Pandemic started in a lab:

USincognito · Mar 2, 2023

probinson said:
Um, yes it is. Any image is a "graphic". I mean, dictionary.com says this is an "Elementary Level" word, so I thought everyone here would understand what that word meant, but here you go.

View attachment 328574

You seem to be unaware of the evidence pyramid, which is what I'm referring to when I say "highest quality evidence".

View attachment 328575

Do you see the arrow on the left that says "Quality of Information"? Do you see that "Meta-analysis" sits atop the pyramid at the highest point?

I suggest you stop with the condescending tome and "lecturing".

So, you're chosing the semantic hill as your stand. O k. That graphic is nothing but an insipid 4chan meme and therefore is dismissed.

As to your little graphic with rhe little arrow, you must have missed where I used the term "metastudy" in my response. That might explain how you missed the numerous caveats the authors included in their conclusion.

Metastudy is another way of saying meta analysis.

probinson · Mar 2, 2023

USincognito said:
I suggest you stop with the condescending tome and "lecturing".

I suggest you stop telling me that a graphic isn't a graphic so that I don't have to be condescending on something so obvious.

USincognito said:
So, you're chosing the semantic hill as your stand. O k. That graphic is nothing but an insipid 4chan meme and therefore is dismissed.

Glad to see you admit that it is indeed a graphic. A graphic that I thought explained the mask debates well. I never claimed it was authoritative in any way. I offered a graphic and my opinion of it. Nothing more, nothing less.

USincognito said:
As to your little graphic with rhe little arrow, you must have missed where I used the term "metastudy" in my response. That might explain how you missed the numerous caveats the authors included in their conclusion.

Metastudy is another way of saying meta analysis.

Yes, and a meta study (or meta analysis if you prefer) is the highest quality of evidence we have.

The authors of the Cochrane Review were not including "caveats". They were saying what their meta-analysis found. And what they found is that there really isn't good data to say whether masking is beneficial, hence the graphic I posted. But what they did find wasn't exactly promising, and was consistent with decades of science and studies prior to COVID that showed little to no effect from masking.

probinson · Mar 2, 2023

Say it aint so said:
Again, no links less the one you provided which again is a study about studies where some economists use the John Hopkins moniker but make this declaration, "The views expressed in each working paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the institutions that the authors are affiliated with."

And? Do you have any comment on the study itself or on the pandemic preparedness plans that were tossed in the trash?

probinson · Mar 2, 2023

Say it aint so said:
I just provided one in post #28. I read your links when you post them, so I can correct your misnomer. I don't post links for the sheer joy of it.

My apologies, I missed that link.

So you're going to reference the Bangladesh study. OK. Interesting choice since the Bangladesh study is included in the Cochrane Review you seem eager to dismiss/downplay. It's also interesting to note that this was really the ONLY attempt at a large randomized controlled trial of masking at any point during the pandemic, which is odd since it's such a hot-button issue.

Let's see what the Bangladesh study actually found. Here is the link again, for easy reference.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

The proportion of individuals with COVID-19–like symptoms was 7.63% (N = 12,784) in the intervention arm and 8.60% (N = 13,287) in the control arm, an estimated 11.6% reduction after controlling for baseline covariates.

OK. So here we see an ~11% reduction in cases. It's worth noting that this is a far cry from the outlandish estimates that the CDC promotes. Let's take a look at this gem, published by the persistently, eminently flawed MMWR.

Wow! The CDC claims that wearing a CLOTH MASK (homemade from your old Guns 'N Roses T-shirts) reduces your infection odds by a WHOPPING 56%! If you choose a surgical mask, it's 66%! So then why did the only large, randomized controlled trial show a much smaller 11% reduction in infections in people wearing surgical masks? Seems a teensy bit disparate, wouldn't you say?

There are also some considerable problems with the Bangladesh study that call into question its results (emphasis added).

In this commentary, we re-analyze this trial using simple non-parametric tests. Upon reanalysis, we find a large, statistically significant imbalance in the size of the treatment and control arms evincing substantial post-randomization ascertainment bias by unblinded staff. The observed decrease in the primary outcome is the same magnitude as the population imbalance but fails significance by the same tests (see Fig. 1 and Table 1). This reanalysis thus complicates drawing any causal link between masks and the observed decrease in population-rate of symptomatic seropositivity.

