Much of the government response, particularly at the federal level, was aimed at terrorizing the public and, when they came online, coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people. The government also financially incentivized refusal to treat covid in its early stages (allowing the patients to either recover on their own or, for elderly and already chronically ill, to become sicker), place patients on ventilators, and prescribe dangerous experimental treatments like Remdesivir that contributed to the death tallies.
The federal government's meddling in some states' distribution of monoclonal antibody treatments was especially pernicious. Lawsuits targeting hospitals, local and state governments, and the federal governments for their conduct (everything from propagandizing to causing or contributing to deaths as in the use of Remdesivir) during the pandemic are in process throughout the United States now.
The conspiracy thinking assuming some sinister ulterior motive from government actions is just a harmful trope, and wrong.
None of them worked and it was clear from the beginning that they were not going to ameliorate covid's impact. Loose-fitting surgical masks do not meaningfully impede the spread of aerosol-borne viruses. Even N95s have been found to show no additional benefit compared to surgical masks in pre-covid research that compared influenza rates among procedure-mask-wearing healthcare workers and healthcare workers wearing N95s. People seem to forget that the uselessness of masks against covid was known early on, then experts were trotted out to hypothesize (incorrectly but authoritatively) that covid was actually droplet-borne so that the mask-orders being imposed would have some air of legitimacy. Many deluded people still believe that surgical masks are useful against covid.
Then there were the capacity limits for businesses and forced closures of non-megacorp businesses.
And the stickers on the floor at arbitrary, pointless intervals. Pointless because covid is, as we knew from the beginning, pretended to forget for a while when "experts" falsely asserted the droplet nonsense, and know once more... aerosol-borne. Replication-competent covid virions can linger in the air for literally hours.
And the contact-tracing charade. And forced quarantine (not a thing in the USA but did happen in many other nations that were supposedly following "the science"), sometimes simply for alleged exposure to a PCR-positive "case".
During the covid pandemic, most citizens of nations that actively tried to "fight" the pandemic were deceived and abused relentlessly and shamelessly by those in authority, abetted by many experts. Those who dissented were falsely labeled kooks, deplatformed, and targeted for destruction.
I cannot read the minds of government officials in every country that imposed these sorts of unscientific and harmful alleged public health measures on their populations and tell you why they did it but I can tell you that it was obvious to many with relevant expertise or a rational mind and a willingness to look into what was being done and compare it to most nations' preexisting response plans for epidemics of viral respiratory illnesses and with the published literature with an open mind, even at the time when some were panicking, and know that they did not make sense and would not help.
In contrast, here is a report on the CDC's website on mask effectiveness for Covid: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm
That report contradicts your claims of ineffectiveness ("uselessness of masks" etc.) as well as the relative effectiveness of various types of masks.
On top of the lack of evidence for any of your claims, you accuse people of being deluded if they disagree. You call contact-tracing a charade, in opposition to epidemiologists. Those are just two examples among multiple others. So. Is there a reason for this incendiary rhetoric and gish-galloping in your posts?
Did you even search for any peer-reviewed papers about surgical mask effectiveness against covid?
Here's a model study that aligns closely with what we've all observed in real life (i.e. rooms full of masked people spreading and getting covid):
"Effectiveness of Face Masks in Preventing Airborne Transmission of SARS-CoV-2" https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20
"IMPORTANCE Airborne simulation experiments showed that cotton masks, surgical masks, and N95 masks provide some protection from the transmission of infective SARS-CoV-2 droplets/aerosols; however, medical masks (surgical masks and even N95 masks) could not completely block the transmission of virus droplets/aerosols even when sealed."
Here's the clinical study that found no difference between N95s and surgical masks:
"N95 Respirators vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Among Health Care Personnel: A Randomized Clinical Trial" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31479137/
"Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza."
Now, how many replication-competent virions need to make it around, through, etc. a face covering in order to initiate an infection? The answer is one.
