Someday, The Penny Will Drop...

There's nothing wrong with vaccines per se, polio, smallpox, and tetanus being just a few shining examples.

As long as we understand first to last that nobody jabbed with any of the Death Vaxxes developed for COVID got any such thing.

Reality, After Trainloads of Crapola

{UPDATE: For those who just stumbled in here because of a link, and missed the epic week-long ass-walloping we just gave, especially like one commenter already, maybe you want to set the Wayback Machine to last week, and catch yourself up a tad, before you walk into a movie at the final scene. Maybe.

Raconteur Report: Sciency Isn't Science 

Raconteur Report: Second Inning: Still a Shut Out. 

Raconteur Report: The Slog Continues

Raconteur Report: Back To The Septic Tank Dig

Raconteur Report: Another Post-Purgatorium Perambulation

Raconteur Report: Poop Without End

Raconteur Report: Another Day In The $#!^ Mine

Raconteur Report: ♫I've Been Working On The Sh*tpile♬

Raconteur Report: Coffee Break's Over

Raconteur Report: Delving Into The Deep End Of The Septic Tank...

Raconteur Report: Bugler, Play Taps...

Because if you do, you won't be the Baby Duck who just woke up, plopped down here, and shit all over yourself because this discussion is completely new to you.

Just saying. We now continue with our program, already in progress...}

___________________________________________

So, how do we tell the difference between her epic bullshit, and actual information?

Just like with currency: When you handle actual bills, the counterfeit ones stick out instantly.

Actual mask performance study: Respiratory virus shedding in exhaled breaths and efficacy of masks

Abstract:

"We identified seasonal human coronaviruses, influenza viruses and rhinoviruses in exhaled breath and coughs of children and adults with acute respiratory illness. Surgical face masks significantly reduced detection of influenza virus RNA in respiratory droplets and coronavirus RNA in aerosols, with a trend toward reduced detection of coronavirus RNA in respiratory droplets. Our results indicate that surgical face masks could prevent transmission of human coronaviruses and influenza viruses from symptomatic individuals."

Aesop summary: They took 246 people, 123 of whom had actual viral illnesses, including 111 with seasonal corona virus. Had them cough for 30 minutes at a virus collection machine (actually named the Gesundheit-II). Counted how many viral copies were captured. Then repeated the experiment, exact same conditions, but with the actual infected individuals wearing a variety of masks.

Results: No mask = 10¹ to 10³ viral droplet particles collected. (For Common Core grads, that's 10-1000.)

10³ to 10/4th (sorry, there's no superscript 4) viral aerosol particles collected. (Common cores, that's 1000-10,000)

Wearing surgical or simple face masks = 0 to 10º viral particles collected. (For Common Core grads, that would be one. Not 1%. Just 1. Down to zero.)

For reference, via nasal swab samples prior to the experiment, the average person with corona virus had between 10,000 and 10,000,000,000 viral copies (that's 10 billion with a B) present on a single swab of the nasal mucosa. And always more in the nose than the throat. (See if you can guess why we think so poorly of lackwit idiots sticking their schnoozes out of their masks...)

Conclusion: With the average social distancing, having people wear masks provides a reduction in viral transmission 10x-10,000x or more better than wearing nothing. And as noted by actual study data, prevents any viral transmission onward from respiratory vectors.

BTW, the face masks did better with seasonal corona virus than they did with flu and cold viruses.

They didn't use test media, they used actual virus from infected people. They measured exposure for 30 minutes. They actually tested the masks' performance, they didn't test the infection rate for people who might be licking stripper poles or living with plague-monster rug rats, absent any protection at home. Not being total morons, they also didn't bassackwardsly test to see if the masks protected the wearers.

In short, they narrowed the test down to one variable: putting on a mask.

And that's all visible there, at the study link. You could look it up.

Blackjack for the dealer. QED

AFAIK, this is the only such test of actual face mask performance done, before, during, or after COVID, and Covidiocy. (If you can link to anything similar, please do so.) Like the lack of studies of hydrochloroquine or Ivermectin when it mattered, you can decide why that would be so.

We've already shown you 51 or more examples of how not to test what you're supposedly looking at. (Starting with the maxim: "Read the goddam study first!")

Now you see one example of how to do it right, using "Science, bitchez!"

That's why all the bullshit ceases, and unless you conduct the same test, and can't replicate it, and no one else can either, you have to STFU about whether or not "masks work". (Unless you're a moron. Which is punishment enough for one life.)

We repeat for The Usual Suspects from the short bus:

Masking Policy doesn't work, because people won't follow it. Children certainly won't, but also adults acting like children, or with the intellectual ability of a two-year old, in most cases.

For the hardcore fucktards, whose memory is shorter than their pecker, to a metaphysical certainty:

You weren't told to mask to protect yourself. If you heard that, or believed it, you're the idiot there. Don't feel bad: 20% of medical professionals, actual doctors, are thereby idiots too.

You weren't masking to stop all transmission of the disease. See the above if you thought otherwise.

You were wearing them to protect everyone else from you, because then, now, and always, we don't know who the asymptomatic spreaders are, so everyone is guilty until proven innocent where infection is concerned.

You were told to mask up when out and about amidst people indoors or in crowds (anyone wearing or enforcing wearing in bright sunshine, or travelling in cars, while alone, or in deserted places, is beyond fucktardedly stupid), to drastically slow the spread enough that a novel virus, with a worst-case 3% CFR, (which meant 97% of people would be just fine, as we told you, and told you, and told you) would not overwhelm all health care in the country, or any one region of it, simultaneously, while still allowing people out and about for necessary functions, like getting food.

It worked when people did it, but it was carried out for far too long, and it was an abysmal failure as a semi-permanent policy, both for reasons of sheer human cupidity and stupidity, and for a host of larger reasons, esp. when coupled with lockdowns of everything in perpetuity, starting with sheer economics, and moving to undermining the republic, and curtailing personal freedoms indefinitely.

Bitch about that to Heaven. It's true, and eminently and demonstrably bitchworthy.

But save the horseshit about "masks don't work". That's a fucktard's fuckwit line. Don't be one.

If you disagree, back it up with valid firsthand proof of what you're claiming; otherwise your confirmation bias and/or innate stupidity is yanking the bell on your Dunning-Kruger gene, and trying to drive the bus from the back row.

