181–190 of 432 posts
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People also forget that it wasn’t a Muslim ban. The world’s largest Muslim country was not included in it.
Well, those excluded countries included places where Trump had business interests and longtime allies of the US (Saudi Arabia). https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-trump-immigration-ba...
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Lockdowns don’t make any progress. They put everything on pause. But as soon as you unpause, all of those saved lives are at the same risk they were at before. And you can’t pause forever. Each lockdown becomes less and less effective as people stop caring.
Except there's hope of finding a more effective treatment against this virus while we are on pause. So lives can be saved potentially.
2 years of this is a non trivial amount of time.
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I will repeat myself one more time: Facts simply do not concern themselves with your feelings. I know it feels like oppression (a new Third Reich!!111!) & like there is no metric to get rid of masks, but your feelings alone do not make these true statements. The fact -- and we should concern ourselves with facts, not vague feelings or bouts of hysteria -- is that all of these measures will go away once the pandemic h…
Facts don’t dictate policy. Even if masks were incredibly effective so some point we’d have to stop wearing them. Now that we have countless effective medical interventions, I’d say that time is now. Vaccinated individuals have zero business being required to wear masks. They’ve done their part and should be able to return to a fully normal life. COVID is never going away. There is so much more to live for than being…
They absolutely should, and I think this is an intractable disagreement we have. Sorry.
But I agree that COVID is never going away -- I'm saying that all of these measures should go away once the pandemic has abated to such an extent that it no longer poses a substantial threat to human lives. I.e. there is a version of COVID where we have tamed its lethality to the point where it's a shadow of its former self.
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As far as I know the current view is that it won’t end, but it will become a regular the same way the flu is. There may even be yearly shots combined with flu shots for all the new variants that may evolve. I truly hate that guy, but “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
I don’t think OP is concerned with yearly shots or covid hanging around. It’s the lockdowns and other restrictions that people care about.
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Vinay Prasad seems to be a contrarian who recently compared the US COVID-19 policies to Hitler's Germany[1]. In the article you linked, he's citing his own study on cloth masks. Most would agree that cloth masks are the least effective masking option at stopping viral spread. Cloth masking is just the easiest target to attack in an anti-mask agenda. He also implies doctor's have inherent bias against HCQ and Ivermect…
> In the article you linked, he's citing his own study on cloth masks. This is a blog post summarizing his review of every study on masks ever conducted. So yes, he's citing that. You should read it. I linked to it because most people won't have time to read 30,000 words on masks, and want the TL;DR. Everything else you've said is an ad hominem .
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Read the study, not a press release. It said quite explicitly that cloth masks had no effect , and surgical masks had an extremely minor overall effect (11.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence), with an absolute effect size of 0.09%: https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publicati...
The Bangladesh study does not say that cloth masks have no effect . It said that it can’t support an impact of cloth masks usage on infection rates , but associates them with reduced severity/symptoms. That’s a notably distinct proposition from “no effect.”
What this should tell you is that "symptoms" are a bad endpoint for a randomized-controlled trial, not that if the good endpoint doesn't show you what you want, you should rely on the bad one.
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Here's a link to a real actual science study that used tuberculosis-sized particles and found filtration efficiencies of 99.5% or higher by N95 masks. Which isn't minor. It's been over a year. If you're not using an N95, you're doing yourself and those around you a disservice. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9487666/
I've never seen anyone in public with an N95 mask since the pandemic started but I've seen plenty of cloth masks, bandanas and those cheap hospital masks.
> Because the change is small, an updated vaccine doesn’t need Phase III trials and/or regularity approval. So, this whole process should take a max of 6 weeks. This appears to be incorrect, Moderna says it needs 60 days to just get into trials ( https://twitter.com/megtirrell/status/1464225637590310938 ) . The FDA has not said what the approval process will look like, but its safe to say it will be non-zero
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Facts don’t dictate policy. Even if masks were incredibly effective so some point we’d have to stop wearing them. Now that we have countless effective medical interventions, I’d say that time is now. Vaccinated individuals have zero business being required to wear masks. They’ve done their part and should be able to return to a fully normal life. COVID is never going away. There is so much more to live for than being…
> Facts don’t dictate policy. And you don't see that as a problem?
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> that's not what you want to measure. You want to measure whether an intervention works if people adhere to the protocol. No, you want to measure if an intervention works if you do everything reasonable to enact it. You don't get to invent an alternate reality where people are 100% compliant and there are chocolate rivers and gumdrop trees. Otherwise, I have the perfect diet plan that will end all obesity, worldwide…
No, these are not public policy studies. These are medical studies. Do they measure the effectiveness of an experimental medication on people who stop taking it? No. If I were to measure things as you propose, I guarantee you I could conduct a huge study showing that exercise doesn't make people healthier, just because most people won't adhere to an exercise program . That has no bearing on the effectiveness of the i…
If you show that a drug works in a petri dish, that's completely irrelevant if it's so toxic that people don't take it because of side-effects.
If you show that full-face respirators work on a mannequin in a box, that's completely irrelevant if real-world people don't wear full-face respirators because they suck.