Although raw numbers were not presented in the published paper, the primary outcome differed by a total of just 20 cases between the treatment and control arms: In a study population of over 300,000 individuals, there were 1106 symptomatic seropositives in control and 1086 in treatment.

...

Nonetheless, the data is consistent with mask wearing having modest or no direct effect on COVID-related outcomes in this experimental setting.

Re-analysis on the statistical sampling biases of a mask promotion trial in Bangladesh: a statistical replication - Trials

A recent randomized trial evaluated the impact of mask promotion on COVID-19-related outcomes. We find that staff behavior in both unblinded and supposedly blinded steps caused large and statistically significant imbalances in population sizes. These denominator differences constitute the rate...

trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com

So the Bangladesh RCT originally found a risk reduction of around 11.6% in the mask-wearing group (which is a far cry from what the CDC tells us masks are capable of), but there were issues with the trial that call into question its results on causality.

Say it aint so · Mar 2, 2023

probinson said:
And? Do you have any comment on the study itself or on the pandemic preparedness plans that were tossed in the trash?

When I want to know about economics, I read the work of economists. When I want to know the effects of medical desicions during a pandemic, I read the work of those who work in that field.

Say it aint so · Mar 2, 2023

probinson said:
My apologies, I missed that link.

So you're going to reference the Bangladesh study. OK. Interesting choice since the Bangladesh study is included in the Cochrane Review you seem eager to dismiss/downplay. It's also interesting to note that this was really the ONLY attempt at a large randomized controlled trial of masking at any point during the pandemic, which is odd since it's such a hot-button issue.

Let's see what the Bangladesh study actually found. Here is the link again, for easy reference.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069

The proportion of individuals with COVID-19–like symptoms was 7.63% (N = 12,784) in the intervention arm and 8.60% (N = 13,287) in the control arm, an estimated 11.6% reduction after controlling for baseline covariates.

OK. So here we see an ~11% reduction in cases. It's worth noting that this is a far cry from the outlandish estimates that the CDC promotes. Let's take a look at this gem, published by the persistently, eminently flawed MMWR.

View attachment 328592

Wow! The CDC claims that wearing a CLOTH MASK (homemade from your old Guns 'N Roses T-shirts) reduces your infection odds by a WHOPPING 56%! If you choose a surgical mask, it's 66%! So then why did the only large, randomized controlled trial show a much smaller 11% reduction in infections in people wearing surgical masks? Seems a teensy bit disparate, wouldn't you say?

There are also some considerable problems with the Bangladesh study that call into question its results (emphasis added).

In this commentary, we re-analyze this trial using simple non-parametric tests. Upon reanalysis, we find a large, statistically significant imbalance in the size of the treatment and control arms evincing substantial post-randomization ascertainment bias by unblinded staff. The observed decrease in the primary outcome is the same magnitude as the population imbalance but fails significance by the same tests (see Fig. 1 and Table 1). This reanalysis thus complicates drawing any causal link between masks and the observed decrease in population-rate of symptomatic seropositivity.

Although raw numbers were not presented in the published paper, the primary outcome differed by a total of just 20 cases between the treatment and control arms: In a study population of over 300,000 individuals, there were 1106 symptomatic seropositives in control and 1086 in treatment.

...

Nonetheless, the data is consistent with mask wearing having modest or no direct effect on COVID-related outcomes in this experimental setting.

Re-analysis on the statistical sampling biases of a mask promotion trial in Bangladesh: a statistical replication - Trials

A recent randomized trial evaluated the impact of mask promotion on COVID-19-related outcomes. We find that staff behavior in both unblinded and supposedly blinded steps caused large and statistically significant imbalances in population sizes. These denominator differences constitute the rate...

trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com

So the Bangladesh RCT originally found a risk reduction of around 11.6% in the mask-wearing group (which is a far cry from what the CDC tells us masks are capable of), but there were issues with the trial that call into question its results on causality.

Yes when only two of the seven eight studies were actually done during the measured placed in effect during covid, it will get rightly poo-pooed. And again, it's more than wearing masks. It's the measures taken in totality as advised by epidemiologists, not economists.

probinson · Mar 3, 2023

Say it aint so said:
When I want to know about economics, I read the work of economists. When I want to know the effects of medical desicions during a pandemic, I read the work of those who work in that field.