Masking policy depends, and depended, on near 100% compliance. One asymptomatic Gilligan being a Special Snowflake fucks the whole idea up for everyone, and did. And always would. And always will. Which is why it never will and never could work.

Like WE TOLD YOU, all the way back at the beginning.

In any pandemic, you're at the mercy of your own ability to self-isolate, times the number of Gilligans in society trying to fuck things up 24/7/365, because that's what Gilligans DO.

COVID showed that last to be about 50% of the population for any given day or place. Babies with a case of live grenades couldn't have fucked things up any better.

And TPTB were either criminally stupid for not knowing that would be the case, or criminally evil for knowing it and doing it anyways, because the worse they could jack life up for everyone, the better for stealing an election, and putting their boot on everyone's face forever.

The third- and fourth-order consequences of COVID are still fucking up everyone's life, day after day, and all the lava chunks from the initial explosion still haven't all landed. Starting with the biggest pieces of horseplop it inflicted upon us all, currently sitting in the Oval Office, and just down the hall from it.

Stop throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and focus on the actual realities, and biggest problems. Walking around with your underpants on your head and chanting "We're morons! We're united!" isn't getting anything useful accomplished.

Kindly knock that stupid shit off. You're mainly just pissing off people smarter than you, and sounding stupid while doing it.

Paging Otto

 

Le sigh. 

Today we look at something a lot of people think they understand, point out the glaring flaw in their reasoning, and deliver poo-flinging amounts of butthurt upon them. For them, the apocalypse. For us, any day ending in "y".

Some people keep wanting to be right on something, and it truly pains us. Like sucking on lemons would. We'd rather not do it, because there's no sweetness to be found. But sometimes we just cut up the lemons, and let other people suck it. This would be that time.

You may have seen this little bucket of codswallop. Usually as the preface for a "See?!? We Wuz Right! MASK DON'T WORK! ELEVENTY!" article trying to justify their weak grasp of middle school science.

There are at least two problems with that line of jackkassery :

1) In neither that study, nor in any of the 20 40 60 78(!) studies cited does anyone say "Masks Don't Work". Not as such, nor anything close to that.

2) That's not what they were even studying, nor even attempting to study.

So what does the study cited actually say?

I know this is a novel approach for people who swallowed the "Masks Don't Work" horseshit hook, line, and sinker, but let's excerpt the following quote from the actual study summation:

Author's Conclusions

"The high risk of bias in the trials {that would be the exact 78 studies everyone who never read them is huffing and puffing about - A.}, variation in outcome measurement {meaning endless apples-to-oranges fallacious equivalencies -A.},and relatively low adherence with the interventions {meaning no one wore their f**king masks neither properly, nor most of the time, exactly like we told you they wouldn't, ever} during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions."

In other words, 

"We took your grant money, and spent most of it on hookers and blow, because after looking at all this endless horsesh*t passing for scientific study, we still cannot make head nor tails out of any of it." 

But wait! There's more!

"The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited..."

In other words,

"We'd have more confidence in a study of the best traps to catch a Bigfoot, if it had been conducted by the Seven Dwarves, and verified by the Tooth Fairy."

Saving the best for last:

"There is a need for large, well-designed RCTs [randomised controlled trials] addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness..."

In other words,

"None of these studies was large enough for statistical significance, they were all poorly designed, they were neither randomised, nor were other variables controlled for, nor did any of them examine actual effectiveness, let alone in multiple settings nor populations, nor did any of them control for the fact that people didn't follow any of the imaginary controls, so we really have no idea what effect that had on the dubious results obtained, and quite frankly, they would all be more authoritative if they'd sacrificed a goat, or read chicken entrails and tea leaves before stating their pre-ordained conclusions. We're sorry we even bothered, because what we found was pure bullshit, masquerading as prime rib and sirloin." 

The study authors have just told you, point-blank, that their study wasn't worth a bag of warm piss, and that they wish they'd found any relevant, accurate, and valid studies to look at, but since all they had to work with was horseshit, they decided to bake horseshit pie.

We pray you, stop eating the pie.

What doesn't the study say, anywhere, with any level of confidence higher than "This is probably total bullshit, and liable to be the exact opposite of reality"...?

It doesn't say, anywhere, explicitly nor by implication, that Masks Don't Work.

Which is nonetheless what multiple sites keep cock-a-doodle-dooing over, as if just the opposite were true.

If you're going to get off the helicopter and walk into the tail rotor, you'll have your reward rather promptly.

There's been, AFAIK, one actual study of whether or not masks work to reduce the spread of virus, with a statistically valid sample, and scrupulous methodology.

We'll keep citing it until the penny drops even with the midwits in the crowd:

Efficacy of face masks.

That's the only actual study of mask effectiveness in the last 5 years of which we are aware.

The 78 studies looked at weren't looking at that, which is why they set out neither to prove nor disprove that proposition.

Because they were studies not of mask effectiveness, but of masking policy effectiveness.

♫ One of these things, is not like the other one...♫

Masks work. 100x to 1000x better than wearing nothing. You could look it up.

But masking policies? Abysmal failure.

Because people are quite simply total fucktards.

You want to cite the "study" that's the basis for numerous "Masks Don't Work! See, We Told you So!" posts? That's nothing but psycho-ceramics: the study of crackpots.

But you want to tell us trying to convince the majority of the population to do something sensible, and do it circumspectly, correctly, and scrupulously, has less than a snowball's chance in Hell of working?

We told YOU that very thing, right on this blog, nearly three years ago.

Still feeling butthurt? There's an app for that.

New Dark Ages vs. The Light Of Knowledge

 

Over at Borepatch's blog, he mentions additional evidence to overturn the beloved Big Bang Theory, which has people who've embraced it lifelong in what is best described as panic.

Commenter SiG mentions a New Dark Ages.

Too late, I say. The New Dark Ages have already started. We've been in a Post-Scientific Age for decades, if not nearly a couple of centuries. I've mentioned this before, because I'm not the only one who's noticed it.

The only trouble with describing a New Dark Ages is that one must necessarily place the advent in the past tense. Probably somewhere around the mid 1800s.

