9 Comments

“Most of the people promoting masks were charlatans,” Recht told me...

Too kind!

Expand full comment

Brilliant, as usual. Keep up the good work Paul, who I know, ain't no Martian!

Expand full comment

Who can ever belive journalists again? They propagated the false narrative into oblivion. In fact, that warned me early on that this was not a health crisis. They kept on saying that same thing. The virus originated on a wet market in Wuhan, exactly that same story over and over again.

Expand full comment

This pandemic has jerked the pants down on a lot of reporters, to be certain. My main concern is that it will all be swept aside, with zero lessons learned.

Expand full comment

There is actually a dialogue in the UK happening now about the crazy NPIs employed during the pandemic, their efficacy and their harms. But it seems unlikely we will ever have that discussion here in the US.

Expand full comment

I think you are right. It seems people are very hard to teach. We have a dutch saying, a donkey never stumbles over the same stone twice. But humans not only stumble over the same stone numerous times, they also seem to lend the stone to each other! History repeats itself over and over into eternity. Read a book from 2000 years ago - rereading the Tao te Ching - they already knew.

Expand full comment

The Cochrane report which seems to be the key anti-mask piece of evidence was published Nov 2020. It pretty clearly does not state that masks don't work: it simply said that the evidence was weak either way.

A year on, by far the largest masking study was published (Dec 2021 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069 -- 340k people in a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh) It found that an increase in mask use from 13% to 42% caused a reduction in transmission by 10%.

That's nowhere near some of the more extreme mask effectiveness claims, and certainly vaccines are far more effective in saving lives. But if you're going to argue for accuracy and nuance in reporting you should be the change that you wish to see.

Expand full comment

All the media did was push fear and it's still happening today. In San Francisco, there are huge billboards throughout the city that state "you are 16 times more likely to die from covid if not vaccinated..." Some of the wording is written in bold red letters. It's disgusting and brutally dishonest. It was paid for by myturn.ca.gov.

Expand full comment

On despicable deeply corrupt Joe Biden – lying us into war while knowing with 100% certainty that WMD in Iraq is a bipartisan fraud (same as with Bucha and other crimes in Ukraine) – a major US war criminal

https://youtu.be/ecH1SI9ufr8

Expand full comment