531–540 of 803 posts
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So 'real free speech' is about requiring private companies to carry the message of a politically powerful agent of the government?
s/politically powerful agent of the government/person/ , yes.
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It is misinformation. Masks (cloth or otherwise) were meant to reduce infectiousness, not completely prevent the possibility of infection. Masks (cloth or otherwise) do in fact reduce infectiousness. The misinformation is the implication that masks are pointless because you can still get infected. The point of masks is to get the probability of spreading it down by some multiple, not to be a personal not-my-problem-a…
That's the wrong discussion to have. What's unacceptable is that a platform in a free speech country edits speech to conform to an authority it doesn't have.
Freedom of speech is specifically protecting people from the _government_ preventing their speech.
But you knew that already.
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Sure. As an ophthalmologist certified both by the American Board of Ophthalmologists and the National Board of Ophthalmologists, Rand Paul is both an expert in general medicine as well as ophthalmology. Given that it's fairly safe to assume that he knows more about practicing medicine than either one of us, is better prepared to read and understand medical research better than either of us, but most importantly, that…
> National Board of Ophthalmologists, which Rand Paul personally invented, and he wrote the cerificarion exam that he took.
> YouTube indicated that examples of the offending content in the video included the line: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” > It also included the quote: “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.” Regardless of what you think about YouTube's misinformation policy, I don't think this i…
Totally agree, YouTube is in the wrong here. They are no arbitrator of truth or facts, leave that to the courts and allow 'real free speech' in online platforms.
Not sure this is a good approach either.
Discerning truth and separating fact from fiction isn't a skill that some people have and other's don't. It is a process that requires one to embrace free speech rather than assigning the role of truthsayer to any particular person, group, or institution.
Here is John Stuart Mills rationale for free speech:
..the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.
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Historically medical professionals used cloth masks which where repeatedly shown to reduce transmission risk of many airborne infections though minimal usefulness vs influenza. Modern masks may be significantly more effective, but nothing suggests cloth masks are useless when it comes to COVID, just less effective.
To what degree does a cloth mask protect the wearer? Enough that high risk people should feel safe going out with one on? Because that's the messaging that a lot of people got. "Masks work" [if enough people are wearing them in congregate settings] might make sense to some tiny subset of people who obsessively follow the current understanding of various covid mitigation strategies. For people who don't , that reads a…
For example, surgical masks with ties provided 71.5 percent filtration, while surgical masks with ear loops only provided 38.1 percent. …
a three-layer knitted cotton mask blocked an average of 26.5 percent of particles in the chamber, while a washed, two-layer woven nylon mask with a filter insert and metal nose bridge blocked 79 percent of particles on average. Other masks scored somewhere in between.
They also tested a variety of modifications to improve the fit of commercially available medical procedure masks, like tightening ear loops, placing rubber bands over the top and bottom of the mask to reduce gaps, and placing a cut-out piece of nylon stocking over the mask to seal the gaps. The filtration ability improved by 60.3 to 80.2 percent depending on the modification made. As the fit of the medical procedure masks improved, so did their filtration efficiency. https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/epa-researchers-test-effe...
IMO, saying masks work is perfectly reasonable even if they don’t provide 100% protection.
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Why bother locking your doors if a criminal can just carry a crowbar and pry it open anyway? Gray areas exist. If you decide to drive drunk and hit me while i am driving while i'm wearing a seatbelt you could kill me. If you decide not to wear a mask in public and are an asympomatic carrier of COVID and i am immunocompromised you could kill me. This has nothing to do with personal choice or liberty, it is a legitimat…
We allow people to make personal choices all the time that negatively impact others. I am acknowledging the gray area and have been the entire time. I'm saying that on the particular issue of seatbelts (and mask wearing) - I prefer to let people make their own choices being fully aware that it could cause some amount indirect harm to others. Maybe I hate the color yellow - people can still have yellow cars. I hate br…
Some indirect harm? This is life or death for older and immunocompromised people. You are a monster. I can't fathom your inhumanity.
This seems exceptionally problematic. I absolutely think everyone should use masks, but the science is clearly not in on the effectiveness of cloth masks. It's a valid area of discussion. My own opinion is that everyone should use N95-equivalent masks, but others are entitled to their opinions too. We have democratic and civic processes to decide what should be mandated, what should be recommended, what should be dis…
Only when done in "good faith".
If someone wants to help stop this pandemic and was arguing that masks aren't effective in "good faith", then they have follow-on arguments that they will be making: "stay home", "don't attend gatherings", etc.