It's a sloppy border, not a hard demarcation, but while some of the harder sciences proceeded fairly normally to the current moment, the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings regressed hard over a century and a half ago, and many of the popular explainers were promulgating the exact superstition-filled world they claimed to be leading us out of. Color me shocked.

They merely traded their own biases and fears for those of the medieval monks, and they've spent entire careers, not shining a light on darkness, but throwing buckets of water on any unorthodox candles they find offensive.

That's "scientific consensus" in a nutshell, and such dictatorial groupthink - the hallmark of tyranny and socialism in every other realm - has ever been the nemesis of actual discovery.

The only thing that makes it even partly fair over time is that some things can't be shouted down, because the entire body of evidence shouts back against them.

Science is a team sport; Discovery is one man stepping forward onto the pinnacle and saying "A-Ha!"

Thus true science is always and necessarily Show and Tell.

There's no Tell without the Show. And anyone who says "Trust the science" isn't a scientist, he's a used-car salesman, trying to get you to buy the sizzle, without providing any steak.

Everyone's job, as a proper consumer of the product, should be shouting back at those charlatans, "Where's the beef?"

False prophets, upon discovery as such, used to be stoned to death. It's a penalty that needs to be revived.

Damned Science

 h/t Irons In The Fire

It seems the universe didn't get the Hawking Memo,
and all those galaxies are not flying ever outward into the abyss.
They're all just sitting there, minding their own business.

Waitwhat?

No Big Bang?

Hmm.

Fully-formed galaxies, old and young, hang speckled throughout the cosmos, as though Someone had one day just hung them up there hither and yon like enormous Christmas tree ornaments.

I wonder what that could mean, when a physical event and process no longer explains the existence of the cosmos. However will they explain this away next?

Cue the "It's just a great black sheet, with holes punched in it to let the light through, because aliens are trying to hornswoggle us" Theory, in 3, 2, ...

We were taught, and hold to the notion, that All Truth Is God's Truth, and firmly believe that we weren't given a mind and strong arms if not to help us understand the mechanism we inhabit, and we applaud all such exploration and illumination.

But the more of this we see, the greater our suspicion that cosmologists are intensely studying the rococo backgrounds and brick-a-brac on the stage with binoculars and telescopes, to the point of counting the buttons and threads-per-inch in the performers' garments, while entirely missing the glorious performance that is the main focus of this opera.

YMMV

I'm Sure It's Just A Wild Coincidence...

 

Another two of my "fully" vaxxed and boosted colleagues are home with the 'VID. For the second time, each.

Poor little wholly unvaxxed me: haven't been sick a single day since before this started, and confirmed COVID-free via twice weekly mandated testing for the unvaxxed.

Almost like the Not-A-Vaxx is not a vaxx. Hmm. How...curious.

For those of you who sadly chose the Jab, my sincere condolences. You did it from the best of motives in most cases, with poor information and good intentions, but based on all extant information, your life to come is looking less than fabulous by the day.

And when I pointed out to other fully (so far) vaxxed colleagues that "At least COVID has mutated to a less virulent form", the knee jerk answer was "because of the vaxx". I shit you not. And that was from a supervisor.

I should have given Polly a cracker for being a good parrot.

This is the average mentality among people who should know better, FFS.

Which means the average science-illiterate is 10 IQ points below that.

I'm still waiting for the inevitable, when one of the vaxxed employees hereabouts drops dead at a young and healthy 30-50 from "suddenly", and the light bulbs maybe begin popping on. But based on yesterday's response, that'll be no time soon, and I wouldn't be holding my breath for common sense to break out.

War Is Peace.

Freedom Is Slavery.

Ignorance Is Strength.

2+2=5.

AMSOC is here. O'Brien would be proud.

Cannonballing Into The Stupid Pool

 

This is what a cannonball dive looks like in a swimming pool.
To see what it looks like into a septic tank, read the linked
Daily Mail article, or the chuckleheaded "study" it's based on.

479th time in the last 2 years: 

Cloth face masks do not, nor were they ever intended to protect the wearer from other people's germs. This has only been common knowledge since about 1870 or so, so we can totally understand how the baby ducks who did the Bristol "study", the Daily Mail, or anything-but-random* fuckwits on the internet may not have heard about it after only about 150 years of common medical usage.

Dumbfuck Pop Quiz: given the works of Louis Pasteur,
Ignaz Semmelweis, and Joseph Lister, are the
masks being worn by the surgery staff intended to
 a) keep their germs out of the patient, or
b) to keep the patient's germs out of the surgical team?
Grading will be on a scale of Pass/Fucktard.

Cloth face masks are there to keep your snot in your bubble, and preventing it from flying outward at 200-300mph every time you cough or sneeze, and entering anyone else's piehole.

If anyone out there still cannot grasp this basic reality, you are literally too fucking stupid to have internet access without adult supervision, and a baby monitor should be in place on you, to make sure you remember how to breathe without being prompted by a punch to the solar plexus 12-20 times per minute.

If any of this is news to you, you're making Emperor Poopypants' mental abilities look like Stephen F. (for "Fucking") Hawking by comparison.

 

And with this latest "study" determining, yet again, that wet streets cause rain, we remind those who still haven't read it to peruse the -AFAIK- only recent study to actually test the effectiveness of cloth masks to prevent snot blasted viral loads from travelling OUT, rather than the recockulous idea that they're worn to stop viral particles from getting IN, is this one.

TL;DR?

(Ask me how I knew.)

Measuring from 6' away, wearing no mask, while coughing and sneezing, delivered  between 10² and 10³ viral particles from people with actual Kung Flu to a viral collector. (For Common Core Grads, that means 100 to 1000 individual virus particles flew that far. You're welcome.)

Conducting the same test under the same conditions, with any variety of face covering, reduced the number of viral particles hitting the collector to 10°. (Common Core grads: that would be a total of one.) Not two. Not three. Not 11. Not 100. Not 1000. Just one.

I apologize for throwing this much math at people, but that means a cloth mask is between 99% and 99.9% effective at keeping your COVID viral snotstorm in your piehole, and out of everyone else's, at a range of 6'.

Don't believe me: Take off your shoes and socks, or get a calculator, and Do. The. Math.

