never mind that many of the positions that are "scientific consensus" are not supported by the current peer reviewed research.
Do the interventional cardiologists want to stop stenting people? Not really. The orthopedic surgeons still want to mess with your meniscus, etc.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19. (surgical masks - different story)
Yet I'm still surrounded by people - wearing predominantly cloth masks - that are full of outrage for the maskless. I've not heard any updates from the CDC on this issue.
"Statistically insignificant" is the same as "no reason to believe it is true".
EDIT: here: https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-...
That summary is really hard to draw conclusions from;
“However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.”
And “ A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”
But also “ Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.”
This is a completely false characterization of the article you just linked.
There were significantly fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with surgical masks compared with the control villages. (Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.) This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.
“Unfortunately, much of the conversation around masking in the United States is not evidence-based,” Luby said. “Our study provides strong evidence that mask wearing can interrupt the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. It also suggests that filtration efficiency is important. This includes the fit of the mask as well as the materials from which it is made. A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”
However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.
--- We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.2% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.80%; treatment prevalence = 0.71%). For cloth masks, we find an imprecise zero, although the confidence interval includes the point estimate for surgical masks (aPR = 0.95 [0.79,1.11]; control prevalence 0.67%; treatment prevalence 0.62%). ---
If you go to the chart, you find a 5% relative reduction with a p-value of 0.540 (!)
Regarding reduction in symptoms:
--- Additionally, when we look separately by cloth and surgical masks, we find that the intervention led to a reduction in COVID-like symptoms under either mask type (p = 0.000 for surgical, p = 0.048 for cloth), but the effect size in surgical mask villages was 30-80% larger depending on the specification. In Table A10, we run the same specifications using the smaller sample used in our symptomatic seroprevalence regression (i.e. those who consented to give blood). In this sample we continue to find an effect overall and an effect for surgical masks, but see no effect for cloth masks. ---
There's no intellectually honest way to interpret this data other than "cloth masks have very little effect, if any".
This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic.
Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.
The real gatekeeping comes in what research gets grants and funding, but if you look into what's happening there, it's not comparable to the Church proscribing things - it mostly means that the DoD, petrochem, and a few industries have outsized influence on what research is done.
That points to a bad system, but one that has nothing to do with the modern world we live in, and which if applied by analogy will fit so poorly as to be a bad analogy.
Also the Church conducted scientific experiments regularly, since a number of priests through the ages were scientists, and it was a result of priests taking observations in later, better telescopes that updated the Church's position on heliocentrism.
That aside, individual priest carried out their experiments, not in the name of the Church. The Church had already leaned towards scholarship by this time (post-Bologna) and being the dominant component of all European cultures, it only made sense that it would attract people with interests in science and experiments. (By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.) This is discounting roles in Church or its bodies—usually monasteries—that required a vow to dumbness.
What do you mean?
Scientific consensus provides a means for bad science/scientists to escape ostracism (I use this with the full intensity of its definitions). Because it provides a thick and opaque veil behind which the clergy (all scientists) instructs the laity (the rest of us). Individual scientists no longer stand and fall on their own. So call them cranks if you want but the individuals standing on the banks of the "scientific consensus" stream are arguably the closest we have to 16th and 17th century scientists tinkering away in their private labs, making discoveries that continue to bear their names.
Now, to a philosophy of science I subscribe to: Popper's Falsifiability Test. An undercurrent (probably prominent, even) theme is this: new confirmatory experiments add nothing new if they don't deviate materially from the original experiment. Following this, the whole enterprise of scientific consensus stands on shaky grounds since it adds nothing. It transforms science into a faith-based exercise (akin to bishops at a synod throwing their weights behind certain theories and declaring other bishops as cranks/heretics). This I do not accept.
To my knowledge theories proposed that way in modern science aren't taken seriously and in our present time are not the norm for any recent major scientific discoveries or research. Those days are long past. New science is done in expensive labs with very expensive equipment and gets funded by grants. The Alvarez Hypothesis was possible because of cutting edge nuclear science that could identify the iridium. LIGO, and every space science and astronomical discovery are driven by really expensive ever growing scopes. In astronomy, chem, physics, molecular biology, paleontology, et al today you'll need an expensive lab and very large grants to do cutting edge work. At this point we're building colliders many kilometers in length. Modern Science is a product of well funded labs with staffing and equipment funded largely by research grants. There are cases in domains like macrobiology where individuals could do field work and find a new species, but the domains where the individual scientist is doing meaningful work are dwindling to none, and you should update your model of how modern science actually operates and is funded, it's interesting.