Bret Stephens:

Eric Boehm:

It takes a lot to make a libertarian look forward to the next election.

Like, say, two years of miserable government mandates ignored by some of the very people imposing them. Like watching over 70,000 maskless adults (and many celebrities) partying at a major sporting event in a city where children are required to wear medical-grade masks to school and keep them on while playing sports. Like imposing border controls on immigration and travel meant to stop the spread of COVID-19, and then keeping them in place (with no off-ramp) long after the virus is spreading here.

For once, we can be thankful that another election season is already upon us since politics is the last realm where the pandemic is dominating decision-making. The economy emerged from the omicron wave in better shape than expected. Sunday’s Super Bowl was the latest signal that lots of Americans are done with the health theatrics of the past two years. But even the political class’ commitment to COVID policy is wavering. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and President Joe Biden might be refusing to offer much hope that COVID-related mandates should be lifted soon, but they are increasingly being undone by rank-and-file Democrats who are looking at favorability ratings that are falling nearly as fast as COVID case counts.

Jacob Sullum:

A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly shows that wearing a face mask in public places dramatically reduces your risk of catching COVID-19. The CDC summed up the results in a widely shared graphic that says wearing a cloth mask “lowered the odds of testing positive” by 56 percent, while the risk reduction was 66 percent for surgical masks and 83 percent for N95 or KN95 respirators.

If you read the tiny footnotes, you will see that the result for cloth masks was not statistically significant. So even on its face, this study, which was published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on Friday, did not validate the protective effect of the most commonly used face coverings—a striking fact that the authors do not mention until the end of the sixth paragraph. And once you delve into the details of the study, it becomes clear that the results for surgical masks and N95s, while statistically significant, do not actually demonstrate a cause-and-effect relationship, contrary to the way the CDC is framing them.

That framing is part of a broader pattern. In 2020, the CDC went from dismissing the value of general mask wearing to describing it as “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” In September 2020, then–CDC Director Robert Redfield asserted, without any evidence, that masks were more effective at preventing infection than vaccines would prove to be. Even before the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, Redfield’s successor, Rochelle Walensky, implied the same thing, exaggerating the evidence supporting mask use in a way that made vaccination seem inferior.

The CDC consistently bends over backward to validate its recommendation that everyone, including children as young as 2, wear masks. It is thereby undermining its already damaged credibility by distorting what we actually know. In this case, the CDC is asserting a causal relationship without considering alternative explanations for the results it is touting.

The researchers identified 1,528 California residents who tested positive for COVID-19 between February 18 and December 1, 2021, then matched them to 1,511 California residents who tested negative. The “controls” were similar to the “cases” in terms of age group, sex, and the region of California where they lived but were not necessarily similar in other ways that could affect the odds of testing positive. That crucial point by itself means it is impossible to say whether masking accounts for the differences highlighted by the CDC.

The mask analysis was limited to 652 cases and 1,176 controls who “self-reported being in indoor public settings during the 2 weeks preceding testing and who reported no known contact with anyone with confirmed or suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection during this time.” Overall, the subjects who said they “always” wore masks in indoor public settings were 56 percent less likely to have tested positive than the subjects who said they “never” wore masks. The comparison presented in the CDC’s graphic is based on a subgroup of 534 subjects who “specified the type of face covering they typically used.”

It seems obvious that people who “always” wear masks in indoor public places are more COVID-cautious than people who “never” do. While the researchers adjusted for vaccination, which unsurprisingly was more common among people who had tested negative, they “did not account for other preventive behaviors that could influence risk for acquiring infection.” If mask wearers tend to avoid crowded spaces, spend less time indoors with strangers, and/or are more likely to keep their distance from other people—all of which are plausible—those precautions could partly or fully explain the differences that the CDC attributes to masking.

Data from the study reinforce the point that masking rates were not the only potentially relevant way in which subjects who tested negative differed from subjects who tested positive. While 78 percent of the COVID-positive subjects sought testing because they had symptoms consistent with the disease, that was the motivation for just 17 percent of the COVID-negative subjects. People in the latter group were nearly 50 percent more likely to say they had sought testing simply because they were curious about whether they had been infected—a motivation that suggests greater concern and caution. The COVID-negative subjects were nearly three times as likely to report that they were tested because they were undergoing a medical procedure, a prospect that may have made them especially keen to avoid infection.

While the possibility of systematic differences in “other preventive behaviors” is enough reason to be skeptical of the way the CDC is presenting these results, the study has several other problems.

