 I got an ask from actually the show sponsor, the sponsor by Matt. I'm not going to give his whole name because I don't know if you want me to. I think he's here on live. And this is the, this is kind of the topic as he defined it. He said it would be great to do a show or maybe several shows to take a hard look at what constitutes good objective scientific studies. How to evaluate various claims about scientific questions like COVID-19 and masks and treatments and such. An ideal preferred approach would be a combination of lecture discussion about this topic combined with the concrete analysis of a study or two relating to, for example, COVID-19 and mask efficiency or quality of COVID-19 vaccines. So that's a big ask, particularly if we're going to go through actual articles and, and I have posted the articles that I think Amish is going to be talking about on the show. I've posted it in the comment section below so you can open them up and look at them and I don't know how much in depth we're going to get into these, but it seemed to me that Amish was the ideal person to talk about this. I have done a little bit of stuff on my show about just statistics which I know a little bit about and how particularly doctors have used statistics in bad ways, but partially because they're not trained in them and partially because I think they have other agendas going on, but statistics is hard. But, you know, so part of the analysis of any paper any study in the world in which we live in is has to be are they using the statistics rate. There's a little bit of work on that, but I think, but what I want to do today is take an issue with Amish is actually I think we can say you change your mind about like, I would say that I revise my, I revise my position I think that from the beginning, yes, I can explain that whole evolution in my thinking. Yeah, so let's do that why don't we explain that and use the studies these three papers that we've got. I assume they have. They are here because they had some causal relationship to you changing your mind, you know, I think they over they kind of summarize some of the there's a lot of the background to what happened. So, so I'm going to start, I'll just start going so let's. So let's talk about so let's talk about mass so from the very beginning, everybody has said if you're symptomatic meaning if you've got cough fever, sneezing sore throat you should be wearing a mask if you have to be around people that's always been the case for symptomatic people. The question with masks came about do you need to wear a mask if you're an asymptomatic individual somebody with no symptoms at all. Initially, the recommendation of not just me but basically everybody was no. And that was because we did not ever, we had not seen asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus is and remember this is the seventh human coronavirus that's discovered. And for them cause 25% of our common colds, we'd always seen people transmitting when they were symptomatic and that's an easy way that you say if you're symptomatic wear a mask if you're not don't because you can't transmit. This is the case for you, so take Ebola for example you cannot transmit if you don't have symptoms of Ebola. That's really so so that's something we all thought based on what we had seen the context was all these other coronaviruses. And that's why that recommendation came early on you started to see some anecdotal reports coming from China about maybe this person was asymptomatic but there was always some flaw well maybe that person was that the case in Germany was taking Tylenol because she was jet lagging like well that's not really asymptomatic it probably wasn't jet lag it was probably COVID where they were in the same place and they might have they might have touched a contaminated object like a pen. So there was all these ways to kind of discount that but over time it became clear that asymptomatic transmission or pre symptomatic transmission was occurring and if that was the case that meant that and we're in a situation where you have no way to know whether you're infected or not because you couldn't test yourself if you can't test yourself and brush your teeth. And we also figured out that people with mild symptoms had no idea that the symptoms were from COVID they thought they were patients that people that I had talked to said well I was at the gym yesterday I lifted a lot of weights and that's why I thought my muscles were achy but it was COVID. So then it became a public policy issues you know what do you do with all these asymptomatic pre symptomatic and people who have symptoms that they don't realize are COVID. And that's where the mask that's how that mass recommendation change. So we didn't have that evidence back in January February we'd not never established pre symptomatic spread if you look back at all the interviews I did. Dr. Fauci or whoever it might have been or even look in textbooks about Coronavirus is it was not there the context of knowledge change and I think that's an important thing is that it was contextually right what we said we would have been I would have been arbitrary if I would have said to where mass back then. And when the evidence change I had to change my position because it can because knowledge is contextual in the context change and I think that's it. People say that we flip flopped or the Dr. Fauci lie it's not true. It's it's basically the context change and you read that section in opar about blood about blood types it's very similar to what happened here and what we've seen. I wanted to ask, in terms of symptomatic people so people with symptoms. Was it well established as a bean well established for a long time that symptomatic people, if they women ask a less likely to infect others. Yes, because there's a I see people making claims that no mass don't help and so on. It's symptomatic that I mean that's that's a no brainer basically because it's a physical barrier that's that that's it stops respiratory droplets. I've heard people say things like the virus is too small to be stopped. The virus isn't naked it doesn't come through those it's in a respiratory droplet. Just just sneeze on your computer screen right now everybody watching and see what you see that's where the virus is. It's in those big droplets that's what we're talking about there are certain certain pathogens like tuberculosis that aren't very small, they get suspended in the air need a special kind of master that but for these types of respiratory viruses the primary transmission is large respiratory droplets that you can see they fall to the ground under the action of gravity and about six feet or so. It's a barrier that stops the kind of droplets that we get when we sneeze is going to stop, at least a significant percentage and overwhelming percentage of the virus is getting out there into the yes they're not ironclad there's going to be, and it's not a substitute for you shouldn't get a false sense of security that you're wearing a mask that you can go into a mosh pit at a punk rock concert. So that changed. And then at the same time, you know in some of these studies that I that you have in there I think are useful. So if you look at the one there was both Goldman Sachs and, and the one in health affairs, they both what they did. Now this is an important way to think about so so it's just not so there's lots of studies that came out of places that had mass mandates cases went down. But you just can't say that, because other things are going on at that time was not just mass mandates it was stay at home orders it was restaurants closed it was schools closed it was everybody teleworking. So you've got to control for that. So that's an important point of when you're looking at a scientific paper is are they controlling for all of these other variables, so that the only thing different is the mask mandate. Then it's even more than that you have to also know, you know where cases going down before the mask mandate and then all of a sudden the mass mandate company went down. They had to you have to control for that as well. So you have to control for the time to see when the event occurred and where it was in relation to the trajectory of cases where so you have to look back and say, five days before the mask mandate cases were doing this they were at this rate and now they're at this rate. All of that was, was what was important to figure out what was going on in these studies and that's how you evaluate a study it's not an anecdote, and it has a lot there's a lot of statistics and, and most, you're right, many physicians don't know that much about statistics but if you're an academic medicine or if you're an epidemiology or public health statistics are kind of the bane of your existence you have to get very good at understanding it because you can manipulate data can look completely two different to you if you don't understand what statistical tests were done so that's what happened we had this biological knowledge new knowledge about Coronavirus, then at the same time, we saw mask wearing go up, and in places where it went up where cases were going up they went down, or where no and compared to places where they had all the other restrictions except for masks that that it was really clear that this was happening, and that's why the position changed. So yeah, I read the health affairs article. I was interested in because it does what's called an event study which is a particular way of doing statistics about these exactly kind of things when when something changes. What impact does it have that that's an event study and I used to do events studies and finance all the time so actually my dissertation is one big event study. It's interesting so I went to the appendix and look at the stats and looked at look at how they, they composed it, and they do a good job. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a it's a good study in that sense. What I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, women or mystic revelations. 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