Leaked emails have revealed how the New York Times sought to discredit a top scientific review that found no evidence masks work because it came to the ‘wrong’ conclusion. Paul D. Thacker, who obtained the emails from the Cochrane whistleblower and via FOI requests, has written about the scandal in UnHerd.
Amid the storm of U.S. election headlines in recent weeks, a snippet of news began bubbling up on social media that, only a few years ago, would have whipped up a frenzied media hurricane. President Biden had tested positive for Covid and videos posted on X showed him boarding and exiting Airforce One, but without a mask.
“Listen to the scientists, support masks,” Biden said at a campaign rally, four years ago, berating Trump for not wearing a mask after he (Trump) had caught Covid. “Support a mask mandate nationwide,” Biden thundered to cheers and adulation. His campaign message captured a ‘follow the science’ sentiment among Left-leaning American voters who derided anyone questioning mask effectiveness with the label “anti-mask”. This, despite a smattering of articles in Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine and the Atlantic reporting that scientific studies found masks didn’t seem to stop viruses.
The debate over mask effectiveness took an odd turn last year when ardent mask advocate, Zeynep Tufekci, wrote a New York Times essay claiming “the science is clear that masks work”. Tufekci’s piece denigrated and belittled a scientific review by the prestigious medical nonprofit, Cochrane, for concluding that the evidence is “uncertain”.
Shortly after Tufekci published her essay, Cochrane’s Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, dashed out a statement to assure mask advocates that Cochrane would update the review’s language. Cochrane reviews are widely considered as the ‘gold standard’ for high‐quality information to inform medicine, and their process is laborious, with multiple rounds of internal checks and expert peer review. Having Cochrane’s head make a personal pronouncement about a published review is unprecedented — akin to having the Executive Editor of the New York Times write an essay expressing personal opinions about one of the paper’s own deep-dive investigations.
The incident also marked an odd point in the timeline of mask use. Before the pandemic, few, if any, prominent organisations promoted masks to stop influenza or other respiratory viruses. As the WHO concluded in its 2019 pandemic preparedness plan: “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.” So, it was not surprising that both Tufekci’s claims “masks work” and Karla Soares-Weiser’s allegations that something was wrong with the Cochrane mask review were later found themselves to have no real evidence.
Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued another statement, this time explaining the mask review was fine and no changes would be made. Despite the 180, damage to Cochrane’s mask review had already been done. Google sends you straight to Tufekci’s New York Times essay alleging problems in the Cochrane review.
But why did Soares-Weiser change her mind?
I have discovered, through hundreds of emails provided to me by freedom of information requests and a Cochrane whistleblower, that Tufekci bumped Soares-Weiser into making the statement against Cochrane’s own mask review — a move that landed like a grenade inside the organisation.
While Soares-Weiser runs Cochrane, scientists with expertise in each specific subject matter write and edit the reviews. When she rushed out her statement complaining about the mask review, the review authors charged that Cochrane had thrown science under the bus by working with “controversial writer” Zeynep Tufekci; meanwhile, the Editor of the mask review reminded Cochrane’s leadership that changes were only being considered because of “intense media coverage and criticism”, not because there were any problems in the review’s science. “I had a very challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday,” Soares-Weiser wrote a few days afterwards. “I am holding on, stressed, but okay.”
But the story doesn’t end there. Because the attack by Soares-Weiser and Cochrane’s leadership on their own mask review is illustrative of how media and political pressure undermined and suppressed inconvenient scientific conclusions during the pandemic — and are still attempting to do so. The incident also raises questions about media ethics and whether Cochrane’s leadership is still fit for purpose.
Worth reading in full.
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Maybe ,while they are at it , they can start surveillance on kids affected after their mothers or they themselves were Jabbed !
This is another example of the general woke pattern: Given a problem X, say, racism, the less harmful the actual effects of the problem become, the more hysterical the people making a living from manageing X act in order to distract from the fact that their well-paid positions have really become useless encumberances.
I was unaware until recently that there is a Chicken Pox vaccine. In the past children would be taken to Chicken Pox parties by their parents to be deliberately exposed to another child with Chicken Pox. The wisdom in this was that a child would be exposed to this virus early and develop immunity, which by and large is what happened, without much fuss. The reason I was given that children need the CP vaccine is that CP can be bad for some children.
That and society’s predisposition to believe that governments and experts must solve our problems.
And they’re not entirely wrong. Modern man has slowly degenerated into a soft, office bound creature that has few of the survival skills and sense of self sufficiency that our ancestors only a few generations ago had in abundance.