When the researchers called people for interviews, just 13 percent of those who had tested positive and 9 percent of those who had tested negative answered the phone and agreed to participate. Those low participation rates make you wonder how representative the people interviewed by the researchers were.

The COVID-positive people who did not answer the phone may have been especially ill, for example, while the COVID-negative people who did participate may have been especially eager to discuss their experiences—perhaps because they had dodged the virus and attributed that outcome to precautions such as masking. The researchers note that “generalizability of this study is limited to persons seeking SARS-CoV-2 testing and who were willing to participate in a telephone interview, who might otherwise exercise other protective behaviors.”

The fact that people knew their own test results may have introduced another bias. People who wore masks but nevertheless caught COVID-19 may have inferred that they were not as careful as they should have been, making them less likely to report that they “always” took that precaution. Conversely, people who tested negative may have retrospectively exaggerated the extent to which they wore masks.

University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist Vinay Prasad, who discusses these and other weaknesses of the study in a recent Substack post, also notes that the purported effects described by the CDC are “implausibly large.” Last September, a report on a randomized trial in Bangladesh described an 11 percent reduction in the risk of symptomatic infection among villagers who wore surgical masks. Now the CDC is claiming that surgical masks “lowered the odds of testing positive” by 66 percent—an effect six times as large. Walensky, meanwhile, has averred that wearing a mask “reduc[es] your chance of infection by more than 80 percent,” although the CDC cited no evidence to support that startling claim.

“The paper is entirely, irredeemably flawed,” Prasad concludes. “Its flaws are so evident that it should not have been published [or] promoted. When an issue is deeply polarizing, publishing bad science helps no one. It cannot convince skeptics, proponents don’t need convincing, and it deepens mistrust in institutions.”

Prasad has long been skeptical that general masking, especially with cloth coverings, has an important effect on virus transmission. He co-authored a recent review of the literature that described the evidence supporting the CDC’s recommendations as weak:

Facemask efficacy is based primarily on observational studies that are subject to confounding and on mechanistic studies that rely on surrogate endpoints (such as droplet dispersion) as proxies for disease transmission. The available clinical evidence of facemask efficacy is of low quality and the best available clinical evidence has mostly failed to show efficacy, with fourteen of sixteen identified randomized controlled trials comparing face masks to no mask controls failing to find statistically significant benefit in the intent-to-treat populations. Of sixteen quantitative meta-analyses, eight were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks, and the remaining eight supported a public mask intervention on limited evidence primarily on the basis of the precautionary principle. Although weak evidence should not preclude precautionary actions in the face of unprecedented events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ethical principles require that the strength of the evidence and best estimates of amount of benefit be truthfully communicated to the public.

In his Substack post, Prasad laments that the CDC has not sponsored any randomized controlled trials to verify the effectiveness of face masks, which he calls “a catastrophic research failure,” especially when it comes to “universal masking” in K–12 schools and day care centers. Even if you find the existing evidence more persuasive than Prasad does, the CDC’s lily gilding is troubling. The agency has flagrantly failed to make sure that information on this subject is “truthfully communicated to the public.”

While “well-fitting face masks and respirators effectively filter virus-sized particles in laboratory conditions,” the authors of the California case-control study note, “few studies have assessed their real-world effectiveness in preventing acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Given this study’s severe limitations (eight of which the researchers explicitly note), it does not do much to fill that gap. The CDC nevertheless claims the study shows that “consistently wearing a comfortable, well-fitting face mask or respirator in indoor public settings protects against acquisition of SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

Both this study and the Bangladesh trial suggest that cloth masks are not effective in real-world settings—or at least that their benefits are not big enough to generate statistically significant results. But even on that point, the CDC, which only recently acknowledged that N95s are more effective than cloth masks, is maddeningly evasive. The CDC concedes that “a respirator offers the best protection,” which is not quite the same as admitting that cloth masks may provide little or no protection against infection, especially by omicron.

The CDC’s handling of this study has implications that extend beyond the empirical question of how well masks work. In this case and others, the agency has proven that it cannot be trusted to act as an honest broker of scientific information. The result is that Americans are increasingly skeptical of anything the CDC says, even when it is sensible and well-grounded. While the CDC’s desperate attempts to back up conclusions it has already reached may be aimed at protecting its reputation and credibility, they have the opposite effect.

Wisconsin Right Now posted on Facebook:

We have a new article posted on https://www.wisconsinrightnow.com/ that deals with an issue that is being censored. Since we are already on super-secret double probation and have been threatened with the complete removal of our pages and profiles for our coverage of the KR trial, we have chosen not to share the story on FB.

