A reply to isbiu.com

This is a reply to this article by „Karimabazbouz“.

So, the first thing you claim is that my study was „deeply flawed“. It’s peer-reviewed science in a 100-year-old journal.

Then you go on to make comments about me, keeping to proclaim that this paragraph was not ad hominem. Yet, you fail to mention anything positive about me.

Things you could have said: I have no ties to any university or pharmaceutical company. My career is in treating humans, not earning money with studies. My website is not monetarized, so I have no financial interest. I have vast mathematical knowledge because I studied mathematics, too. You could have mentioned that I have a lot of articles in my blog that actually „defend“ vaccination by disproving rumours around it.

You also make wrong claims, like where you claim that I had published on brownstone institute, whereas they just republished what I wrote for Daily Sceptic. You fail to mention that I was supported by a professional scientific editing team and keep writing I was doing this all alone.

Then you go on bragging about how I dare to name something after myself. How dare I? If I had called it differently, you would have criticised me for not standing up for it and giving it my name, that „raises a few olfactory flags“, right?

Okay, so you keep writing wrong and negative stuff before going to the core of the analysis. Why?

Then you talk about ecological fellacy. First, you seem not to know what you’re writing about, as there are actually four statistical evological fallacies which you could have found out on wikipedia.

To conclude that the masks caused the severity of their disease is not only to mistake a correlation for causation, but to commit the ecological fallacy by assuming that a county-wide rule necessarily informs us on an individual’s behaviour.

Second, I did not argue like this. Just read the abstract! I found a correlation between mask mandates and case fatality rate, and then I went on to write a hypothesis why the mask might influence the individual under mask mandate.

You go on to write this.

Deaths from COVID-19 are influenced by a lot more than whether or not people are wearing masks indoors. They are impacted by how much of the virus is circulating in the community, whether or not large gatherings have been banned, and the capacity the local hospitals have to take care of people requiring hospitalizations.

Okay, now it’s getting funny. I write about case fatality rate, you write about stuff that either does not impact case fatality rate at all, or was completely irrelevant (hospital capacity during summer).

Crucially, the deaths he attributes to COVID were not necessarily recorded as such; he infers they were due to COVID by removing certain types of deaths, like early infant mortality and suicides, from all of the deaths recorded in those counties.

Now you’re getting really wild, totally befuddling the reader, by mixing in things from the parallelization with the results without providing any context.

Next, you list a paper that basically does not refer to case fatality rate at all, but lists other studies on page 6. Among others, they refer to the study by Adjodah et. al. which I referred to in my study because it supports the foegen effect! The paper you quotes writes:

While Adjodah et al. observed a statistically significant increase in cases after mandates were lifted in January to March 2021, they found no statistically significant effect on hospitalizations and deaths associated with lifting mask mandates in January to March 2021.

And it gets even better, more evidence in the next paragraph

An analysis of mask mandates in the US from September 1 to October 31, 2020 found that the longer-term associations over a two month period were stronger for confirmed cases than for deaths. 19 The 60-day adjusted ratio was 0.9 (95% CI = 0.9-1.0) for deaths compared to 0.7 (95% CI: 0.7-0.8) for cases. Furthermore, the implementation of a state-level public mask mandate prior to lifting a stay-at-home order was associated with a 29% relative reduction in new cases and an 8% relative reduction in new deaths after two months

So if cases drop by 29% but death by only 8%, that means CFR increases! You bring up more stuff that supports my point!

Also, maybe you didn’t read my study correctly, as I did also find that mask mandates reduced infection rates…

Then you bring up Dr. Matthew Oughton, whoever that is, on my hypothesis. So, my argument for the foegen effect stemms from the „helmet study“ by Patel et. al., which is also a peer-reviewed study done by independent researchers, and some other studies. So I bring up peer-reviewed studies and you some random doctors? Is this some kind of joke?

You adequately describe the hamster study, good job! And you even write that it „is technically true“ – which makes you writing „This is hardly proof of anything“ actually sound kind of biased… Now, maybe I should do a „smell check“ on you, like you did in your article?

No, thanks.

I have to end here already because these were all the arguments you had.