If anyone out there is still too stupid to grasp the utter worthlessness of the alleged "study" that triggered this rant for use as anything other than lining your cat's litter box, bird's cage, or wiping your own ass when the outhouse runs out of Charmin, I would suggest cutting lead paint chips out of your diet, and cutting back to something less than two jugs of moonshine per night.

And before anyone attempts to kneejerk regurgitate "masks don't work" in Comments, define "mask", and define "work", before you climb onto the diving board over the septic tank for the next cannonball.

_____

OTOH, for COVID news you can actually use and profit from, I suggest going to Herschel's summary of Kung Flu revelatory notes you might have seen at Peter's BRM  blog, WRSA, and elsewhere, all in one handy post.  Read it while you knead bread dough by hand, or clean your firearms, and perhaps as you knot a handy length of rope into a serviceable noose.

UPDATE: And today, one day later, Burning Platform* (which name should be changed to Burning Horseshit if this is the best he can do), published rent-seeking jackass Steve Kirsch's asinine look at a study which noted that increasing mask compliance that showed a 9% decrease in infection, and an 11% decrease in symptoms, from a 30% increase in mask-wearing, shows that "masks don't do anything". 

Leaving that level of retardation to fend for itself, what was wholly overlooked was that the final compliance rate change was from 13% to 42%, meaning the entire study was conducted amongst people where 58% of them never masked at all. Imagine studying the effects of kevlar vests in a 10' x 10' room where 58 out of 100 people drop live hand grenades with the pins pulled, and then telling me that obviously, kevlar has no effect on stopping fragments among the 42 people in that room who had one on.

This is a level of "science" grasp last seen from Sir Bedevere in Quest For the Holy Grail: "That, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped."

What this demonstrates is that, exactly as my father frequently suggested whilst reading the newspaper, that "Shit'll do for brains, in a pinch."

*[Sorry to point and use WP marking rounds, but our patience for this level of dipshittery and bag-of-hammers stupidity has worn through the boot and all the way to the raw blister. You Were Fucking Wrong. If this could have been you, we suggest you try turning up the dial on your computer marked "brightness". It can't hurt, at this point.]

The Federalist Beclowns Itself

 

Masktardation is a thing, and it cuts both ways.
Don't be a masktard.

Some blogs, even ones which we visit and pass along content here, apparently either desperate for content, and/or overcome by pathological levels of confirmation bias, go dredging old news to come up with that content. (Kids with a blog, we beseech you earnestly, don't do this. It rarely goes well, and will nearly always  blow up in your face.) Kill your own meat, kids, and eat it fresh, not months-old. Case in point:

The Federalist has now breathlessly announced that Kung Flu is an "airborne" virus. Based on the pronouncements of "medical experts" (our emphasis, with appropriate derision) from the Communist News network, CNN.

Firstly, when you're listening to any of the usual gang of five-star gold-plated idiots at CNN, you deserve what you get, and even the fucktards at The Federalist who pointed at that bunch of @$$clowns should have known better than to go there, yet away they went.

Secondly, much like that term in a military context, the designation of a virus as "airborne" has actual criteria, which Kung Flu does not meet, and has never met thus far. It's a virus transmitted by droplet transmission and contact transmission. (And nota bene, gentle reader, that the @$$clowns at CDC and numerous sites have deliberately hazed and clusterfornicated up all those definitions in their ceaseless efforts to karenize Kung Flu into the Virus From Hell; I had to go all the way to that bastion of accuracy, Wikipedia, which was the seventh or eighth listed definition for "airborne" transmission, to get an accurate and correct definition that hadn't been completely and purposely fucked up to make Kung Flu fit that mold, which it does not meet to date.) 

For reference: "Airborne or aerosol transmission is transmission of an infectious disease through small particles suspended in the air." (Emphasis mine, for a reason.)

Briefly, something like TB is airborne. The bacteria wafts around and floats in air for prolonged periods of time (we're talking half an hour to hours) after mere exhalation, let alone coughs or sneezes. This is what makes TB or any airborne disease such a royal PITA, medically and epidemiologically. One person with TB can infect dozens in a restaurant or movie theater in a few minutes' time, and did before antibiotics, and still do. Which is why places where TB is endemic and widespread, like slam-packed Asian nations, are places where wearing a cloth surgical mask over the nose and mouth is a daily thing going back decades. (We'll return to tht point momentarily as well.)

But then, the dutiful Karens at Wikipedia, not content to leave the science alone, have gotten into the moving goalposts act, which is what happens when high school and college "experts" are left to edit any repository of knowledge, with all the experience of Gilligan playing with plastic explosive:

"Airborne transmission traditionally has been considered distinct from transmission by droplets, but this is incorrect." - same Wikitardia article 

With a footnote that links directly to some hogwash entitled "COVID-19 has redefined airborne  transmission".

By the numbers:

1) Airborne transmission is, is, IS distinct from transmission by droplets. If you have a plant mister, you get this. Blast a mist of aerosolized water into the air, and there's a mist cloud there, briefly. Unlike, e.g. tuberculosis bacteria, that vapor cloud isn't there very long. (For instant proof, try that on a hot day.)

2) COVID-19 didn't "re-define" airborne transmission, but jackholes trying to make COVID-19 do something which it manifestly does not do, have changed the definition of "airborne" to suit their purpose, by first ass-raping the English language and medical definitions.

QED

Language doesn't work like that, especially in science, versus in political advocacy.

Language, especially medical and scientific, is not
fungible, despite the earnest opposing desires of
crack-smoking Leftards.

For those with military training, it's the difference between getting hit with nerve gas, versus by a projectile. If you're standing in someone's cough- or sneeze-spew cone, you're being hit with a droplet. It's a projectile. If you walk into a cloud of VX, you're getting hit with something airborne. And minute sneeze particles hanging about for a few minutes is not the same as something that lingers for hours. Period.

But wait, there's more.

Then, our heroes, both the blog in question, and The Federalist, not content with that much fail, go far beyond stupid, to recockulous.

"Joe Biden’s COVID-19 adviser Dr. Michael Osterholm similarly agreed that wearing masks is “largely” nonsense and that “trying to stop the flu [another respiratory virus] is like trying to stop the wind.”