The article is from Stephanie Soucek:

“We had to do this! It was life or death!” He took the first dose and started to feel better within a few hours. 

As we look around the world and even right here in the United States of America, it is clear that there has been an overall effort to take away our freedoms under the guise of keeping us safe. When it comes to COVID, only the government-sanctioned experts know best—even though they’ve been wrong and flip-flopped many times the past two years. One could easily argue that more harm than good has been done by restricting our freedoms in order to “keep us safe.”

It is alarming when debate about what treatments work best is shut down and the government will decide what doctors and “science” you should trust and listen to. alternative COVID treatments including inexpensive repurposed drugs like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that have been approved for human use by the FDA for decades have been suppressed and made difficult to obtain for the purposes of treating COVID.

And expensive treatments like Remdesivir are pushed as one of the only drugs used for the treatment for COVID. Yet in November 2020 the WHO came out with a study claiming Remdesivir should not be used to treat COVID patients in hospitals because it was ineffective.

According to an article from NBC News: “In light of the interim data from the WHO’s ‘Solidarity’ trial — which included data from more than 11,200 people in 30 countries — “remdesivir is now classified as a drug you should not use routinely in Covid-19 patients,” the president of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, Jozef Kesecioglu, said in an interview with Reuters.” Yet it’s the main drug still being pushed by the CDC and many hospitals in the US today. Why?

I suppose nothing has disturbed me more than hearing about the first-hand accounts of patients being refused alternative COVID treatments they request, even after being told by the hospital that nothing else can be done for them and they will likely die. On top of that, some of these hospitals have refused to release patients when they or their families request to be released in order to get a second opinion or alternative COVID treatments somewhere else. Second opinions have saved people’s lives at times and a patient has the right to get a second opinion or try another treatment in order to potentially save their lives.

There are stories right here in Wisconsin of families who have suffered because of hospital protocols. One such story comes from a woman who shared the heartbreaking story of her husband, who died last year at the age of 55 after being admitted into a Milwaukee area hospital. Out of respect for her family’s privacy she asked to remain anonymous. Her husband became sick in late September 2021 and tested positive for Covid shortly after.

After about a week of not getting better on his own she took her husband to the hospital. Shortly after being admitted his oxygen levels dropped and he was transferred to the ICU. She says she was unable to go into the hospital to be with him during this time and the communication between her and the hospital was poor. He was given 4 treatments of Remdesivir before his liver started being negatively affected. She requested they stop using Remdesivir and try other potential alternative COVID treatments such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and monoclonal antibodies but was told that wasn’t allowed because of hospital protocol (based on the CDC guidance).

She says once she became power of attorney she requested to have a meeting of care for her husband but the doctor refused. They continued with four more treatments of Remdesivir. A little more than a week after being admitted to the ICU he was put on a ventilator. His kidneys were failing, which is a potential side-effect of Remdesivir. Disagreements occurred among doctors about whether or not he should be transferred and he ended up being transferred to another hospital and sadly died the next day.

She believes (with good reason) that treating him with Remdesivir and the hospital not being willing to try alternative COVID treatments is what truly took his life. She hopes telling her husband‘s story will help raise awareness and help other people avoid similar tragedies.

Another woman I talked to named Debbie tells the story of her father who was diagnosed with Covid and Pneumonia last year December. He wasn’t doing well so he was admitted into a hospital in northeast Wisconsin where he was sent to the ICU and put on oxygen, plus they started treating him with Remdesivir.

He started to get worse and the family was told he would likely need to be put on a ventilator soon. The family was distraught and thought he would likely die based on everything happening. They asked to stop treatment of Remdesivir and asked if the hospital could try an alternative COVID treatment like Azithromycin with Ivermectin. The family was told it wasn’t approved and it doesn’t work.

But this family was desperate and decided to get a prescription for ivermectin along with a Z pack from a doctor in Michigan. They couldn’t get the prescription filled initially because the pharmacy they went to refused, so thankfully they found a pharmacy out of town that would fill it.

Michael Smith:

Dr. Richard Menger of the University of South Alabama:

I practice medicine in an emerging Covid-19 hot spot in a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates. Last year I saw Covid at its worst when I deployed to New York to take care of patients in an overflow intensive-care unit. I am vaccinated. I wouldn’t say I “believe in science,” because science doesn’t work that way, but I trust the scientific process. Yet when it comes to trust and persuasion, the medical profession isn’t always winning the Covid-19 battle, and it’s worth understanding why.

