Unmasked

[GURPS]

Christina Pushaw on Florida, Misinformation and The Importance of Freedom


Florida has been a flashpoint for COVID policy discussions; as one of the best examples of evidence based thinking, Governor Ron DeSantis has attracted huge amounts of negative publicity and conspiracy theories. By not endlessly following the collective set of discredited “interventions” known as The Science™, DeSantis and Florida have been the control group for the country.

I thought it would be interesting to get the perspectives of one of the hardest working people in politics and COVID policy: Christina Pushaw, the governor’s Press Secretary.

We had a thorough, wide ranging discussion that touched on a number of subjects, so I hope you enjoy the interview and if you weren’t already considering it, it might make you want to move to Florida.

 

[GURPS]

Politicians Can’t Stop Lying About Masks



The announcement contained purposeful misinformation; really the entire paragraph is a masterpiece of incompetence, misinformation and unproven assertions. Painful as it is to read, it’s important to point out how far removed from reality Hochul is:

"As Governor, my two top priorities are to protect the health of New Yorkers and to protect the health of our economy. The temporary measures I am taking today will help accomplish this through the holiday season. We shouldn't have reached the point where we are confronted with a winter surge, especially with the vaccine at our disposal, and I share many New Yorkers' frustration that we are not past this pandemic yet," Governor Hochul said. "I want to thank the more than 80 percent of adult New Yorkers who have done the right thing to get fully vaccinated. If others will follow suit, these measures will no longer be necessary."

We’ll come back to the first few lines, but the second part of the paragraph required a willful disregard for evidence and data.

Just as one example, three of the most heavily vaccinated places on earth are Singapore, Portugal and Chile.

At the time Hochul made her comments, Singapore had already seen the largest surge of the pandemic with ~80% of the entire population vaccinated. not the 80% of adults, 80% of the whole population:





When she claimed that New York’s surge was due to those who had not “done the right thing” and been vaccinated, anyone with the slightest awareness of the global COVID situation would know that it was inaccurate and needlessly divisive to blame the “unvaccinated.”


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“Mask regulations protect vulnerable New Yorkers”

“They keep schools safe and open”

“Critical tools”

Well if mask mandates protected the vulnerable, you’d think the introduction of Hochul’s universal mask mandate would positively impact hospitalizations. So did it?





It most certainly did not. Hospitalizations essentially equaled the level seen in the first wave of the pandemic and exceeded the peak from winter 2020-2021.

As they did in 2020-2021, hospitalizations did not decline a few weeks after the mandate, but continued to skyrocket. Mask mandates do nothing to protect the vulnerable, because masks don’t work.

 

[GURPS]

The CDC's Latest Study on Masks is Purposeful Misinformation​

Not Statistically Significant​

A definition of statistical significance is “…the claim that a result from data generated by testing or experimentation is not likely to occur randomly or by chance but is instead likely to be attributable to a specific cause.”

Most well constructed studies do not attribute an outcome to a specific cause without statistical significance.

For example, in the DANMASK study, which was a randomized controlled trial designed to test the hypothesis that mask wearing would prevent infection with COVID, their results pointedly reference the lack of statistical significance to any measurement:

In a per protocol analysis that excluded participants in the mask group who reported nonadherence (7%), SARS-CoV-2 infection occurred in 40 participants (1.8%) in the mask group and 53 (2.1%) in the control group (between-group difference, −0.4 percentage point [CI, −1.2 to 0.5 percentage point]; P = 0.40) (OR, 0.84 [CI, 0.55 to 1.26]; P = 0.40). Supplement Figure 2 provides results of the prespecified subgroup analyses of the primary composite end point. No statistically significant interactions were identified.

Statistical significance is an important tool — except for the manner in which the CDC and these researchers used it.

There’s a lot going on here, so you’d be forgiven for not observing one of the most important elements — the symbol next to the “cloth mask” notation.

Notice that it corresponds to a sentence at the very bottom of the graphic, to the left of the MMWR logo. It’s hard to see, so I’ll repeat it here:

“Not statistically significant”

The CDC posted this graphic, which will be used to inform public policy, local school boards, politicians and corporate executives, and purposefully included a result that was not statistically significant.

That’s misinformation.