Point of Order: So CNN "experts" weren't stupid enough, now you're going to reference Joe Biden's "science adviser"?!? Well-played, soopergeniusii.

And then point to a "meta-analysis". Which isn't a clinical study. It's a study of other clinical studies.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

If you do a meta-analysis of physics studies, published by Einstein, Fermi, Richard Feynman, and Sir Isaac Newton, you might have something worth reporting. If instead you do a meta-analysis of studies published by Gilligan, Goober from Mayberry, Inspector Clouseau, and Baldrick from Blackadder, well, not so much.

Because you lump all the studies in together, and assume that their methodology wasn't hugely suspect, and that their results are repeatable.

Put another way: Exactly how much straight horsehsit are you okay with being cooked into your meatloaf?

Now bear in mind that most of the "studies" are pure horseshit, and re-answer the question.

That the overwhelming bulk of such studies are results that are totally unreproduceable has been an open secret in research science for two decades. SiG revisits this topic frequently, and it's gotten worse than 70% bullshit, year after year. It's something like 90%+, when last I looked. "Meta-analysis" sweeps all that under the rug into a nice hidden shitball of fail.

That's just the overall problem. Next, there's methodology.

IOW, if you want to study something, you have to account for all variables. ALL variables. Ideally, you want to get down to studying just one. Hopefully, the exact one you're hypothesizing about.

For instance, if you want to know the exact temperature at which water freezes, you do at testing at 14.7 psi, I.e. atmospheric average pressure at sea level. Otherwise, when someone tries to replicate your data in Denver, it won't work. You standardize ambient humidity at, e.g., 50%. Or else someone in Panama, at 99% humidity, and someone in Anchorage in January, when humidity is 2%, are going to fail to get the same results, and thus doubt your "proof". And you use absolutely pure sterilized ionized water, with 0% salinity, otherwise, someone trying seawater, or sediment and bacteria-laden swamp water, are going to announce loudly and publicly that your research is horse cobblers. So then, with only the ambient water temperature a factor, at standard sea level pressure, and 0% salinity, you freeze water 100 times, and it keeps coming to 32° F. time after time after time, and you've got something you can publish.

And, for bonus points, if you get random other numbers, you've failed, but you've discovered a hidden variable, an Unknown Unknown, and your new job is to find that little bastard, and track down the Truth. This is why Edison tried and failed hundreds of times to invent a working lightbulb, until he'd weeded out all the variables, and it finally worked.

But grant-beholden scientists nowadays especially are too lazy for that. It's too hard; they know they're right, so they skip a few steps. And when someone checks their experiment, and it cannot be reproduced, it's so much crap. But the "scientist" who did the original experiment has "proved" that asbestos is harmless, and smoking causes no health problems, so the building material supplier or tobacco company who funded their "experiment' pays out, and they cash the check, and never look back. Have lab coat, will falsify data for cash.

Enter advocacy government.

Global warmism/climate change. Or gender dysphoria. And now, coronatardation and COVIDmania.

Suddenly, you're "testing" masks never designed to protect the wearer, and - mirabile dictu! - "masks don't work". (Somebody call Pasteur, Lister, and Semmelweiss, and tell them it's not germs, it's bad air floating in the phlogiston that cause diseases. I'll wait over here.)

There may be others in recent times, but I'm aware of precisely one proper study of the effectiveness of cloth and surgical face masks, used as intended, using documented infected persons, in a study that lasted years, and controlling for the only variable that matters: does the virus get out?

TL;DR: 

No mask - 100 to 1000 coronavirus viral particles land in a viral particle chamber in front of their face after 30 minutes.

Bog-average surgical mask - 1 viral particle escaped. IOW, a 99.9% to 99.99% prevention of viral load down to 5 microns or less was achieved over 30 minutes' exposure.

None of the studies referenced by The Federalist tested that. They tested whether the masks protect the wearer. [Pro-tip, fucktards: they are neither designed nor intended for that, since ever. You could look it up.] This is like testing parachutes to see how many people wearing them didn't land on the earth. Fucktard Science 101 level error there, geniuses.

They tested whether the masks stopped everything, for unknown long periods of time, e.g., during extended surgical procedures.

In one "study" cited, they found that wearing a double t-shirt mask increased the level of virus expelled above the level transmitted by wearing nothing. [Pro-tip: if you can't figure out why this is prima facie recockulously impossible, try putting a t-shirt over the gas nozzle at the local station, and see if that delivers more gasoline into your car's tank. IOW, you can't exceed the results of no mask, under any circumstances, unless you're having people blow through a fully colonized petri dish of germs grown for days beforehand.]

When a test succeeded exactly as expected, it was labelled as "apples and oranges".

We could go on and on, as these assclowns have, but their point is pointless.

When you keep pointing to retards, and bullshit studies, and then act like Little Jack Horner pulling a plum out of your ass, you're just an idiot.

When you can't account for a thousand other things, like people wearing their masks on their chin, or touching everything with gloves, and then taking those gloves off with their teeth to touch their cellphones, or don't wash their nasty hands after they crap and rub feces all over them and then finger-bang everything they touch afterwards with their poo, the problem isn't masking or not, it's societal retardation. And dozens of variables you forgot to control out of the experiment.

Masks Work - As Designed

A surgical or cotton mask isn't something you wear to protect yourself. Write that on your hand with a Sharpie in case you're too stupid to remember that. You wear one to protect other people from you. For the same reason you put a diaper on a baby's ass. It's not there to protect the baby from shitting himself. If this needs further explanation, you're not smart enough to be let out in public without the chaperone from the short bus field trip, and you can probably tell the class what the glass on its windows tastes like.

If your aim is self-protection, you need to be wearing a properly fitted and fit-tested N95, or better. Got facial hair that prevents a proper seal? You're f**ked. Haven't been fit-tested? You might be f**ked. Don't know how to put it on right and seal it properly? You're f**ked. That's why the surgeon general correctly told you not to bother with an N95, unless you're going to do the homework necessary. Only afterwards did CNN and Fauci retardedly conflate that down to "masks don't work".

Anybody who was ever in a military or police tear gas training chamber exercise knows what I'm talking about here.

