone serious should either prove it (or disprove it) that way, or quit gainsaying.
People bloviating on the net doesn't equal science, no matter how much anyone might mish it to prove their agenda, and people who can't tell the difference between a valid experiment and a wagonload of horse cobblers probably shouldn't try and equate the one with the other.
For pete's sake Mr. Aesop. You don't culture viruses in a Petri dish. I used to give blood for my lab mates back in day. Viruses are not bacteria.
ReplyDeleteThat said...
Snot guards are great! But sneezing into your elbow or down your shirt work exactly the same. And are safer." But wait! Mrs. Hobbit, you dewberry, you cannot trust these gilligans to do this!" And I reply, "So you can trust them to use masks properly?"
If you cannot trust your population to generally follow sensible precautions, honestly explained sans drama all mandates guarantee you is the Mask Gestapo.
Mask *mandates* fail for the same reason gun control mandates fail. And if you and I can ever sort out "sensible gun control - pardon me - mask wearing - regulations" we might actually make a dent in the general run of stupidity and cowardice.
Whenever someone says "masks do / do not work" the auto-reply must be: What kind of mask? To achieve what end?"
We lost this one. It is probably too late to convince people that limited use disposable masks (if you are coughing / sneezing for any reason) or wide-use of clear plastic spit guard masks (sanitize after every use!) and common sense precautions (Avoid crowds. Wash your hands. Do not self-innoculate) are useful tools for safer living.
I intend to keep trying though as I do not see how it can hurt.
It's not about winning on the internet. Especially since Team Mask Mandate is *not* the same as Team sensible precautions, anymore than Team Red Flag Law is the same as Team Eddie Eagle.
Also (not sure it is relevant) studies on whether masks prevent transmission of post-op infections from bacteria.
ReplyDeleteHere's one: (There are more.)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/#:~:text=It%20has%20never%20been%20shown%20that%20wearing%20surgical,infection%20rates%20by%20using%20face%20masks%20or%20not.
Since viruses, even ones embedded in the moisture in your breath are much smaller than bacteria, it's a fair extrapolation.
But! The studies are about transmissions from healthy aka asymptomatic surgeon. Wearing the same mask if you were coughing or sneezing or feverish might do some good, but I expect surgeons so not generally operate under those conditions?
Mask *mandates* however, and what folks getting up in your grill are objecting to is just this thing - require healthy aka asymptomatic people to wear masks. All the time. Even outdoors by themselves.
And it would seem the scientific studies are currently weighted in favor of healthy - that is asymptomatic - not needing to wear masks.
We could probably have made a good case for those clear plastic spit guards "just in case" and "even though you are healthy" since they are both sanitary and not dehumanizing. But the scientific evidence for their utility does not - as you have pointed out - exist.
O.H.,
ReplyDeleteThe study noted above from Nature showed that ordinary snot masks improve the capture of virus-laden droplets between 100x and 1000x over nothing. And that with such a mask, essentially no virus is transmitted outwards.
Further discussion begins and ends with whether or not someone can reproduce those results, or disprove them.
This was common sense and common knowledge, from 120 years ago to 5 minutes before anyone heard of COVID.
And let us bear well in mind, the first jackhole to spew the "masks don't work" malarkey was the MSM, and Idiot Fauci, serial fabulist and Emperor's Court Incompetent.
Q.: Why does Fauci still have a federal job?
A.: To make the rest of the federal idiots look competent and intelligent by contrast.