I don't know if you know this, but economists are pretty darn good at math, statistics and probability, which is a big part of decision making regarding pandemics. I suppose you can try to pretend like their report is meaningless, but I don't think Johns Hopkins would have let them publish under their name if they thought the study was useless.

But even so, the pandemic preparedness plans that I posted have nothing at all to do with economists. You haven't addressed any of that. Why do you suppose that everyone (except Sweden) tossed all of their pandemic preparedness plans, based on decades of sound science, in the trash when COVID hit? Isn't the reason for a pandemic preparedness plan so you have a plan for what to do during a pandemic? So why did everyone decide to implement unproven, untested, lockdowns, erect a veritable mountain of completely useless plexiglass, and pretend like staying one meter away from people was going to accomplish anything?

rjs330 · Mar 3, 2023

probinson said:
The only reason this became such a big deal is because there was such a concerted effort by the US government to classify anyone who believed the "lab-leak" theory as a conspiracy theorists. In 2020, even suggesting that SARS-CoV2 originated in a lab would get you censored or even banned on most social media platforms. It was complete taboo to even suggest it.

Whether or not SARS-CoV2 originated in a lab isn't the real story here. The real story is in how the government, and by proxy the media and big tech, took it upon themselves to censor discussion on what is now and always has been a plausible theory for the origin of the virus. And of course, this is going to fuel questions of why they were all so anxious to stifle all discussion of the possibility that the virus came from a lab.

That should concern people. And it's not just the origin of the virus that this pertains to. A recent op-ed on the topic of natural immunity in the WSJ summarizes it nicely.

The Lancet study’s vindication of natural immunity fits a pandemic pattern: The public-health clerisy rejects an argument that ostensibly threatens its authority; eventually it’s forced to soften its position in the face of incontrovertible evidence; and yet not once does it acknowledge its opponents were right.

Opinion | Three Years Late, the Lancet Recognizes Natural Immunity

The public-health clerisy rediscovers a principle of immunology it derided throughout the pandemic.

www.wsj.com

Virus origins, lockdowns, school closures, masking, natural immunity, vaccine mandates, vaccines preventing transmission, the need for everyone to be boosted annually... the list goes on and on (and on and on) of things that just one year ago had you questioned aloud, you would have been criticized, ostracized and perhaps outright banned from social media platforms. Those same topics are all up for legitimate debate now. And this is the danger of allowing the government to decide what is and is not acceptable to be discussed in the public square.

That's really why I'm interested in this topic. I want to know why the government was so very anxious to stifle all discussion on this topic when it has been a plausible explanation since day one.

Can I winner this more than once? I would love to.

probinson · Mar 3, 2023

Say it aint so said:
Yes when only two of the seven eight studies were actually done during the measured placed in effect during covid, it will get rightly poo-pooed.

Do you really think that COVID is that much different from the flu in terms of viral transmission that you can't learn anything from those studies?

If someone is poo-pooing the Cochrane Review but accepting everything the CDC says without question, they are being extremely inconsistent (to say the least) in their evaluation of evidence.

Say it aint so said:
And again, it's more than wearing masks. It's the measures taken in totality as advised by epidemiologists, not economists.

All of which carried immense collateral damage. And this was known. The pandemic preparedness plans that I posted warned of the collateral damage. All of the public health apparatus ignored their own plans and their own warnings and did something completely different. And now we're paying the price. In spades.

The pandemic has had devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up?

This may be a moment when decades of educational reform, intervention, and research pay off.

www.brookings.edu

Masks Can Be Detrimental to Babies’ Speech and Language Development

The good news is that parents can take action to compensate

www.scientificamerican.com

More young children are killing themselves: The COVID-19 pandemic is making the problem worse - Children's Hospital of Orange County

CHOC Chief Psychologist Dr. Heather Huszti shares insight on the impact of COVID-19 on youth suicide suicide rates in this USA Today article.

www.choc.org

Covid-19’s Toll on U.S. Business? 200,000 Extra Closures in Pandemic’s First Year

The economic toll from the pandemic has been tough to measure, but new estimates from the Federal Reserve suggest it wasn’t as bad as feared for smaller businesses.

www.wsj.com

1.6 Billion Disposable Masks Entered Our Oceans in 2020

1.6 billion face masks entered our oceans in 2020, representing 5,500 tons of plastic pollution.

