What Happens if You Study Mask Wearing After Mandates Ended?--BIAS, Stupid Questions, and Irrelevant 'Findings'

Welcome to Clown 'Science™', courtesy of the 'public health warriors' of the Norwegian IPH who boldly breached the frontiers of sanity and chronology

First of all, please read up on Guy Gin’s take on this gem of ‘the science™’, courtesy of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health:

Norwegian researchers find masks associated with more Covid infections, blame bias not masks

If you haven’t subscribed to Guy’s Substack yet, go for it; Guy is originally from England (I think) and lives among the Japanese, and he’s been documenting the madness masquerading as ‘public health emergency’ of the past almost four years.

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Two or Three Things About the Norwegian Study

Guy Gin

Discusses

First, the last author, Preben Aavitsland, is kind of one of my bete noires here in this entire shitshow masquerading as a 'public health emergency'; he's one of Norway's leading pro-vaxxers and has yet to find someone and something that would be contraindicated for any injectable product.

Note, further, that Preben (we're in Norway are all on first-names only) is spectacularly vain, never wrong, and also omits one crucial factoid from the paper: he's an adjunct professor, and while this might be construed as academic pettiness on my part (I’m a 'real' professor, hence I do think this is more than ‘just’ about academic pettiness), he could have just said so. Pathetic.

The second, much more obviously problematic, issue at-hand here is that Norway ended all mandates in early February 2022, which makes the study period (2 Feb.-24 April 2022), the entire set-up, and study population almost entirely absurd: those who continued to wear masks after (almost all) mandates were ended are, well, probably closer to the Japanese he describes so consistently: morons, that is.

I suppose, then, that the 'bias' mentioned by Guy Gin (lolcatz, btw), derives, in no small part, from this peculiar setting of the 'study' against a society that, from February through April 2022, could possibly care spectacularly less (or nothing at-all).

As I reported back in early February 2022:

As per the Bergens Tidende, quoting the chief medical official of Norway’s second-largest city, Marit Voltersvik. What is more, all pertinent mandates from quarantine, self-isolation, and the like are similarly to be scrapped, according to Voltersvik (my emphases):

We see no longer any point in [mass] testing, which should turn [revert] into something we do to determine clinical indication, by which is meant testing should be restricted to symptomatic patients…

and we are seeking to end all mandates and quarantine obligations. I think that should have been done by now. If you’re ill, you should, of course, stay at home.

This is unambiguously good news, if you’d ask me, but there’s more. According to a recent piece in Aftenposten (Norway’s NYT equivalent), the director of the IPH, Camilla Stoltenberg, is calling on the government to ‘go to normal everyday life shortly’. While there exists some uncertainty about the final size of the winter wave, the situation has improved to such a degree that there are no public health risks that should preclude an end to mandates.

Why Would Norway Do So?

There’s even a sourced link—as in: Aftenposten appears to have begun to rediscover what journalists do—to the most current risk assessment (here), updated just yesterday…

• 3-4m Norwegians will likely be infected, with ‘a few thousands’ requiring medical attention, and ‘a few hundred’ will be admitted to the ICU.

• There’s nothing any of the mandates will be able to do against this, and ‘any mandate may only serve to minimally reduce the number of infections’. In plain English: the mandates don’t work…

There’s also more (fear porn) on influenza, but the main feature is the ‘let’s go back to normal shortly’ recommendation (p. 5). While this is unambiguously good news, there’s also a quite big, fat fly in the ointment: whereas the IPH admits to the inescapable fact that hospitals weren’t overrun in the past couple of weeks [that would be during the high point of the original Omicron wave], and whereas this means elevated pressure on ambulatory services and first providers, there is still (!) no mention of early treatment options.

Read the rest here, if you will:

Covid in Norway, which will end (most) mandates soon, a new risk assessment by the IPH, and the current state-of-play: is Omicron really 'mild'?

Bottom Lines

Please marvel at the moronic study, its results as discussed by

Guy Gin

(subscribe to his Substack, btw), and let esp. the second point sink in:

After late January 2022—i.e., before that let’s study mask-and-glasses wearing—all participants knew that the mandates would be ending within 1-2 weeks.

The ‘biases’ reported by the authors (see their ‘study’ here and have a good laugh while weep that such crap is actually funded ‘science™’) are as follows (emphases by Guy Gin, but I’d highlighted the same issues):

A major limitation of our study is the non-randomized, cross-sectional study design. It may be that mask wearers were more prone to wear masks to protect others from their own infection. This reverse causality may explain the positive association between risk of infection and mask usage, and could be supported by the finding that participants reporting to wear masks also were more likely to test themselves for COVID-19. Furthermore, there may be other behavioral differences related to perception of risk or occupation that we did not observe, that are linked to the likelihood of wearing mask or to the likelihood of being tested for COVID-19 when symptomatic. There is also the possibility that mask wearers feel somewhat protected and thus change their behaviors to not observe social distancing, so that any benefit of masking is offset by increased exposure. Lastly, our main outcome was based on self-report, which is also a possible source of bias.

So, why would the authors—who included (!!!) the Institute of Public Health’s Chief Epidemiologist Preben Aavitsland—omit from their ‘paper’ that the mandates were revoked in early February 2022? This is not just a major ‘bias’ (rather: confounder), but a glaring propaganda lie by omission.

There is also the possibility that mask wearers feel somewhat protected and thus change their behaviors to not observe social distancing.

Why would they do that? Oh, yeah, perhaps because the ‘recommendation’ (orig. anbefalling) of ‘social distancing’—which is yet another of these ‘measures’ that did not work, btw—was no longer ‘in force’, or observed, during the majority of the study period because the bloody mandates were abrogated.

Finally, there’s this gem of stupidity:

Our main outcome was based on self-report, which is also a possible source of bias.

Possible? Hahahahaha, I just fell of my chair.

I know I repeat myself here, but, yeah, that’s a factually true statement here, for the only (morons) who continued to profess adherence to the ‘public health’ cult after the mandates were abrogated are…wait for it…the most flamboyantly idiotic Branch Covidians.

Nuff said here, I suppose.

Shout-out to

Guy Gin

for absolving me from the intellectually painful necessity of dissecting this crap paper—which offered me the opportunity to simply rant here.

What a huge pile of horse manure (apologies to horses), for their excrements are actually helpful and useful; the above-linked ‘study’ is clearly—garbage.