The current attempts at persuading people to get the vaccine follow the typical trinity of persuasion put forth by Aristotle —logos, pathos and ethos. Social media and government platforms focus on data (logos), such as the stark disparities in serious illness between the vaccinated and the not. Then it turns into emotional pleas (pathos), with personal stories of lost patients or loved ones. Advocates talk about a moral duty of getting a vaccine (ethos).

But when the desired response doesn’t materialize—when a substantial portion of the country still refuses a shot—the calls devolve into histrionic and condescending pleas. Many people respond by digging in their heels. Plenty of research shows that once people make a decision and attach a strong moral identity to it, they ignore contrary data.

The medical community needs to confront the ugly reality of distrust, especially in my state. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is a living memory. Between 1932 and 1972, government researchers actively withheld treatment for syphilis while promising free medical care, meals and burial insurance. Some reluctance in blindly trusting a new vaccine is understandable.

It is also cause for pause that the government appears willing to coerce Americans to take a vaccine that doesn’t have full approval from the Food and Drug Administration. President Biden has considered a $100 payment for vaccination. Such fiscal rewards will likely have the biggest sway on the vulnerable populations. But the government can use sticks as well as carrots. Is it morally acceptable to tax the unvaccinated $100? How would you feel if the government applied this tactic to something you strongly disagreed with?

The best way to change minds is to talk to people and treat them with respect and dignity. I understand a lot of my healthcare colleagues are frustrated and tired, but a sensationalist, sanctimonious narrative driven by social media doesn’t help anyone. This is part of our job: persuading people to take medicine they don’t want to take.

Healthcare professionals have a challenging obligation to work to understand where people are coming from, build a relationship, address their fears to help them understand, gently correct information that is wrong, admit when medicine was wrong and medical authorities misled people, motivate them based on their needs, and develop networks of support in the community.

Using this approach and more, Jacqueline Brooks, superintendent of the Macon County, Ala., School District, helped lead the charge that resulted in universal vaccination among the district’s custodians, bus drivers, and lunchroom workers. Macon County includes the city of Tuskegee.

Ms. Brooks engaged in personal conversations, reduced barriers to appointments, formed a partnership with a local medical center, made sure people were comfortable with the decision, and praised them for making a “sacrifice” and “taking on risk” for the community. Most important, when an initial cohort was in a “wait-and-see” mode, she acknowledged the risk, didn’t pressure them, and offered reassurance and data as more people they knew became vaccinated. The results speak for themselves.

Jacob Sullum:

Like many Americans, I do not like wearing a face mask, which hurts my ears, fogs my glasses, and makes my bearded face itch. And while I think businesses should be free to require face coverings as a safeguard against COVID-19, I am skeptical of government-imposed mask mandates, especially in K-12 schools.

At the same time, I recognize that my personal peeves and policy preferences are logically distinct from the empirical question of how effective masks are at preventing virus transmission. From the beginning, however, the Great American Mask Debate has been strongly influenced by partisan and ideological commitments, with one side exaggerating the evidence in favor of this precaution and the other side ignoring or downplaying it.

Last September, Robert Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), described masks as “the most important, powerful public health tool we have,” going so far as to say they provided more protection than vaccines would. In a 2020 New York Times op-ed piece, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer asserted that “wearing a mask has been proven to reduce the chance of spreading Covid-19 by about 70 percent”—a claim that even the CDC said was not scientifically justified.

The CDC invited skepticism about the value of general mask wearing by dismissing ituntil April 2020, when the agency suddenly began recommending the practice as an important weapon against the pandemic. Although that memorable reversal supposedly was justified by evolving science, the main concern that the CDC cited—asymptomatic transmission—was a danger that had been recognized for months.

When the CDC changed its advice, research on the effectiveness of face masks in preventing virus transmission was surprisingly sparse and equivocal. Although laboratory experiments supported the commonsensical assumption that almost any barrier to respiratory droplets, including DIY cloth coverings, was better than nothing, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) generally had not confirmed that intuition.

A January 2021 review of the evidence in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found “no RCT for the impact of masks on community transmission of any respiratory infection in a pandemic.” The article, which also looked at observational studies, said “direct evidence of the efficacy of mask use is supportive, but inconclusive.”

The authors then considered “a wider body of evidence,” including epidemiological analyses, laboratory studies, and information about COVID-19’s transmission characteristics. “The preponderance of evidence,” they concluded, “indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts.”