The absence of those follow-on arguments demonstrates that the arguments are not in "good faith".
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Thanks for admitting that you are treating this like Polio, and not like the Flu... Treating COVID like polio is foolish, and naive. All indications are COVID will be an annual thing like the flu, chances are mutations will be more transmissible but less deadly (and the data is bearing this out) Chances are we will need annual "booster" or other vaccine just like the flu... We do not mandate people get the annual flu…
The question is how to get the fraction of people vaccinated high enough, so that costly mask+behavior mandates are obviated. Mask wearing and behavior changes last year were massively effective against flu, by accident. Flu is usually much less deadly than COVID. That factor matters in how we treat it. (edit: added data) The 2017-2018 flu season was an historically bad one in the US, resulting in an estimated 30,453…
This is assuming facts not in evidence. there are other factors at play
1. Many people avoided seeking medical treatment that normally would have for the flu this year due to covid, this do not mean they were not infected just it was not recorded
2. There are indications that some people testing positive for COVID could have been flu patients, as some PCR testing has been found to show positive for some flu [1]
3. It is unclear if behavior or mask were more effective, personally I believe Behavior modifications where more effective, a lot of which did not need to be mandatory at all and some of it was not at all (such as increased hand washing, no shaking of hands, etc which I believe it pretty effective at flu mitigation as well)
>>flu is usually much less deadly than COVID. That factor matters in how we treat it.
I did factor that in, The original COVID was much more deadly, the new variants do not seem to be, and new variants + vaccine means I have a pretty low likelyhood that I will have a serious COVID infection thus I really don't feel the need to mask or cede any freedom, regardless of the vaccination status of others around me.
>>The 7 day moving average for new COVID hospital admissions is 89,977 today, and peaked at about 260K in a single week in January.
Where are you getting this data? Ourworldindata[2] has the US at 60,000 Total People in the hospital for COVID, down from a peak total hospitalization of 120K people
This is the TOTAL number of people in the hospital at a given time, not a per day total of new admissions, there is NOT 90,000 new people being admitted to the hospital daily in the us
Further the CDC reports that the 2019-2020 Flu season saw 405,000 hospitalizations and 22,000 deaths[3] and 490,600 hospitalizations, and 34,200 deaths for 2018-2019 Flu [4]
[1]https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/letters-health-care-prov...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-hospitalizations
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Every year, ~647,000 Americans die from heart disease alone. Even if the COVID death numbers aren't over-inflated, I guarantee you that if I were to time-travel to 2019 and ask you if you think that it would be worth precipitating a global supply chain disruption, missed schooling and medical appointments for children around the globe, both first and third world, and the greatest erosion in civil liberties in Western…
600k deaths after huge mitigations. Without any mitigation’s is it 3 million in the US dead?
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Saying cloth masks are effective in the context of (K)N95 masks is even worse misinformation. Even the CDC's website on masks points out you should really be using (K)N95's, and that cloth masks are completely ineffective when wet, which they get after 15 minutes or so of breathing through them. The science on cloth masks says they work, but only shortly and just barely. Rand Paul is closer to the truth by saying the…
Perhaps you could point us to what cdc website you are referring to? Because on cdc.gov wearing a multilayer cloth mask is recommended, and they cite a number of studies on the effectiveness of masks which all show significant reductions in transmissions in people and populations which where masks vs those who don't. See "Human Studies of Masking and SARS-CoV-2 Transmission" on this page: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavi…
> A community-based randomized control trial in Denmark during 2020 assessed whether the use of surgical masks reduced the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers (personal protection) by more than 50%. Findings were inconclusive,54 most likely because the actual reduction in infections was lower.
This is inaccurate, and should make anyone doubt the judgment of whomever wrote this summary. The paper in question was quite clear that there was no statistical significance between groups:
> The between-group difference was −0.3 percentage point (95% CI, −1.2 to 0.4 percentage point; P = 0.38) (odds ratio, 0.82 [CI, 0.54 to 1.23]; P = 0.33). Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.
To characterize this as "inconclusive" is misleading at best, dishonest at worst. In general, I find this page to be a highly selective reading of the available literature, which was (and remains) predominantly inconclusive regarding the effectiveness of masks. Even the WHO meta-analysis of mask literature found only a weak positive effect after mixing together the results of studies ranging from cloth masks to respirators, in medical (most of the data) and non-medical settings [2]. This CDC page has instead chosen to lean on a few poorly controlled observational and/or correlative studies, and ignore the higher quality evidence that came before.
[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...