How is /anybody/ believing this mask story more?
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Someone argued to my wife that she should wear a mask because even though she is vaccinated because she could carry covid germs on her clothes. Masks are magical protection talismans.
She can still get the virus. There have been thousands of breakthrough cases, including those who were hospitalized or died. CDC is even reducing PCR count to 28 for post-vaccinated only to make it seem like the vaccine is more effective. (28 is a reasonable cycle count, 35-45 which is used otherwise is not)
Wouldn't this indicate that the CDC isn't trying to make the vaccine seem more effective but that they were trying to drive the case numbers up under Trump?
Both. The 35-45 succeeded against Trump, and now the focus is on pressuring vaccinations. Since 28 is only for post-vaccinated, the gap in false positives (compared to 35-45) alone could "prove" the vaccines are effective. The WHO has also removed naturally gained immunity from the herd immunity definition, and Fauci has gone from 60-70%, to 80+%, to "We want to do as many people vaccinated as we possibly can, and not focus on an elusive number that nobody even knows what that number is."
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html
The good people at the CDC have actually gone ahead and said the quiet part out loud.
They are no longer counting breakthrough cases unless they rise to the level of hospitalization or death. Put another way: they are only counting breakthrough cases when it is impossible to ignore them.
We know that only 1-5% of positive cases require hospitalization. So there's a possibility that 95-99% of breakthrough cases are not being reported by the CDC.
We also know that the vaccines hypothetically reduce hospitalization. This would further reduce the number of breakthrough cases deemed "relevant" by the CDC.
We also know that a significant number of covid cases present nearly asymptomatically, which means a large number of breakthrough cases will never even be diagnosed, let alone not recorded by the CDC.
Put it all together and there's a possibility that the CDC will only record a fraction of 1% of breakthrough cases.
Why?
This sentence is pure obscurantist nonsense. The CDC is simply pretending that the vast, vast majority of breakthrough cases are medically unimportant while simultaneously pretending that the vast, vast majority of unvaccinated cases are critically important. The end result will be an insanely skewed and dishonest data set that fraudulently indicates enormous efficacy for the vaccines. And because journalists are more likely to launder bad science than criticise it, we will be seeing plenty of articles claiming that the vaccines magically prevent infection/transmission despite this never being the intended purpose of these vaccines.
Edit: imagine what covid-19 case numbers would have looked like if they'd only ever counted cases requiring hospitalization. The information would have been almost meaningless. Yet that's exactly how the CDC is counting breakthrough cases now. In the name of "quality data". Because ignoring data is how you do science in 2021.
First, they are afraid and looking for safety. Second, they believe masks work and provide some of this safety. Simple as that. They will not discuss the efficacy of masks at all. Anything questioning masks is met with something like "masks work the science is settled." I can't think of a single discussion I've seen with a normie that was even open to a discussion of flaws with masks. You'd get farther convincing them of Qanon stuff.
I made a book called "Settled Science"
It has a foreword, but no content.
The argument early on was that it reduces the spread by a small amount, and if 2 people are wearing masks, it's a 70% reduction. Same for anything that isn't N-95 (like cloth masks). Turns out it is actually a 0.5% decrease in daily cases within 20 days, to a 1.8% decrease within 81-100 days.
https://patriots.win/p/12hkd8yVKb/new-cdc-report--mask-mandates-lo/c/
I brought up with a pro-masker that mask maybe reduce cases by 1% and he called me ignorant and linked a news story that said masks were estimated to prevent 200,000 cases in the US (at the time there were 20,000,000 cases). I pointed out to him that 20,000,000/200,000 is 1% so he fell back to "if it saves one life." Which when you break down that they don't actually believe that they fall back to "masks are effective."
They have moved beyond motte and bailey. They have an infinite staircase of motte and baileys, a set of arguments that aren't consistent with each other but because you can only attack one position at a time they can pick the current argument and move to the next motte. "? Masks work." -> "Masks barely work at best." -> "? If it saves one life." -> "You don't hold that standard for anything else." -> "? It's a pandemic we have to do something." -> "It doesn't matter if you do something if it barely works." -> "? Mask work." -> ...
I think they just put selective pressure on the disease to spread on smaller and smaller particles, increasing infectivity over the long run.
Seems less like an infinite staircase and more like this one.
Common "debate" style for dishonest people... you either have to seize them by the tail and force them to admit you've won, or walk away and ignore them.
the argument for it is that it stops the spreading, not the catching of it. However, that still doesn't explain all the other ways people still spread germs like touching things on the shelf at the store
The CDC has largely given up on the surface-spreader narrative.
The best thing about this fear of getting sick people have now is when you ask them the last time they washed their mobile phone. How many times do people pick up and put their phone down in a day with their bare hands and have never once cleaned it?
They don't do that either. The air just blasts out the sides and rolls around and diffuses into the air all the same. Unless you have that one that's fitted to your face with adhesives that makes you breath everything through a filter, it's worthless.
I suspect that even if those weren't in far too short supply for the general populace to use, a lot fewer people would be willing to put up with that.
They act as a baffle so besides redirecting they also rob a bit of kinetic energy but there's no reason to think either of these effects actually help. They probably also stop the very largest drops which have too much momentum to be redirected but as far as I know they still don't know what size drop are most concerning.
Really though if masks worked then masks would work and we would know they work without some data scientist running a model that shows "oh if we didn't wear masks the cases would be one percent higher." I was promask early on because "maybe masks work" but then everyone started wearing masks and nothing changed.
if masks worked to stop disease we would've been wearing cloth "masks" for centuries before science even realized why they worked