Yet Another Misleading Mask Study Will be Used to Justify Masking Kids

The inaccurate advocacy just keep on coming

The CDC clearly disgraced itself during the pandemic.

At this point, that’s not particularly newsworthy — it’s become an expectation that the CDC will release a new flawed “study” every few weeks in an effort to promote their policy goals.

The interventions and policies championed by the CDC haven’t worked, both domestically or globally. The policy failings are so extensive they could quite easily fill a book.

Their MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality weekly report) releases, or as they should be known, policy advocacy dressed up as “science,” have caused incalculable damage. Politicians and teacher’s unions have been given complete authority to enforce mask mandates and other policies designed to continue indefinitely during seasonal surges.

Based on the CDC’s extensive track record, it’s possible that the latest bit of scientific propaganda from NIH is merely their best attempt to grab some of that power for themselves. After witnessing the incredibly poor work by the CDC, they must have thought to themselves, “We can’t let them show us up like this! We can conduct absurdly bad ‘studies’ meant to ensure endless masking too!”

And that’s exactly what they did.

It should come as no surprise given how unimaginably horrendous former NIH director Francis Collins was at science, which of course earned him a promotion to the White House. But if you haven’t already come across the organization’s attempt at mask advocacy, it’s important to break down just how contemptible it is.

The NIH, the CDC, NAIAD…all of these organizations are raging against the dying of the light; trying their best to justify their stunningly dramatic reversal on mask mandates. Science and evidence be damned.

They’re so desperate, they’ll resort to anything. And this “study” is the proof.

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Sample Size

If you haven’t already seen it, the study has been posted as a preprint, with NIH gleefully releasing the results to the press several days ago. As always, their purposefully misleading conclusions were ready made for media consumption.

You can only imagine the attention this would be getting if the media and the public weren’t so understandably distracted by the war in Ukraine.

The study had admirable goals — an attempt to assess the importance of masking in preventing “secondary” cases. Primary cases are defined as infections that came from the community, while secondary cases refers to transmission that seemingly occurred in schools.

To do this, the researchers contacted 13,800 school districts. 143 responded with interest in filling out a survey. 85 completed the survey. Here’s how that looks visually:

Immediately, the problems are noticeable.

When contacting that many districts and only 85 out of 13,800 actually complete the survey, they’re likely pre-selecting for districts convinced their policies mattered. And only 61 of the 85 consistently reported data that could be used for their results.

But don’t worry, it gets so, so much worse.