People too stupid to understand that were very entertaining to those of us in those chambers who watched them spaz out and lose their shit, choke, and puke, because they didn't pay attention. Don't be That Guy.

What Masks Won't Do

An N95 won't protect you from anyone if you wear it wrong, or it doesn't fit and seal.

A surgical or cotton mask isn't there to protect you from anyone else.

Any mask is pointless if you aren't in close proximity to the infected, and you aren't infected yourself.

In your car, by yourself, wearing a mask? You're a fucktard. Walking outside, or exercising, by yourself, with a mask on? You're a fucktard. In a population that isn't infected with COVID, flu, or anything else, and wearing a mask? You're a fucktard.

The problem comes with that last part: knowing whether you, or anyone else, is infected. Want to go mask-free? ROWYBS. And so will everyone else around you. Which works fine (just like with VD and AIDS, and merrily sport-f**king people.) Until it doesn't. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

I've been wearing masks of all levels, and putting them on people, professionally, for decades. They piss me off mightily. But if you cough or sneeze or spit, fuck your comfort. And if I have to be around you, and you could give me something nasty, or lethal, fuck my comfort too. Harden the fuck up.

When enough people play stupid games, the professional jackasses in politics feel honor-bound to nanny them.

When they have a spring-loaded fuck-with-everyone-and-control-their-every-waking-activity setting, then it becomes the shitshow we've lived for the last two years and counting.

And when intelligence is a constant, but the population is increasing, the mean IQ is dropping like CNN's ratings.

Bloggers and the usual gang of science-impaired idiots at The Federalist should probably stop hitching their wagons to the fucktards at CDC and ABCNNBCBS. Unless you don't want people to be able to tell the difference.

Related: GMTA. RTWT.

Quite The Poser

 See if you can guess why the lack of any enthusiasm for further testing of the safety and efficacy of the current Vaxx jabs. You get three guesses, and the first two don't count.

FDA: COVID Vaxx = 71x more heart attacks

 h/t Vlad Tepes blog

(HOLY SHIT) This was an FDA livestream of an open virtual meeting their own officials and medical professionals, along with multiple other outside parties, from yesterday. This is a US Government-sponsored meeting:

"Herd immunity using the vaccine is impossible." 4:15:00ff

"The vaccine caused 71x more heart attacks in the vaccinated than any other vaccine." 4:20:00ff

"...vaccines, boosters, and mandates are all nonsensical." 4:21:00

"We killed two people to save one life." 4:21:30

"[The number of deaths per million doses administered - 411:1M] translates into about 150,000 people have died (from receiving the vaccine in just the U.S.)." 4:21:50ff

"The real numbers confirm that we kill more than we save." 4:22:00ff

"In the most optimistic study (for 90-year-olds) it means 50% of the vaccinated died, and 0% of the unvaccinated died." 4:22: 20

Read and watch TWT.

Most of that was from the presentation of Steve Kirsch, Exec. Director of COVID Early Treatment Fund.

This guy is throwing hand grenades out with the pins pulled, every 5 seconds, the kind of headlines that would get a newsreader from BFEgypt a featured position at 60 Minutes.

Presenter after presenter beat the vaxx pimps over and over about the dearth of proper testing protocols, and utter lack of actual scientific data for any of the claims to date made by them and TPTB.

The entire meeting left the reservation, and stayed there.

Direct YouTube link. Go to indicated timestamps. (It was an all-day 8-hour live virtual meeting.)

Do You GET IT Yet??

Anyone who thought otherwise has been well and truly had.

FTR, that 411:1M death:vaccine ratio means 157,000 US dead, which is over 25% of all US deaths reported and attributed to COVID. BTW, as was pointed out in the meeting, the Israeli COVID case and death spike, in a country with more than 80% vaxxed, correlates with increasing vaccinations, at exactly 1:1. The vaccine is the pandemic, and the killer.

Cat: Completely out of the bag. Game: Over.

Be Careful What You Wish For

 From a particularly thought-provoking post over at Zero's blog, this response:

"As I type this my wife has been in a local hospital emergency room waiting for a bed for the past 12 hours. She has Covid and is struggling to breath. She has been treated like a leper an not even offered an food. Her ER Doc walked out and slammed the door after she asked to be given a vitamin C IV. He said he wouldn’t treat her with something not proven and she was free to leave."

My reply, which Cdr. Zero may or may not elect to publish there (his choice. And the graphic aids are just for you, Gentle Readers):

My sympathies on your wife's plight. Really.

Just curious: When you take your car to the mechanic, do you tell him how to fix that, too? Or not? If not, how many years of education did your mechanic get, after his college degree?

Have you ever hired a lawyer? Who handled the legal work? You, or him/her?

Just wondering. Let me know if the penny drops.

FWIW, the time to bulk up on Vitamin C was probably long before coming down with COVID, and shockingly, there aren't too many doctors amenable to letting their patients run their own treatment regimen.

It's got a lot to do with losing their own medical license for letting patients practice the medicine. States are kind of sticky about letting passengers fly the airliner, for similar reasons.

So the bigger question is, why did you go to the emergency room in the first place?

My second is, how much is orange juice selling for at the local market?

My third is, where d'ya suppose she got COVID, and how regularly do folks thereabouts wear masks, and how often does she use ordinary hand sanitizer?

And regarding getting fed, did you see a menu at the ER drive-thru window? Or not?

I ask that last one, because as a rule, if you need food, it's probably not an emergency; and if it's an emergency, you probably don't need food. Unless she's been there at least overnight, and/or her blood sugar is less than 70mg/dL, as a rule. 12 hours is largely meaningless, because if there's no food to offer (which is most days, or in my case, nights) there's no point in making such an offer. But if you're admitted and there all day and overnight, we'll generally put in a breakfast order for a tray the next morning. I've yet to see anyone starve to death my entire career for missing a meal or two, but I suppose it might have happened, somewhere.

If being treated "like a leper" is being put inside a sealed isolation room, that's standard of care for COVID for, oh, about 18 months. We're not really big on hand-holding and wet sloppy kisses with infectious diseases, and speaking personally, a COVID patient (I had two more last night) involves getting gowned and gloved up before I enter the Giant Ziplok Of Isolation, and I'm required to wear an N95 at all times in my department. Some people add a face shield or powered respirator. If any of this is news to you, you haven't been watching any since about February 2020.