www.visualcapitalist.com

Britain’s excess death rate is at a disastrous high – and the causes go far beyond Covid | Owen Jones

A deadly, avoidable crisis is under way, fuelled by NHS cuts, the neglect of social care, inequality and the soaring cost of living, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

www.theguardian.com

The hidden Covid-19 health crisis: Elderly people are dying from isolation

The lockdowns and visitor restrictions meant to protect nursing home residents from the coronavirus can also threaten their lives.

www.nbcnews.com

The list goes on and on. All of these things are NOT a result of COVID. They are a result of the untested response to COVID. And we will be feeling the consequences for many, many years to come.

rjs330 · Mar 3, 2023

iluvatar5150 said:
Yes, they were. The bulk of the folks I heard screaming about it were not merely saying “hey, this is plausible and should be investigated.” They were looking for someone to blame.

Seriously. When people found out that the carona virus was from China from Wuhan AND there was the Wuhan corona virus lab in Wuhan there was a perfectly legitimate thought process that CORONA likely came from the CORONA VIRUS LAB. No we were absolutely told the Wuhan Corona Virus didn't come from the Wuhan Corona Virus lab but we were expected to believe some random bat captured somewhere in the countryside ended up in someone's soup releasing the virus into the community.

Nobody was talking out their rear end. It's a perfectly reasonable and understandable thought. More reasonable than the random bat theory.
No the government did not want us blaming China for the CHINESE WUHAN CORONA VIRUS where the CHINESE WUHAN CORONA VIRUS LAB was located.

It turns out after all that people were very logical in their thoughts and suspicions.

durangodawood · Mar 3, 2023

rjs330 said:
...but we were expected to believe some random bat captured somewhere in the countryside ended up in someone's soup releasing the virus into the community. ...

Your dismissive tone re "wet market" vector for viruses is a mistake. They were a health concern before covid and remain so, regardless of whether they played a part in this instance.

Say it aint so · Mar 3, 2023

probinson said:
Do you really think that COVID is that much different from the flu in terms of viral transmission that you can't learn anything from those studies?

If someone is poo-pooing the Cochrane Review but accepting everything the CDC says without question, they are being extremely inconsistent (to say the least) in their evaluation of evidence.

Yes there is a vast difference between studies in approaches and affects taken during normal flu seasons as juxtaposed what the whole world did in masking, distancing and lockdowns come a covid pandemic.

Listen. I think we are both wasting our time. If you think masks distancing and lockdowns had no impact on the spread of covid, then have at it.

Be well.

probinson · Mar 6, 2023

Say it aint so said:
Listen. I think we are both wasting our time. If you think masks distancing and lockdowns had no impact on the spread of covid, then have at it.

The reason this is so vitally important is because there will be another pandemic. It is crucial to understand the REAL impact of these measures, not just on the pandemic, but in terms of the collateral damages they caused. It is crucial to understand the decision making process, and why all of the pandemic preparedness plans that had been prepared on decades of sound science were ALL tossed in the trash in favor of untested mitigation measures that carried far greater collateral damage.

That's why it matters to me. Because if people continue to believe that all of this was "necessary", then we're doomed to repeat all of these foolish mistakes again.

In the meantime, anyone who doesn't think the hundreds of thousands of kids that left school due to COVID and haven't returned will have a profound negative impact on public health is fooling themselves.

Thousands of kids are missing from school. Where did they go?

Over a million kids left public schools during COVID. Hundreds of thousands of them didn’t start private school or homeschool. They’re missing.

apnews.com

Make no mistake. It's not the pandemic to blame for this collateral damage. It is the foolish, untested response mandated by those in power that is to blame. They own this mess.

probinson · Mar 6, 2023

Interesting stuff. The cover up is always worse than the crime...

Source: 2023.03.05 SSCP Memo Re. New Evidence.proximal Origin | PDF

Pommer · Mar 6, 2023

probinson said:
The reason this is so vitally important is because there will be another pandemic. It is crucial to understand the REAL impact of these measures, not just on the pandemic, but in terms of the collateral damages they caused. It is crucial to understand the decision making process, and why all of the pandemic preparedness plans that had been prepared on decades of sound science were ALL tossed in the trash in favor of untested mitigation measures that carried far greater collateral damage.

That's why it matters to me. Because if people continue to believe that all of this was "necessary", then we're doomed to repeat all of these foolish mistakes again.

