COVID is Helping Kill Science
Last fall Donald Trump was trying to find a way to reduce fear. Trump tried in vain to convince people that while covid was a problem, it did not warrant lockdowns and mask mandates. Of course this was in the lead up to an election. An election that the media and bureaucracy desperately wanted Trump to lose. Fear was their best tool and they had no intentions of letting it go. The Democrats reached in to the swamp and pulled Robert Redfield out for his 15 minutes of fame.
Robert Redfield is the head of the center for disease control (CDC). On September 16th he testified before congress about the effectiveness of masks. You can watch his testimony below.
According to Dr. Redfield you don’t need an immune system you just need a piece of cloth on your face. He was emphatic about the effectiveness of masks. That is curious since the CDC only finished studying the effectiveness of masks 2 weeks ago. 6 months after Dr. Redfield assured us he already knew the answer. You can see the report at this link.
A panel of PHDs looked at the effectiveness of mask mandates and impacts of restaurant openings. Here are their conclusions on masks.
Mask mandates were associated with statistically significant decreases in county-level daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation.
That seems to support Dr. Redfield doesn’t it? No it doesn’t once again the devil is in the details. The statistically significant reduction in cases after 20 days was 0.5%. The CDC set out to prove their boss was not an idiot. What they found was that masks made almost no difference.
Remember in the video Dr. Redfield said all we could bring the virus under control by concealing our identity for 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks. That is not very specific. He was very certain masks would work he was just a little foggy on how long it would take. The study found that after 12 weeks mask mandates were associated with a 1.8% reduction in cases. There you have it folks. All it takes to control the virus is to decrease case growth rates by 1.8%
Still a 1.8% reduction is better than nothing right? It might be if it was real but it is not. The key word in the study is associated. They use it several times. All that means is that the mask mandates happened at the same time as the case reduction rates. At no time in the study did they try to determine if there was something else that caused the reductions, like maybe spring. They also carefully avoided using data from counties that saw infections rise after mask mandates as we saw in Edmonton and Calgary. The study credited masks with the reduction in cases without trying to determine if the masks had anything to do with it.
Their conclusions on impacts of restaurant openings were just as bad. Here is what the study said.
Allowing on-premises restaurant dining was associated with increases in county-level case and death growth rates within 41–80 days after reopening.
The incubation period is 4 to 5 days. In severe outcomes death occurs less than 21 days after infection. Increases in infections and deaths that happen after 41-80 days cannot be blamed on the restaurant re-opening. To make things worse contact tracing shows very few infections come from restaurants. You cannot blame the restaurants for a rise in infections when contact tracing clearly shows they did not come from restaurants.
Correlation is not causation. Just because 2 things happen at the same time does not mean that one is causing the other. I get out of bed every day and the sun rises every day. That does not mean I am causing the sun to rise by getting out of bed. This is the same bullshit “science” we get from the global warming crowd. The temperature is rising now and we are here now so obviously we must be causing it.
Look at the author list again. These people are all PHDs. The only “science” that they are doing is political science. They set out to back up their Bosses ludicrous statements. The best lie they could muster is that masks made almost no difference and restaurant food kills, maybe. We are witnessing the death of science. The CDC is not even capable of handling a fake emergency. What would happen if we had a real pandemic?
