Month: February 2023

AP classes were cool

Ron DeSantis was an AP student back in the glory days when it was all white males, before the you know what’s history and beyotch studies were taught in school. When America was great:

When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis floated the possibility of eliminating Advanced Placement classes from his state’s curriculum, he conveniently left out an important fact.

DeSantis was once the “AP US History student of the year,” according to his high school yearbook, pages of which were obtained by The Daily Beast.

Before turning on AP classes in his latest culture war skirmish, the governor not only benefited from the rigorous courses as a high schooler at Dunedin High School, he also praised the Sunshine State’s top three placement for students in AP courses in February 2020, calling the program “a gateway to achieving success in college, career and ultimately in life.”

Now DeSantis is trying to sell a populist pitch that APs aren’t worth the trouble, despite benefiting from the highly sought-after curriculum on his way to an Ivy League education.

The Florida governor’s provocation to the College Board—the company that handles the Advanced Placement curriculum, as well as the SAT exam—is the culmination of a series of interventions DeSantis has made in Florida’s public schools to suppress what his administration has called “woke indoctrination.” His blitz on education has also become a key plank of the impending DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign, with each new proclamation earning him praise on Fox News and across conservative media.

The Yale University and Harvard Law alumnus recently banned a new AP course on African-American studies, saying the interdisciplinary class violated Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” by veering into “political” topics and trying to “shoehorn in Queer Theory.”

“This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about?” DeSantis said at a press conference in January blasting the new class. “Queer Theory. Now, who would say that’s an important part of Black history, Queer Theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.”

DeSantis has since extended that line of reasoning to float scrapping AP courses altogether in Florida. While AP classes are not taught at every public school in the United States—around 88 percent of public high school students attend a school offering them—Florida would be the first state to outright ban the curriculum, which is designed to give students a head start on college.

Back in 1997, DeSantis received a commendation for doing just that.

“Ron ‘D’ DeSantis was awarded the AP American History Award in June of 1996, the Princeton Book Award along with athletic awards,” the 1997 yearbook obtained by The Daily Beast says, while further listing out a series of baseball achievements.

I’m beginning to think he’s much more genuinely like Trump than we might have thought. He’s an old “get off my lawn” curmudgeonly asshole. He took AP classes 25 years ago and they didn’t talk about Black history or queer theory or gender studies and that’s how it should be! All this modern wokism is destroying our culture. Bah humbug!

Everybody wants a generational chance. But what if the right wing younger generation is even more throwback than their predecessors?

With DeSantis on board, it might be

This is going to be interesting in this presidential campaign. It’s not because I take Mike Pence seriously but because it does represent the GOP giving up a pillar of its appeal with both Trump and DeSantis adopting isolationist rhetoric. As I’ve written before, this is not unprecedented — they did this with Clinton and the Balkans too. But Trump has made this rhetoric standard and it’s leading to some real disorientation among Republicans:

Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday rebuked fellow Republicans who have given less-than-robust support for America’s defense of Ukraine — a group that includes potential presidential campaign rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“I would say anyone that thinks that Vladimir Putin will stop at Ukraine is wrong,” Pence said in an exclusive interview with NBC News when asked about DeSantis’ position on U.S. efforts to help repel Russia in Europe.

The interview came moments after a Pence speech at the University of Texas on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“While some in my party have taken a somewhat different view, there can be no room in the leadership of the Republican Party for apologists for Putin,” Pence, who is considering a run for president in 2024, said without naming names in his speech. “There can only be room for champions of freedom.”

DeSantis, who is widely expected to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has taken a much different tack. Earlier this week, he criticized President Joe Biden for visiting Ukraine, questioned the value of U.S. spending for that country’s defense and downplayed the threat Russia poses to the U.S.

“An open-ended blank check” is “not acceptable,” DeSantis said in an interview on “Fox & Friends,” adding that “Russia has been really, really wounded here and I don’t think that they are the same threat to our country, even though they’re hostile. I don’t think they’re on the same level as a China.”

Here’s right wing pundit Kimberly Strassel in the Wall St Journal:

Mr. Trump is signaling hard he intends to make limiting or ending Ukrainian war aid central to his campaign. “This thing has to stop, and it’s got to stop now,” Mr. Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt. “The United States should negotiate peace between these two countries, and I don’t think they should be sending very much.” He posted a video pledging to “clean house of all the warmongers and America-Last globalists,” while a Truth Social post hypes the risk of “WORLD WAR III.”

The position is perhaps unsurprising from a former president whose foreign policy in office was mercurial at best. And the ever-more-populist Mr. Trump sees an opening to rally a chunk of the base that is skeptical of military commitments abroad, so he is floating the false choice of a strong America globally or a strong America domestically. Add in Mr. Trump’s transitive Biden equation: If Joe Biden supports Ukraine and Mr. Biden is bad, it follows that support for Ukraine is bad. Or so he’s banking enough Republican voters will think.

