Gary,
Interesting. Let's pick this apart a bit. First, you keep hinting that those highlighting articles questioning the official position on Covid and vaccines are uneducated. I have a PhD in optical physics (BS degrees in Physics and in Mathematics), and I have a fair number of published papers both in open and refereed publications. I've also contributed chapters to books about optical physics. I'm not an expert in epidemiology, but I understand the research, publishing, and peer review process quite well. I also have a lot of experience parsing results and conclusions. It's been quite interesting to read conclusion sections in published papers regarding covid. The results sections describe the actual outcome of the data, and the conclusion attempts to spin those results in a certain direction. This is why papers showing significantly lower than expected efficacy of the vaccine include a line about vaccines remaining an effective and critical component of limiting the spread of Covid. I've done the same thing on papers in the past. The conclusion effectively says, "The results showed the exact opposite of what we expected, but here are 5 reasons why we should question those results and still stick with our original expectations." In addition, presenting results as percentages or with carefully selected scale bars on graphs can help spin interpretation of the data in a certain direction.
Now, to the Vox article. The author is critiquing a published scientific paper in, what she admits, is "a major source of high-quality, reputable meta-analyses .... [that] are frequently called the 'gold standard' for evidence-based medicine." As part of her critique, she calls the study's lead author's credentials into question. He is a professor at Oxford and has extensive scientific and medical training. He is accused of being a crank because he pointed to traces of Covid-19 in sewage samples from Spain, Italy, and Brazil obtained prior to the Covid-19 discovery in China and suggested that they should be investigated further. Meanwhile, the Vox author is an activist, not a scientist. If we're making an argument to authority, the Vox critique has the weaker position. So let's set that argument aside.
She then proceeds to claim that the gold standard in meta-analysis should have ignored 76 of the 78 studies they included. What of the studies she wants included? She refers to a study in Denmark: "The group that was told to wear masks had slightly lower infection rates than the group that didn’t wear masks, but the sample was too small for the effect to be significant." Her interpretation of a statistically insignificant result? It found "limited but encouraging evidence" in favor of masking. This is the kind of spin I was referring to in the first paragraph.
The other study she wanted included was an extensive one in Bangladesh. The only result from that study she reported is "In surgical mask villages, we observe a 35.3% reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence among individuals ≥60 years old ... We see larger reductions in symptoms and symptomatic seropositivity in villages that experienced larger increases in mask use.” Unfortunately, while this statement is mathematically correct, it's misleading. The percent reduction is actually a percent of a percent! And they are inconsistent with where they apply this function. In the study, they had a massive publicity campaign in some villages, and the result was an increase in mask usage from 13.3% to 42.3%. Easy math here: mask usage increased by 42.3% - 13.3% = 29%. All good. On the outcome side, 8.6% of people in the lower masking villages exhibited Covid symptoms versus 7.6% of people in the villages much higher rates of masking. That's a decrease of 1%, right? Nope. It's a decrease of 12% when we calculate it as a percent of a percent. Likewise, the rate of symptomatic Covid cases dropped from 0.76% to 0.68%, which counts as a decrease of 9.5% rather than the 0.08% one might initially expect. It's understandable why they presented the data this way. They particularly call out the ≥60 subgroup where the computed reduction in symptomatic cases using this method is 35.3% as a result of an overall increase in mask rate of 28.8%. That sounds really conclusive right? But using their mathematical methods in the opposite direction, I could accurately say that their study showed a drop in symptomatic cases of less than 0.1% even though mask usage increased 300%! It's all a matter of interpretation.
Back to the Vox article. The author acknowledges that the Cochrane study was not specifically focused on mask usage in Covid, but as a general practice to limit transmission of respiratory illness. She calls this irresponsible, though I could easily argue that now that we are past the point of Covid as an emergency, it is a much more relevant study than what she is asking for. She then admits that "We want science to be objective and impartial, for scientists to get the same answers regardless of their starting worldviews. On some questions, like the efficacy of antibiotics against bacterial infections, the evidence really is overwhelming. But on some, like masks, it’s limited."