It’s an intentional attempt to deceive the public by utilizing a result that did not meet the bare minimum requirements to be “significant” in order to push an agenda.

It’s the textbook definition of misinformation and should be included among the long series of discrediting statements from the CDC. Posting a graphic with a non-statistically significant result highlighted as a conclusion should not be acceptable. But that’s exactly what the CDC did.

And they weren’t done yet.

 

[GURPS]

The CDC Got Vaccine Efficacy Wrong​

What’s happened here is profoundly disturbing.

If you haven’t seen the video already, CDC director Rochelle Walensky recently spoke at the Washington University in St. Louis to discuss “lessons learned” from the pandemic and how her experience as an HIV expert prepared her for the challenges of COVID:

“We learned so much from HIV in terms of who gets care and access to care,” Walensky said. “We in infectious diseases have long known that infectious diseases go not to places of wealth but to places of poverty and places that lack access to care. The first people who brought SARS-CoV-2 to the United States were people who traveled on airplanes, people who traveled on cruise ships, people who had the resources to do those sorts of things. But then it became a disease of the more vulnerable.”

If she was so concerned with “who gets care and access to care” for HIV, how has she not issued a statement explaining that unvaccinated people should never be denied care or access to care based on personal health status? I would expect she is aware that many of the unvaccinated are from marginalized or disadvantaged communities — the CDC is obsessively concerned with equity, except when the inequities are focused on those who haven’t had this specific vaccine.

Her agency’s maddening mistake and subsequent demonization of “unvaccinated” individuals directly led to horrifying examples of patients denied transplants and treatments for the simple crime of not receiving a vaccine which we’ve learned does little to nothing to protect others.

In addition, her astonishing conclusions about the disease becoming prevalent among “the more vulnerable” are stupefying. The disease has affected and will continue to affect everyone. That is how endemic viruses behave. Everyone will be exposed to COVID, likely multiple times throughout their lives.

 

[GURPS]

The CDC Extending the Mask Mandate on Planes Indicates They Want Permanent Masking​

And even in the high risk zones, hospitalizations, which we’re told are the most important metric to focus on in the era of mass vaccination, are often remarkably low.

For example, Colquitt County, Georgia has 0.70% of inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID patients, but is classified as a “high” risk county. Also, two counties in Arkansas, Ashley and Chicot, are “high” risk with 1.70% of inpatient hospital beds occupied by COVID positive patients.

In those counties where 1-2% of hospital beds are being used by those with a positive COVID test, the CDC recommends the below mitigation measures.

The left column describes personal “protections” while the right column are their policy recommendations for local governments.





Yes, you’re reading that correctly; an area with 0.70% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID patients should “implement healthcare surge support as needed” and “maintain improved ventilation in public indoor spaces.”

Oh and, it bears mentioning that several counties in highly vaccinated Maine, such as Washington County where 81% of the population is vaccinated, are also in “high transmission” zones where the CDC recommends distributing and administering vaccines “to achieve high community vaccination coverage.”

Absurd metrics and policy guidance aside, what is the possible justification for maintaining mask mandates for airplanes and transit when 99.53% of the country is in a low to medium transmission zone?

How can the risk possibly get lower than this?

What are they hoping to accomplish?

This is part of the broader issue with regards to COVID policy: the lack of clear cut, accomplishable goals. Mask mandates, vaccine passports, 10pm curfews and capacity limits were based on unproven, inexplicable criteria with the repetitive drumbeat of the vague objective of “slowing the spread.”

Despite the unequivocal failure of government intervention to accomplish whatever “slowing the spread” would mean in the face of an endemic virus, mandates and the threat of mandates have persisted.

Despite the unequivocal failure of government intervention to accomplish whatever “slowing the spread” would mean in the face of an endemic virus, mandates and the threat of mandates have persisted.

There was no logical endpoint to when the measures would have “slowed the spread” enough to be removed, because COVID could never be eliminated. What was initially claimed to be a short term goal of reducing the strain on hospitals became an endless dance of mostly useless interventions that accomplished nothing to lessen the strain on hospitals or reduce infections and instead led to countless lives being needlessly disrupted.