In the meantime, anyone who doesn't think the hundreds of thousands of kids that left school due to COVID and haven't returned will have a profound negative impact on public health is fooling themselves.

Thousands of kids are missing from school. Where did they go?

Over a million kids left public schools during COVID. Hundreds of thousands of them didn’t start private school or homeschool. They’re missing.

apnews.com

Make no mistake. It's not the pandemic to blame for this collateral damage. It is the foolish, untested response mandated by those in power that is to blame. They own this mess.

I can agree with the notion that we did things during the pandemic that didn’t totally make sense, but people would like to think they they are “doing their part” and “busy work” of public masking was a nice thing to have tried.
I don’t care that it may have been all for nought, it made people feel as if they had some AGENCY in their own lives.

probinson · Mar 7, 2023

Pommer said:
I don’t care that it may have been all for nought, it made people feel as if they had some AGENCY in their own lives.

This is an odd take. I like to know that what I'm doing is actually beneficial, and not just giving me warm fuzzies of having done something. But I think you've hit on something. Many people did want to be seen as doing something, and they didn't really care if it actually helped, as long as it made them feel better.

I suppose that's fine at an individual level, although you'd think educating people about what actually might help protect them would be better than telling them talismans will help, but we certainly should have NEVER implemented MANDATES on the incredibly flimsy basis of making people feel better.

And what of the collateral damages? The education lost? The escalating mental health crisis in our children, teens and young adults? The permanent business closures? All of those things are the cost of "doing something".

The real question that no one seems to want to address is why did we abandon all of our pandemic preparedness plans in favor of the untested model of Chinese lockdowns? Every pandemic preparedness plan on the planet advised of the immense collateral damage that would result from such a drastic, draconian approach. And yet they did it anyway, knowing full well the chaos that would ensue. All because people wanted to "feel" like they were "doing something"? Certainly we should expect better from our public health agencies than that.

probinson · Mar 7, 2023

From the, "Can't make it up if you tried" category, NYC Mayor is now telling shop owners to bar customers who won't lower their mask when they enter a store. Why? Because people are using masks to conceal their identity so they can rob the store. Who could have foreseen this interesting turn of events?!

Mayor Adams to New York City Shoppers: Drop That Mask

To prevent robberies, Mayor Eric Adams is telling shopkeepers to bar customers who refuse to lower their masks when they first enter stores.

www.nytimes.com

probinson · Mar 7, 2023

Say it aint so said:
4 You may want to reread your link. as in this one, "the lowest in Europe. Look at the map, Sweden is that country in gray which clearly says "Data not available" so not sure how a claim anything lowest in Europe can be made when there is no data available for the country it is being made about.

Since we were talking about Sweden last week, here is how Sweden compares to other European countries in excess mortality for the period 2020-2022.

rjs330 · Mar 8, 2023

probinson said:
Since we were talking about Sweden last week, here is how Sweden compares to other European countries in excess mortality for the period 2020-2022.

View attachment 328794

I really enjoy your well thought out and researched posts. There are so many out there that are so sold on what we did in the US as being necessary and we need well informed people.like you to counter the nonsense with the facts and truth. Backed up with actual information and not just opinions.

whatbogsends · Mar 8, 2023

iluvatar5150 said:
The current state of this is that some (definitely not all) agencies think that the lab leak hypothesis is more likely than others to be true, but they're not very confident in that assessment.

That's not a ringing endorsement of it. It's still true that the people pushing the theory a couple years ago were talking out of their back sides, likely for political reasons, with no evidence to back up their claims. You guys have not been vindicated.

Wrong.

There was evidence for lab leak for a long time now (June 2021), most of which was dismissed out of hand by proponents of Fauci, such as yourself.

Internal emails showed that many of the prominent proponents of zoonotic origin privately said they thought it was "potentially engineered", but then, days later, after a closed meeting with Fauci, announced their public opinion that it was "crackpot theory" or "conspiracy theory" that it could have been lab leak.

The more evidence has accumulated (FCS proposal to DARPA among other things), the more it supported lab leak, while the evidence of zoonotic origin remains "many of the early cases were centered on the market" (despite that argument ignoring that there were earlier cases not included in that analysis).

You can pretend "no one could have known", but anyone who looked at it objectively knew that calling lab leak "conspiracy theory" was nonsense.

Pandemic started in a lab:

a post by Alan Smithee

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