The most-recent example of surival skills I’m aware of involved a guy who was stationed close the ruins of Fleury in summer 1916 with his (German) army unit. During various earlier opportunities, he had grabbed a lot of gas cartridges and coffee powder. The men were all badly suffering from thirst and the only availble source of water was a large puddle with a rotting corpse in it. The guy with the gas and the coffee powder than started cooking bowls of coffee from this water so that they could safely drink it. But this probably wasn’t quite what you had in mind.
I would say that those with agrarian skills, of which there were still plenty in the mid 20th century, were pretty self sufficient.
Manual workers, of which there were many only 30 years ago, had plenty of confidence to do things with their own two hands.
As far as I can see, the physical skills of most young people these days are limited to their two thumbs.
That’s more what I was referring to.
People who engage regularly with the physical world are much less likely to be fooled or intimidated by our state bureaucracies and their invented or highly exaggerated dangers.
You seem to be living in a somewhat strange world. Neither farming nor manual labour of craftsmen have gone away. At the moment, there are 331 apprenticeships advertised in the small, rural German town (about 7700 inhabitants) my parents are living in. About 60% of these are certainly for jobs which don’t involve computer work.
I’m not sure if people without an account can see Twitter posts yet. Anyway, whoever put together this 7min montage of the usual UK criminals has done a great job. Just mind-blowing how it was all 100% blatant lies and there can be no justification from their perspective for the harms and tragedies which subsequently followed as a result of their flagrant deceit.
https://twitter.com/FunctionGain/status/1675247367899979777
We are still locked out Mogs.
I don’t know how long this is going to go on for. Musk says ”temporary”, but just how temporary is that? It’s a nuisance, everyone’s complaining about it because the number of tweets you view is is also limited.
Perhaps it is an underhanded way of pushing up subscriber numbers.
Ve vant names…
Remember this from 2022? The Human Rights Attorney Leigh Dundas talking at a Special Meeting of Board Supervisors of Orange County, California..the woman is on fire!
But she talks about ‘locking down for RSV’…and in the USA she says it has a death rate for children of 0.000004714.. or four one millionths of a percent….
….but if it saves just one life!!!!
https://rumble.com/v1ug65q-human-right-attorney-leigh-dundas-and-others-declare-never-again-to-orange-.html
I had a conversation the other day about the defibrillators that seem to have appeared in greater and great number. I was trying to discuss. 1. How many cardiac arrests happen close to one. 2.Would there be there anyone who can or is willing to have a go reviving a dead person 3. What happens when these things inevitably need servicing and or replacing, Is there some kind of benefit analysis, all of which was countered by ‘well if it saves one life, its worth it’. Well, how much are we prepared to spend.? Give everyone a defib in a backpack and a trained paramedic to accompany them about their daily business.? When compassion comes in the door, common-sense seems to go out the window.
Do you know which company makes them? If it is a UK one are we to become a “world leader” in this product? Very important to become a “world leader” where ever possible to our politicians, they think the electorate is impressed by “world leadership”.
Dr Mike Yeadon had a very good piece on this on his Telegram channel a few days ago – I haven’t really sussed the mechanics of Telegram yet – and he explained that to a large extent vaccination is a double edged sword and certainly where RSV’s are concerned, of which there are thousands, it is wholly the wrong way to treat and natural immunity is nigh on essential.
As I understand it the vaccination procedure basically undermines the body’s ability to fight and particularly so with RSV’s. Effectively, shoving vaccines in to children to protect against RSV’s is completely undermining their immune systems and they suffer more infections.
Funnily enough this is extremely profitable for Pharma. No…ooo I can hear you shouting. More bloody conspiracy theory.
Dead infants don;t take long to replace
Towards the end of 2021 I viewed a video clip from Ireland AM on One-Live TV based in Dublin. It showed a group of women eagerly demonstrating the application of face-coverings, these were home-made, to a doll. The aim was to practise getting “a nice tight fit” on a baby’s face and to “normalize and demystify” covering the face from childhood onwards. Viewers were encouraged to get their own small children to help and join in this exercise in interfering with the airways of babies. Viewers were also shown how to take nasal swabs of babies and make a habit of this risky business. I watched in disbelief and complained (in vain, of course) to my MP, even though masks were also mandated in Britain’s and NI’s schools around that time. There is an ‘ID with a mask’ setting on the I Phone and everyone knows how loathe to part with these gags the NHS still is. This article is chilling, because the first place it will lead is to covering the faces of our young, as night follows day. The vile and sinister practice of covering the human face is not going away.