When targets and goals were specifically mentioned by “experts” such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example getting 70% of adults at least partially vaccinated to eliminate the risk of future surges, they were proven hopelessly incorrect:

 

[GURPS]

The Remarkably Surprising Results of Ending Mask Mandates​

During the pandemic, an endlessly repeated phrase from experts, media members, politicians and social media pundits has been that it’s “too soon” to lift restrictions.

It’s important to deconstruct the intentions encapsulated in that phrase, because it’s remarkably pernicious.

The implication of the infuriating phrase, “it’s too soon to lift restrictions,” is that restrictions were proven to have had a demonstrable impact on the spread of COVID, which is entirely inaccurate. It also implies that restrictions should be considered necessary or valuable for a virus which will likely infect everyone on earth, possibly multiple times throughout their lifetime.

There’s also the unspoken assumption that restrictions are imposed at no cost; that masking kids in schools, for example, has little to no downside with significant benefits.

The “evidence” used by health officials to justify continued mask mandates has consistently been unbelievably flawed and thoroughly debunked.

We’ve seen the results of masking across the general population and in specific populations:




By pretending that mask mandates ever had any evidentiary basis, that the “benefits” will always outweigh the harms, while ignoring the inescapable reality that COVID will infect essentially everyone regardless of policy, the phrase that it’s “too soon” is profoundly ignorant and extremely disturbing.

Even now, as the Los Angeles City Council voted to end the vaccine requirement for many businesses, they have already set the stage for future mandates:

“I know it feels like we’re out of the woods. It feels like we’re all going back to normal. But there’s new variants and new strains all the time,” he said. “This BA.2 (variant) is spreading and we really don’t know what the variant a month from now or two months are.”
Martinez responded last week by saying, “I agree with you on that,” and noted that the City Council would have to revisit the vaccination mandates “as we learn to live with this pandemic unfortunately.”

Of course, Martinez ignores the unequivocal, inarguable fact that the vaccine mandates and passports in Los Angeles he’s advocated for had zero impact whatsoever on the rate of spread:

 

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Wait , what? There will continue to be new viruses causing cold-like symptoms forever??!!!! Ohhhhh nooooo!!!!

 

[GURPS]

The Most Heavily Vaccinated Areas Are Reporting Higher COVID Numbers​

One of the most consistent and repetitive phrases we heard from the media, “experts” and politicians over the past year has been that getting vaccinated was the key to “ending COVID.”

They’ve endlessly and patronizingly lectured the public that doing “the right thing” by getting vaccinated was key to reducing the spread of the virus, and would lead to lower rates of infection and the elimination of future surges.

The issue is that nearly a year and a half into the rollout of the vaccines, we’re seeing the exact opposite result unfolding.

Areas with the highest vaccination rates are reporting the highest case rates, and often higher than average hospitalization rates.

This shouldn’t be too surprising given the poor track record of policies based on vaccine related discrimination, but the scale of the issue is being completely ignored by those who have pushed the hardest for the return of mask mandates and vaccine passports.

 

[GURPS]

"Experts" and The White House Are Purposefully Exaggerating the Risks of COVID to Kids​

Perhaps that’s one explanation for why pro-mandate and progressive policy activists like emergency medicine doctor Jeremy Faust have turned to desperate measures — the purposeful exaggeration of the risks of COVID to kids.

In a perfect distillation of the symbiotic relationship between the “expert” community and progressive influencers, Faust published an extremely misleading article that was immediately amplified by Ashish Jha, an official employee of the Biden White House currently serving as the Coronavirus Response Coordinator.

Jha has repeatedly spread misinformation about masks while overtly promoting vaccine passports and verification, and last summer claimed that “unvaccinated, unmasked folks” are the drivers of transmission, while ignoring that cases surged in highly masked and vaccinated areas like San Francisco:

Jha claims in his personal Twitter bio, seemingly without a hint of irony, that he is an “advocate for the notion that an ounce of data is worth a thousand pounds of opinion,” while ignoring the data that proves him wrong.

Instead, after years of disseminating his inaccurate opinions to hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, he was promoted to the White House by virtue of telling “believe in science” progressives what they wanted to hear. So it comes as no surprise that he chose to spread disinformation from another progressive activist with credentials, Jeremy Faust.

Faust went completely off the deep end when airlines ended mask mandates in April, suggesting that those who have accepted the reality that masks do not work will be responsible for the deaths of “babies” from COVID: