Beware of Studies with False Conclusions & Lies
During the height of the masking frenzy there was an article in a magazine stating that a study showed that masks worked to prevent infections. The article mentioned the study paper they were referring to. I then looked up the study on www.scholar.google.com and read it. The study abstract made that claim, but when I actually read the whole paper, it was clear that this “study” did not examine anything. All it did was refer to other studies, claiming that masks worked. I took the time and then looked up three studies this “study” was basing its conclusion on. The first cited study as well didn’t actually study anything but referred to another study that claimed that conclusion. We are now at the third level down going through citations. When I looked up that particular study, they tested if masks prevented the spread of the flu in hospital workers and it actually found that masks didn’t make a difference.
Later that year, the CDC came out blasting with a study that supposedly showed that masks worked. The Abstract of that study made that claim, but upon reading the entire study, the conclusion was that there was no difference between the population wearing masks and not wearing masks.
This means we can’t trust public media claiming that a study showed a particular result. Unfortunately, we now also can’t trust the study Abstract to tell the truth about the findings. Most health professionals usually only read the Abstract, because it’s time consuming to read entire studies and it’s often not an easy read, even for medical doctors.
To give the general public an idea, how studies are written, I will go through the different parts and explain what they are supposed to contain.
At the beginning of a paper, you find the title and underneath the scientists who conducted the study and wrote the paper as well as their affiliations. These are important to know as there might be financial interests involved.
Thereafter you usually find the Abstract which is supposed to be a short summary of the study objective, methodology of study and the results. It is often broken down into sections such as Background, Methods and Results.
Thereafter begins the method section with the actual description of the study with describing the background, the methods used, number of study participants, division into groups e.g. a placebo group and a group receiving what is being studied, examinations done and so on. The method section is the most important to scrutinize. Therein are the details of how the study was conducted. It takes some detective work, knowledge and common sense to discern whether the methods used are able to prove the conclusions drawn.
After describing the methods, a description of the results in detail follows about each group studied. This is followed by a discussion and/or a conclusion of the findings. Beware of language that says “could potentially be, might, suggests that, possible” and use of other such conjunctives as these really say that nothing definite could be concluded.
The study put out by the CDC cheated by claiming in the Abstract – the only thing most people ever read- that masks worked. Only if one read the entire study, was it clear that this wasn’t true.
Besides obvious lying, there are other reasons studies can come to wrong conclusions such as methods used that are inadequate, skew the results or don’t have any scientific value. Omission of important information about the people studied can obscure results. For example, if nothing is known about the general state of health of the participants in one group, we don’t know if the results in that group are valid if the state of health in the other group is very different. If study participants are deleted from the study without knowing why, it’s impossible to know if they got out of a study because of severe side effects of a drug for example, including death or other reasons not related to the thing being examined. If a group of people in the study are claimed to have a viral infection, tested for by a PCR test, then most of us now know that the PCR test can’t test for that. Thus right away, the study results are meaningless. The actual detail of the methods used or the reasoning behind conclusions can be missing because the authors work on the premise that “everybody knows this”. Just because everybody “knows this” is no evidence of fact and truth.
In conclusion, if you want to know if a claim referring to a study is true, you need to use scholar.google.com to find that study and read the whole thing. If the study cites other studies, you need to find them too and read them. Unfortunately this is not always easy and quite time consuming. Some studies can only be accessed in their entirety if one pays for them or has access through an institution. The other problem is that reading study papers is not easy. Many papers use highly technical language and even medical professionals may have to read it several times before grasping what is written.
In regards to masks, we will see why masks can’t work against viruses in my next Substack where I will tackle the question “To Be or Not To Be” in regards to viruses.
One last note on masks: In my younger years I spent plenty of time in operating rooms wearing the standard mask provided by the hospital to staff. These consisted of a thin, one layer piece of paper and allowed breathing quite comfortably. This is in contrast to so called surgical masks sold during the plandemic with three thick layers that made it almost impossible to get air. Surgeons wear masks to prevent facial hair, spittle and food particles from falling into an open wound.