In a “science brief” last updated on May 7, the CDC says “experimental and epidemiological data support community masking to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2.” But it acknowledges that “further research is needed to expand the evidence base for the protective effect of cloth masks.”

Where does that leave Americans who are unpersuaded by the existing evidence? Banned from major social media platforms, if they are not careful.

YouTube recently suspended Sen. Rand Paul’s account because of a video in which the Kentucky Republican said “most of the masks that you can get over the counter” have “no value.” Those statements ran afoul of YouTube’s ban on “claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19,” which is similar to policies adopted by Facebook and Twitter.

While conceding that “private companies have the right to ban me if they want to,” Paul said he was troubled by the fact that the leading social media platforms, partly in response to government pressure, seem to be insisting that users toe the official line on COVID-19. He has a point.

Paul’s criticism of cloth masks was stronger than the science warrants, reflecting a broader tendency on the right to dismiss them as mere talismans without seriously addressing the evidence in their favor. But rational discourse entails rebutting arguments by citing contrary evidence instead of treating them as too dangerous for people to consider.

Robby Soave:

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now think that many Americans will need booster shots in the coming months, and the Biden Administration has plans to make that happen. While the vaccines still provide remarkable protection against severe disease and death, recent studies suggest that an additional shot will help decrease transmission of the more infectious delta variant and prevent breakthrough cases.

For vaccine-hesitant rightwing people—who constitute a substantial proportion of the anti-vax movement, though by no means the whole thing—the need for booster shots has been met with considerable opprobrium and even suggestions that this means the vaccines don’t work. Former President Trump called booster shots a “crazy” idea.

“The whole thing is just crazy,” he said in a recent interview on Fox News. “It doesn’t—you wouldn’t think you would need a booster.”

These comments will undoubtedly contribute to vaccine hesitancy and undermine confidence in booster shots; as such, this sort of talk is deeply irresponsible. It’s as if the former president doesn’t know any better, or just can’t help himself.

So what’s The New York Times‘ excuse?

Astonishingly, the paper of record has opted to give support to this Trumpian denial of vaccine efficacy. A recent news story by Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli—whose articles on the pandemic have constituted some of the most fear-driven and pro-restriction writing appearing anywhere in the mainstream media—cast doubt on the need for boosters and suggested that people could “easily” obtain the same level of protection by wearing a mask instead.

Mandavilli quotes Boston University epidemiologist Ellie Murray in opposition to booster shots for the general population:

Dr. Murray said boosters would undoubtedly boost immunity in an individual, but the benefit may be minimal — and obtained just as easily by wearing a mask, or avoiding indoor dining and crowded bars.

The administration’s emphasis on vaccines has undermined the importance of building other precautions into people’s lives in ways that are comfortable and sustainable, and on building capacity for testing, she and other experts said.

“This is part of why I think the administration’s focus on vaccines is so damaging to morale,” she added. “We probably won’t be going back to normal anytime soon.”

Note the agenda here: The “experts”—i.e., overly cautious epidemiologists picked by The New York Times to give weight to Team Blue’s quixotic COVID-19 mitigation preferences—think the focus on vaccines is damaging because it comes at the expense of a pro-lockdown, pro-masking, pro-social-distancing strategy. Vaccination, broadly speaking, lets most people live their lives like normal again; this is somehow viewed as a bad thing.

These policy preferences are completely contrary to the reality of the human social experience. The health benefit of a booster shot is not “obtained just as easily by wearing a mask or avoiding indoor dining or crowded bars,” because wearing masks and eschewing conversation with other people is much more taxing than getting a shot. Many normal people actually like talking to people in bars and seeing human faces, so forgoing this indefinitely is not a trivial matter. (Note that the Times recently ran an op-ed piece titled: “Actually, Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Children Learn.”)

If Trump deserves criticism for failing to urge his base to get their shots—and he does—then why should The New York Times get a pass for suggesting to its readers that regular masking is an effective substitute for booster shots? The Biden Administration frets constantly about COVID-19 misinformation being spread by right-wing accounts on social media. But Mandavilli is guilty of the same: She called the delta variant “as contagious as chicken pox” in an article that preached doom and gloom about the current state of the pandemic. It later turned out that this claim, sourced to an internal CDC document, originally appeared in an inaccurate NYT infographic.

I wrote previously that the media’s enthusiasm for mask mandates is so strong that it occasionally seems as if some liberal and mainstream writers prefer masks to vaccines, even though the latter is a vastly superior tool for defeating COVID-19. Now The New York Times has said it quite explicitly: Who needs booster shots when experts say we can just wear masks forever?