Published Mask Study Confirms: the CDC are Master Data Manipulators

Picking your timeframe is their go-to tactic to get the result they want

For over a year, the CDC had to rely on a mediocre laughable “study” that mask mandates work based on 2 hair stylists in Missouri. The legend has it that the two stylists tested positive for Covid after making 139 women look fabulous. Local county contact tracers were able to persuade half of the customers to take a positive test and - in the absurd logic of this non-study, concluded that MASKS WORK!

In 2021, CDC authors looked at Arizona schools from July 1–September 4, 2021 and compared those institutions which had mask mandates and those that did not. School starts a bit earlier than most states in Arizona but they conveniently ended their study RIGHT at the peak of the cases for that summer/fall in Arizona.

Samantha Budzyn published another one of these non-studies (they call them MMWRs - Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report - non-peer reviewed “reports” that they pass off as authoritative tomes). Budzyn would then perform the same data analysis on a country-wide basis and concluded that counties without a mask mandate saw almost DOUBLE the rate of cases among children.

Welcome now to the stage the inestimable Tracy Beth Høeg M.D., Ph.D. and her co-author Ambarish Chandra. Earlier this year they attempted to replicate the mask data and analysis done by Budzyn and then extended it to capture the entire curve of that late summer wave.

That paper is now peer-reviewed and published.

The results?

Thus, during August—September 2021, mask mandates were associated with lower pediatric cases of Sars-CoV-2 in districts where schools started by August 15. However, Fig. 1 also shows that cases quickly declined in later weeks and did so faster in counties without mask mandates. In fact, the Budzyn et al., study ended at exactly the peak of school case numbers for this sample of counties. By the end of the ninth week after reopening average daily pediatric case rates in counties without mask mandates were 15.8 per 100,000 while counties with mandates averaged 18.3 per 100,000; the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.12).

No statistically significant difference between masking and unmasked schools (in fact, the rate was higher for masked schools!)

The entire study is worth your time to read: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163445322005503#bib0001

More on this soon but we owe a huge debt to Tracy and Ambarish for their efforts to see this through.