When You're Retarded, Everything Sounds Like "Science"

 h/t 90 Miles From Tyranny

This kind of idiocy is why we're doomed:

Not even N95 masks work to stop COVID.

Which then links to an article from the Brown Underpants Institute pimping some cockamamie horsesh*t purporting to support the same recockulous contention.

Which finally links to the actual study, concocted by midwits, and published by actual halfwits, in the Annals Of Internal Medicine.

You can read the study yourself.

For the TL;DR crowd, allow me to summarize.

One group was people who sometimes have access to N95 masks.

The control group did not.

Lo and behold, the rate of COVID among both groups is roughly equal.

Therefore, N95s offer no additional protection.

QED, if you were one of the two co-stars of Dumb and Dumber.

What they didn't do was study people who wore N95 masks 24/7, even while sleeping.

They didn't study the function of N95 masks themselves.

They studied people who sometimes had access to N95 masks.

Natzsofast, Guido.

Let's put it another way.

Suppose you wanted to test whether parachutes work better than nothing.

But you didn't drop 50 people suitably equipped with a parachute, versus throwing 50 random convicts wearing just boxer shorts out of a perfectly good airplane at 10,000', and compare the results for each group to determine whether parachutes worked as advertised. Oh, no, bucko. That would be too easy.

What you did instead, was study people in the 82nd Airborne Division, who sometimes had access to parachutes.

And then compare the death rate to, say, the 1st Armored Division, who don't.

If somebody in the 82nd Airborne dies in a car crash, it's those fucking worthless parachutes.

Fell off a cliff, without a chute? Those damned worthless parachutes.

Shot by a jealous husband? Another parachute fail.

Died from drinking to the point of respiratory arrest, on a three day liberty in Fayetteville? Those damned parachutes again.

Drilled into your head with a hammer drill and a 1" bit? Parachutes don't work for you, either.

Stop me when the penny drops for you.

That's the sort of grant-funded gold-plated fucktard-driven "research" the shit-for-brains editorial staff at AOIM printed, with a straight face.

FFS, those mouth-breathing shitheads even told you they were this transparently stupid right up front. This is like scooping baby shit out of a diaper, and putting sliced bananas next to it and whipped cream on top at Baskin Robbins, and telling you it's ice cream.

And you eating it.

And then someone with no idea how actual science works reads the headline, which tickles their confirmation bias like a lesbian's vibrator running on plutonium, and we're off to the races.

Hint For The 80-IQ Booger Eaters

You can't test something by looking at the results among people who aren't using it 24/7/365.

If you want to test seatbelts, you test them by people wearing them versus people not wearing them, while they're actually driving.

You do not lump in the deaths of all people from 187 other causes, compared to people who ride busses with no seatbelts, and use them to prove seatbelts don't work.

This is so fucktardedly simple it's embarrassing to even need to mention it, but the general IQ, let alone science sensibility, has sunk so far, it's like taking the "Remove Shirt Before Ironing" warning, and making it a class for college credit.

And it's now percolated up to people in the blogosphere with less sense about that than God gave a jackass.

That whoever pimped this wasn't taken out behind the building and shot, or tarred and feathered, is why society as you know it is doomed, and that includes people so jaw-droppingly stupid as to reprint it at face value.

For the Pedantically Stupid (You know who you are):

It may have escaped your notice, but this is not an argument for or against the efficacy of any mask for any purpose. It's an argument against bullshit being perpetrated as science, and average idiots too stupid to tell the two apart.

But thanks a pantload in advance for proving why it needed to be addressed, thanks to your Common Core education, as any number of anonymous comments are likely to prove beyond all doubt.