And you're aware that covid infections can be initiated via the exposed regions of mucous membrane around your eyes (ocular mucous membrane), right? Have you been wearing a full-facepiece respirator with N100 filters installed when you went outdoors?
No, I know. You think that stopping some virions, 60% or even 30%, must be useful. And we'll all pretend that eyes aren't a significant route of infection because we can't get the rubes to all wear ski goggles everywhere all the time.
As the saying goes, it's much easier to con someone than to get them to admit later that they've been conned.
1. Paper [1] is a simulation from Oct 2020 - we have had better real-life data since that time, reflected in the CDC graph of relative effectiveness of mask types [2].
Also, further in that ASM paper [1], they state "Our airborne simulation experiments showed that cotton masks, surgical masks, and N95 masks had a protective effect with respect to the transmission of infective droplets/aerosols and that the protective efficiency was higher when masks were worn by the virus spreader. Considerable viral loads have been detected in the nasal and throat swabs of asymptomatic and minimally symptomatic patients, as well as those of symptomatic patients, which suggests transmission potential (4). Accordingly, it is desirable for individuals to wear masks in public spaces. Importantly, medical masks (surgical masks and even N95 masks) were not able to completely block the transmission of virus droplets/aerosols even when fully sealed under the conditions that we tested. In this study, infectious SARS-CoV-2 was exhaled as droplets/aerosols and mask efficacy was examined. To allow quantification, we conducted our studies by using a relatively high dose of virus, and under these conditions, it is possible that the protective capacity of the masks was exceeded. Although the efficiency of detecting infectious virus was reduced when the amount of exhaled virus was reduced, viral RNA was detected regardless of the type of mask used. These results indicate that it is difficult to completely block this virus even with a properly fitted N95 mask. However, it remains unknown whether the small amount of virus that was able to pass through the N95 masks would result in illness."
So they conclude that (a) there is a protective effect (b) which is better if the spreader is wearing the mask (c) people should wear masks in public spaces (d) some virus does get through, but (e) it is unknown (circa Oct 2020) whether the amount getting through results in illness and (f) their process of forcing high doses of virions through is a lab situation and may have exceeded the capacity of the masks to prevent virions getting through.
For the point (e), this study [3] estimates 300-2000 virions (not 1) are needed to cause an infection. For point (f) methinks that maybe masks are ineffective if someone coughs in your face 1 foot away; we'd have to compare viral loads there with those in the study. I didn't research it in that detail, maybe we depend on the scientists to do that and develop some guidance on the topic.
2. Let's look at your second link [4]
This study is saying that "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza." This is a 2019 pre-covid study. And that is not the same conclusion as that "medical masks and N95 masks are ineffective" or that "medical masks and N95 masks are ineffective in the general population" or that "medical masks and N95 masks are equally ineffective in the general population" or that "medical masks and N95 masks are ineffective for covid". Paper [1] examines this last point for covid.
It simply says that for health care personnel, there's no difference in transmission rates for influenza for either type of mask, so we can extrapolate that these (trained) people will see equal effectiveness from either type of mask. To see if the masks are effective is a different study, though there is a clue in this study - 8.2% infections in an outpatient setting. To get a real understanding of effectiveness, one would have to compare that 8.2% infection rate to what the infection rate would be if those healthcare personnel were not wearing masks (I freely and unknowledgeably speculate that would be upwards of 80%-90% depending on their immune system).
Yes, you are right that covid infections can occur through the eyes. For that glasses can cut down the infection rates. Goggles are probably better, but glasses work somewhat [5]. Also [6]. The mechanism appears to be unclear - whether it is by preventing touching the eyes, or by actually blocking virions landing on the eyes.
Overall, neither of these links appears to imply that masks are completely ineffective, and I'm confused about how any reasonable tech/science-savvy person could read those papers and come to the conclusion that masks are completely ineffective. There is also [2]. Wearing glasses appears to convey additional protection.
