Dr. Andy Paquette knows peer-review and stat analysis, and how it didn’t work with COVID mask science.

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The Yale/Stanford Study Mask Study

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[00:00:00] News clip: A large study on masks details their importance in the fight against COVID.

[00:00:04] Alex Tsakiris: Bullshit.

[00:00:05] News clip: For an in depth look, we spoke to one of the lead authors of that study, researchers at Stanford, Yale and UC Berkeley analyzed 350,000 adults in Bangladesh. Now they took half of that group and encouraged them to wear masks. 29% of them complied with that for about a 10-week period, they found that masks in general provided a 9% reduction in cases.

[00:00:29] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah, junk science and today in Skeptiko our guest, Dr. Andy Paquette will break down what is one of the most deceptive studies I’ve run across. I mean, this discussion even brought us back to the Sheldrick Wiseman days. But let’s roll on with the clip.

[00:00:45] News clip Speaker 1: Surgical masks were even more efficient reducing cases by 11%. Ashley Stusinskey, one of the lead authors in the study and an infectious disease Fellow at Stanford says the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter.

[00:01:01] News clip Speaker 2: So overall, we felt that this demonstrated that masks are highly effective in reducing COVID-19.

[00:01:08] Andy Paquette: Yeah, Alex, I gotta say, like a couple of things. I’m sorry, this is just first off, that first headline was much more sensational and then the second one, both of them are not based on any kind of foundation of evidence found in this article. But the thing that really got me was that clip of the TV news, so the TV announcer says that they found a 9% reduction in cases. And then the lady says yes, it’s 9% up to 11% for this other condition. And I’m thinking I just read that paper. And what they just said is wrong. It’s a 9% relative reduction, the actual absolute reduction was something like 0.002%, it was tiny.

[00:01:47] Alex Tsakiris: The headline to me is a big lie. And when I say big lie mean it’s kind of well-known and propaganda, is the best way to hide a lie is to make it a big lie, because little lies are liable to be exposed, if they would have just tried to bury this study and not put it out and someone stumbled across it and said, “Hey, here’s another no result, stack it alongside the Danish study that just came out randomized control study that shows no result, stack it along with all the epidemiological data, which we should talk about. I think what they’ve done is they’ve hyped it up in order to bury it. So the debate becomes, well, did they really do it? You know, did they do this right? Who did they forced to do it? When what the real story is another null result? Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore contrast your science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. And today we welcome back Dr. Andrew Paquette to Skeptiko. Andy is probably best known, at least to Skeptiko listeners, for his work in cataloguing and analyzing just an amazing collection of dreams. And we talked Andy way back in the day,