If you meant they marooned her on an island for life and poked her overboard with sticks, then you have my sincere apologies for the misunderstanding.

But even then, lepers should expect to be treated better than COVID patients: leprosy, unlike COVID, can be cured.

I'm sincerely sorry your wife is sick enough to need a hospital admission.  Ain't nothing good about this bug, and even mild cases suck. But waiting to drive the bus until you get to that point isn't really a great plan, as you're both finding out about now.

Best wishes on your wife's full recovery and return home to her world, rather than spending time in the hospital. I don't recommend it to anyone unless they have no choice, because most people have no wild idea why it isn't run like a billionaire's ski resort or a fast food drive thru, especially for the last year and a half, and are shocked and dismayed that unlike House or Scrubs, or any number of fantasy treatments, things don't all get resolved in 42 minutes, plus commercial breaks, and it becomes very frustrating and disorienting to not be the bright center around which the universe revolves. Illness annoys people, because it rubs their noses in the fact that everything they thought about being in control of their life was pure fantasy. And that's a jarring shock every time it happens.

And particularly among a burgeoning pandemic, short on staff and long on patients, we don't generally have a lot of time to break it down in detail for everyone, every night.

The short story would be for folks to ponder why, going back centuries, it's called being a "patient". All of us in the health care biz are generally working pretty hard lately, but try as we might, we can't be everywhere at once, and we can't make things happen that simply aren't possible. And if people aren't swarming around you in droves, cheer up: it means you're not the guy whose heart has stopped, while we try and bring you back from the dead. So if that's not you or yours, it's a pretty good sign that things aren't really so bad.

And I'm telling you this because you're a good enough guy to be concerned about your wife. (You'd be shocked how many people aren't even that decent.) But what you don't know, not being around nor familiar with the strange new world she's visiting, involuntarily, is that usually the best way to help us do our job, is to let us do our job. Even when and if it makes you feel impotent and out of control.

And if you don't trust us to do that, you probably should leave, and go find someplace where you do trust the people there to do that. As a rule, it doesn't hurt our feelings, especially if you figure that out before you ever walk in. We only get ticked when we waste 5 or 10 hours on someone, who then bails out anyways, wasting the time we could have spent on someone who wanted to be there enough to stay.

_____

I frequently make mention, in my workplace travels, of a salutary tidbit of medical history, from James Burke's excellent The Day The Universe Changed concerning a seminal point about the era when medicine departed from witchdoctory, and became science.

One of the brilliant improvements in the life of the average Frenchman under Napoleon (and there were many such) was that after deposing the king and nobility, there was suddenly a lot of wealth to spend on the peasantry. Consequently, Napoleon set up dozens of free hospitals throughout Paris. And for a real change, they each specialized in one thing. IOW, one hospital treated just gun shot wounds (Napoleon's conquests provided a lot of those too); another might only do broken legs; yet another might do nothing but treat eye injuries, or skin infections, or sick babies.

As Burke points out, medicine before this time was myth and hokum, and if any physician found something that worked, he kept it to himself, lest the other quacks find his secrets out, and steal his best-paying customers.

Under Napoleon's hospital system just the opposite. In the Gunshot Wound Hospital, for example, they might treat 20 gunshot wounds to the legs of as many patients. Five would be treated with boiling tar applied to the wound. Five others might receive a poultice of dog crap and urine daily. Five more would be wrapped, and left to heal or putrefy on their own device. The last five would have the wounds washed daily, and the dressings changed with fresh clean ones. Unsurprisingly, all of the first 15 would get gangrene, and lose their legs to amputation, and the last five - or perhaps only 4 out of 5 - would heal nicely and make a full recovery. But now, the doctors would discuss and publish the results, and tell all their fellow doctors, and the next 20 gunshot wounds would all get the treatment that worked, and the others would be discarded forever. Withcdoctory meets statistics, and transmogrifies into actual science. Voila!

There were only two inviolate rules under this system:

*Everything was free to the patient.

*Anyone who didn't comply absolutely with the doctor's treatment regimen had his sleeping pallet lifted up, carried outside, deposited at the curbside, and given the benediction "God be with you monsieur!" Because the uppity presumption that you, Peasant Scum, knew more about medicine than Le Doctor, brilliant graduate of the medical university, quite reasonably and rationally meant that your ass got kicked the fuck out, with a smile and significant alacrity. You got exactly what you wanted: to run your own case. "Bonne chance, Mssr. Cerveau!"

Fuck off, Bumpkin. We're doing science. And you're fucking up the data.

It's a custom begging to be re-introduced, with a vengeance.

And it's also why people in any science, who lie, or fake data, are the cardinal sinners in the whole edifice, because they're not just screwing the pooch for you, they're dynamiting the entire foundation the whole machine runs on: honest data. Truth.

It's why liars get harsh penalties in courts, and why bearing false witness got its very own Commandment.

You're not just being selfish, or evil, you're crossing the streams. 

And fucking it up for EVERYONE.

Which is why people doing that, for Globull Warmist religious reasons, or COVID Is A Hoax, or the Not-A-Vaxxes Are Safe and Effective, or anything else, should be staked out in the sun all week, then beaten on the back with a dry swim fin, then skinned alive, and lowered an inch at a time into a vat of rubbing alcohol. For openers.

And why people trying to run their own case should be turned loose to do so. At the curb.

The Science Is Irrefutable

 

But this stopped being about science and medicine over a year ago.

For Liberal Arts Majors and Vocational Ed Students: This Is Science

From 4 years ago, before COVIDiots fornicated 

anything on the topic all to Hell and gone.

Here's your mission:

Perform (or find someone else who has already) the following actual scientific study.

a) Get 400 petri dishes the size of a human face, filled with any standard bacterial and viral test growth medium. Mount them at a center height of 5'6", flatly facing the test subjects.

b) Have 100 different people sneeze at a plate apiece from 30' away, indoors, in still air.

c) Have 100 people cough on a plate apiece from 10' away, indoors, in still air.

d) Repeat b and c exactly 200 more times, except put a face mask (or even 2-4 different masks) on the persons sneezing/coughing first.

e) Culture all 400 of the petri dishes according to standard protocols.

f) Money shot: demonstrate that bacterial growth on d is exactly the same as b and c.

g) Show all work.

h) Bonus Round: Do it with 100 people with active, symptomatic Kung Flu.