<rant on> All those surgeons and doctors and nurses wearing masks in hospitals and operating rooms before covid must have been idiots, eh? Semmelweis [7] must have been a moron to start the trend of hand washing in hospitals to reduce infections, yes? I mean, why even bother with medicine or science, we can just pray the virus away, right? We can eat dirt and uncooked and unwashed food and drink raw milk and suck on the pus from an infection without consequences!!! After all humanity has been around for thousands of years and science only for a few hundred! Why even bother with clean rooms in chip factories, it's not like viruses can infect chips!! <rant off/>
[1] https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mSphere.00637-20 [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm [3] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31479137/ [5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8193301/ [6] https://aricjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1375... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Do you mean don't reduce spread at all, or don't prevent it 100%?
The cited values for time post-shot to peak efficacy and the subsequent time from there to whatever threshold of efficacy you choose (and on to negative efficacy after that) are based on studies of groups of individuals. For some of the individuals, the shots were more or less effective than the mean/median/this-many-standard-devs value in preventing infection and then, as their jabs' effects weakened, in reducing viral load and symptoms that are relevant to onwards transmission.
In the absence of any widely-enforced way of measuring an individual's viral load at any given moment, many people who believe themselves to be under a covid shot's umbrella of protection are actually infected with covid and spreading it. Covid is aerosol-borne and can linger in the air for hours.
For high-risk people not living in a one-person habitat at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon, there is no avoiding covid, even if everyone around them gets a booster every three months.
There are reasons that effective vaccines for the viruses that cause the common cold (rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, et al.) and for influenza have never been developed. And everyone should have been very skeptical of authorities' "If you get this (or that) shot, you won't get or spread covid!" claims about a bunch of experimental vaccines (some since withdrawn or abandoned due to lack of uptake in the face of adverse effects or realizations about the mildness of this disease for most people) churned out in a matter of months.
It's neither accurate or factual. Genuinely high-risk people who are vaccinated but get covid have much better outcomes than genuinely high-risk people who are not vaccinated. The vaccine can literally protect them from death. You'd have to be crazy to conclude that the vaccine "does nothing to protect" them.
From my original comment: "coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people"
You are now citing an alleged benefit of lowered odds of severe illness and death to high-risk individuals from receiving the experimental vaccines themselves.
I am decrying the government coercion/disinfo efforts that bribed, bullied, shamed, and frightened low-risk persons (non-elderly, exhibiting none of the known risk factors for serious disease, in apparent good health) into getting any of these shots on the (false) pretext that doing so would prevent truly high-risk persons from contracting covid.
The "and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people" is still a lie. What you didn't say is "coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people from ever getting infected"
which would still be a lie, but much much closer to the truth. Instead you misleadingly stated what you said in such a way that it made the vaccines sound like they weren't protecting genuinely high-risk people at all which is, again, a lie.
The vaccines do protect genuinely high-risk people. It also helps prevent the spread of the virus, but at this point only a little. Against early strains of the virus the vaccines were very effective at preventing infection, but we've allowed the virus to evolve so now that's no longer the case. This wasn't a government conspiracy, it was a complex and changing situation and the CDC was very quick to inform the public once the data showed that the vaccines were not protecting against infection as well as they used to, and were also very clear about the fact that the vaccines are still (so far) highly effective at keeping people from dying and getting seriously ill.
This is an obviously biased total misrepresentation.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Table 4a.
They remain quite effective against hospitalisation and death, and have saved millions of lives globally, net.
Old people should get vaccinated but the herd immunity arguments used to justify vaccination of young people are completely unjustified.
When vaccine efficacy goes negative (you're more vulnerable to infection and become as or more symptomatic and carry as high or higher a viral load than unvaccinated) after a few months, you have to get a booster and subject yourself to the same or greater low, but non-negligible risk of known serious/fatal adverse effects in order to fingers crossed buy a few more months of protection you don't personally need but which you hope will reduce truly high-risk persons' chances of contracting covid. There may also be other, as-yet-unknown adverse effects.
How long are you willing to keep running back and forth across a minefield?
Given the situation a full run of trials would have taken far too much time.
I don't blame you because the governments spread this misinformation. The CDC has recanted this misinformation.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-director-covid-...
But we also know the CDC's original position was false.
More importantly, all social media platforms universally censored the scientist who discovered the mrna vaccine because he said... they dont prevent spread.
Do note that neither the Pfizer nor Moderna vaccines actually tested risk of infection or transmission. You can download the clinical trial protocols and read what the clinical trials actually measured. Patients in the trial were only tested upon symptoms and the endpoint measured was severity of disease.
I believe it was only the J&J vaccine that actually regularly tested patients to see if there was a difference in protection against acquiring Covid. They did not test protection against transmission.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34355689/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738514/
Those studies pretty consistently found benefits in the 40-60% range against the original strain. Unfortunately, we had political opportunists discouraging adoption and then Delta and Omicron evolved so the scenario public health experts had been worried about happened.
Regarding the claim that Pfizer and Moderna didn’t test for transmission, this has been muddied substantially by its popularity as a talking point for antivax activists and right-wing pundits trying to present it as a conspiracy of some sort. In reality, Pfizer and Moderna worked with the FDA to design the phase 3 trials and they all decided to focus on protection against serious outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t look for signals in the data or that other studies weren’t in progress. All of this was clearly communicated at the time, too, so I would question the motives of anyone who tries to say it was buried – at the very least, that’s saying they get their news from untrustworthy sources.
This is covered at considerable length here:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine...
"We estimated a VET of 71% among household contacts of fully vaccinated index cases. Harris et al. found a VET of 40–50% for unvaccinated households contacts". They estimated it, and if using the 40-50% figure, their study found higher transmission rats among vaccinated.
It was also self-reported data they explicitly state was not collected for research purposes, "As our study used data not primarily collected for research purposes, it has some important limitations. Our data do not contain information on negative tests among contacts, therefore we do not know if contacts did not get infected or did not seek testing."
I would be careful in making any sweeping conclusions from an observational study using self-reported income.
In reality, Pfizer and Moderna worked with the FDA to design the phase 3 trials and they all decided to focus on protection against serious outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t look for signals in the data or that other studies weren’t in progress.
I agree - Pfizer and Moderna never claimed they reduced infection rates because they never tested it. Generally it was politicians who were saying "get vaccinated to protect others" based on some theoretical benefit.
Like I said, look at the Phase 3 clinical trial designs, they are public documents. Risk of infection/transmission was not captured.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/01/21/fac...
Do you feel this will be a convincing argument?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22651099/
I draw your attention in particular to one of the figures: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22651099/#&gid=article-figur...
You will see that there is a great deal of variation in the number of aerosol-sized particles emitted by the individuals in this small clinical study and note that the variation between individuals is greater than the difference, for a single individual, between a person's aerosol output when ill vs. after recovery.
You can also find studies confirming that ordinary breathing constantly generates aerosols. They aren't just something produced when someone coughs or sneezes.
If you were extremely socially isolated, perhaps on a farm or in a cabin somewhere and only going into town once a month to buy some supplies or pick up your mail from a one-man post office or something, slight reductions in other persons' viral load and very conscientious use of a properly-fitted respirator and eye protection might buy you a little more time before you got infection.
But living normally, going out most days and interacting with many people and entering environments with non-negligible foot traffic from other people who have made their own respiratory contributions to the ambient air? With surgical masks or cute cloth masks and everyone having gotten some combination of the currently-available covid shots? No.
Also, please stop waving away these deaths as "comorbidities" and act like Covid wasn't involved in these deaths. If these people hadn't had a Covid infection then they wouldn't be dead. Period end. That's why 1 million more Americans than expected died. There are millions of Americans successfully managing their heart disease and diabetes who otherwise can expect to live long lives. Covid cut those lives short.
Doesn't matter, as long as it keeps people out of the hospital. Dying of delayed cancer treatment because hospital staff is busy dealing with unvaxxed Covid patients isn't great.