Do that, and it's over. The science is settled, and masks don't work.

Knock yourselves out.

You should note that to date, no one has done that, AFAIK, because they know it won't show what they want it to. You won't either, to a metaphysical certainty, because you already know the idea is recockulous.

If it would work that easily, anyone could do it with half their brain tied behind their back.

But that's what science looks like, because it can be repeated, endlessly, just like the assertion that at sea level, at 1 atmosphere of normal air pressure, at 50% humidity, plain water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. No one argues that, because it's repeatable, until (you should pardon the phrase) Hell freezes over. 

Evidentiary repeatability = science.

Can't do that?

Can't find anyone who already did?

Can't find the scores of hospitals that ban surgical masks in surgery, "because they don't work"?

And no actual 10-year study showing no increase in post-op infections?

Hmm. That's quite the poser.

Science is.

It has no politics. (Ask Galileo.)

And one "study", or 200, are generally so much horsesh*t.

Because the rate of reproducibility for actual published and allegedly peer-reviewed studies has been crashing towards 0%, year after year, (and everyone but the MSM knows this), proving that they aren't science, but rather advocacy, or grant money rent-seeking, without anything like repeatable evidence to back them up.

Q.E.D.

While You Were Busy Ignoring Reality, The Consequences Called...

"You can ignore reality. You cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality." - Ayn Rand

Just a small update from the pandemic trenches:

1) Had two patients last week, both suspected for Kung Flu, who turned out to have it, absolutely.

First confirmed cases we've seen in over a month in the hospital that required hospitalization.

(And to be fair, only two patients out of several hundred, in a patient load best described as lighter-than-average.)

That coincides with the average lag between case spikes (about which IDGAF, generally), and hospitalization spikes. 

(Next come death spikes, like winter follows fall.)

2) But this was the significant takeaway.

One patient was confirmed to have been infected with it back last spring.

Double positive.

But minor symptoms, and never needed hospitalization. Like about 90+% of Kung Flu victims.

Then, once lockdowns largely ended in the U.S., he had a minor surgical procedure scheduled, which had been postponed earlier. 

So, COVID tests were done, and showed negative, two times, before being allowed to have the procedure. That was back around August.

So far, so good.

Now, three months later, in the ED last week, with sudden-onset shortness of breath, low oxygen saturation on room air, and a beautiful case of raging bilateral diffuse multi-focal pneumonia, and a positive rapid COVID-19 swab test.

In his 40s, and no co-morbidities.

Otherwise healthy.

Hospitalized.

Short answer:

You can get this again.

And again.

And again.

And subsequent infection is worse the second time.

You can kiss mythological "herd immunity" good bye when infection confers no immunity from subsequent infection waves.

Any Gilligans out there, keep preaching that "just the flu, bro" line of utter bullshit.

Lick handrails, and pee on electric fences, while you're at it.

{Hint: Don't screw around. Don't catch this. It isn't fake, and it isn't funny. Period. Full stop.}

3) Just to drive the point home, we also had a non-critical patient some weeks back, confirmed not to have it, who was hospitalized with another non-critical patient unsuspected and totally asymptomatic. Who, it turned out, was fully infectious with Kung Flu.

And gave it to patient #1.

Who subsequently declined, ending up sick enough in short order to be put in our ICU in critical condition.

But before COVID was diagnosed as the problem on that ICU visit, and the infected patient placed in respiratory isolation, they infected 10 ICU nurses, several of them seriously enough to be hospitalized.

The nurse with the worst case died of Kung Flu last week, after about a month's struggle.

Our ICU is currently (and perpetually) running at 1/2 capacity because of resultant staff shortages, and there's no one, anywhere, to bring in.

We've tried.

{This results in closing our ED regularly (to any incoming ambulances), forcing us to care for critical patients for days, rather than hours, and impacting medical care for the entire county, and by extension, a surrounding region encompassing 10% of the population of the entire U.S. of A. That's the razor-margin we work on even in good times. If things are fine for you in Mayberry or BFE, good for you. Your 0.001% success rate in an area with less than 0.1% infection is noted. You will, we hope, pardon us for a decided lack of interest in your infinitesimal success, against a virus you largely never encountered. Unlike, say, the 50 largest cities and suburban regions in the country suffering a far greater impact.}

No one wants to come play in COVID Land anymore, for any amount of money.

LIKE WE F##KING  TOLD  YOU WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, WAAAAY BACK IN MARCH.

I yell because I care.

4) BTW, our PPE is still cobbled-together horsesh*t, including souvenir-stand raincoats usually found at taco stands near tourist traps. Totally serious.

Remember than anytime you hear Fraudpeddler Fauci tell you "We can handle _______."

Like he said about Ebola in 2014.

People are going to fiddlefuck around on this, until they achieve the exact results predicted in worst-case scenarios, because the entire population is well-marbled with 80-IQ morons.

One Gilligan keeps seven castaways stranded forever, and one jackhole "just the flu, bro" asshole who takes zero precautions, because this is obviously an internet hoax, rather than some Frankenbug engineered virus, is going to be the actual super-spreader, eleven times out of ten.

For the oblivious @$$holes who will think this is pimping for another economy-killing shutdown, f##k off with that noise. It's probably a good argument for trimming activity back somewhat, only in the areas where this is raging, and by appropriate legislation, not imperial fiat.

But it's absolutely an exception-proof argument for you wearing a snot mask - not to protect you, but to protect everyone else from you - to curb the spread of the virus, and washing your g## d###ed hands, without exception, in 50 states and 7 territories, until this is either stamped out, or beaten by a Hail Mary vaccine. Wearing a sneeze mask is not communism, and washing your booger hookers is not Hitler, no matter about your pwecious feelz, Snowflake. Exactly like about 90% of you aren't doing, by observation, far outside of the local area.

And that's why you'll keep screwing yourselves, harder and faster, until even the dimmest bulbs amongst you figure that out.

Almost like Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and Ignaz Semmelweiss all knew what they were talking about 150 years ago.

On those cheery notes, Have A Happy Day.