But don’t underestimate the harm to the brand, or to the global order. The GOP for more than 70 years has been the party of strong defense, and where voters turn when they feel threatened. Mr. Trump and a small group (at least for now) of congressional Republicans risk throwing all that hard-earned credibility away, neutralizing one of the party’s greatest strengths and leaving the country without a meaningful alternative to Mr. Biden’s weak multilateralism.

That risk becomes even greater if others in the GOP feel compelled to follow. Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, appears to be charting a refreshingly opposite course. “It’s not a war about Ukraine,” she said last week. “This is about a war on freedom.” Other potential primary entrants—Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton—are on record backing Ukraine.

But all eyes are on Ron DeSantis, who now looks certain to run. The Florida governor made news when he slammed Mr. Biden on Fox News for having a “blank check” policy toward Ukraine with no “strategic objective.” The press instantly slotted Mr. DeSantis into the Trump isolationist camp. Yet these few DeSantis lines hardly amount to policy. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also uses the term “blank check,” though he supports Ukraine aid. He uses the phrase to describe Republican demands for greater transparency into Ukraine spending. Mr. DeSantis still has running room.

The temptation might be to follow Mr. Trump down this rabbit hole. Some will warn Mr. DeSantis that this is where Mr. Trump will hit him, framing him as a GOP pol who’ll drag the country into endless wars. Some will note numbers showing Republican support for Ukraine aid (slightly) waning. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers will tell him he can’t be seen to be on the same side as Democrats. There’s also the risk that Mr. Biden continues to slow-walk Ukrainian aid, giving Russia the upper hand and eroding public support further.

Yet it would be a mistake for Mr. DeSantis to cast his lot with Mr. Trump. Politically, he would lose a defining issue to the former president. The governor has an opportunity to contrast a bold, well-thought-out foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s opaque retreatism. It would muddy Mr. DeSantis’s ability to otherwise take a tough line on the world’s rogues, including China. It would give Mr. Biden—who is already gunning for Mr. DeSantis—an easy attack line. And it would put the governor crosswise with most congressional Republicans, many of whom are rooting for him.

Policy-wise, any presidential candidate needs to campaign as if he plans to win, and Mr. DeSantis might consider the world he’d inherit should Vladimir Putin prevail. A victorious Russia wouldn’t stop with Ukraine. China would delight in America’s retreat from the world stage and rush to fill the gap. Iran would double down on a bomb and on exerting greater hegemony over the Middle East. Peace through weakness never works.

Peace through strength does, and there’s a huge political opening for the candidate willing to take it. Criticize Mr. Biden for the foreign-policy weakness that emboldened Mr. Putin to invade in the first place, and for his dawdling on getting Ukraine real firepower. Describe what Ukrainian victory would look like and note that under a more decisive GOP presidency Ukraine would have already claimed it. Project a future in which a victorious and united Europe stands alongside America to face the growing China threat. Criticize Mr. Trump for his retreatism and remind the country that a strong America (with a rebuilt military) is the best guard against global disorder and the basis of U.S. safety.

National security remains a top voter priority; primary-goers want to know presidential aspirants have a coherent foreign-policy vision. Mr. Trump’s position poses the GOP field’s first test. Let’s see who passes.

Her right wing fantasies notwithstanding, she does illustrate the fault line developing in the GOP. It’s one thing for Trump’s followers to go along with whatever he says. It’s not really about politics with them and I don’t know that anyone really believes that what he’s saying will last beyond him. But for the party to finally make this shift — as it probably would under DeSantis — it is significant. I am very curious about where this is going.

According to Rep. Scott Perry the speech and debate clause in the constitution protects members of congress who are plotting a coup with the president of the United States. One judge doesn’t think so. It remains to be seen if others do:

The chief judge of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., secretly rejected Rep. Scott Perry’s bid to shield more than 2,000 messages relevant to Justice Department investigators probing efforts by Donald Trump to subvert the 2020 election, according to newly unsealed court filings.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell unsealed her extraordinary Dec. 28 decision on Friday evening, determining that the “powerful public interest” in seeing the previously secret opinion outweighed the need for continued secrecy.

Perry, a Republican lawmaker from Pennsylvania, had urged Howell to block the Justice Department from accessing 2,219 documents stored on his phone, which was seized and imaged by the FBI last August as part of the 2020 election investigation.

He claimed that the records reflected his efforts to research potential legislative decisions — like whether to vote to challenge election results on Jan. 6, 2021 — and therefore should be protected from disclosure by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, a provision meant to safeguard lawmakers from pressure or intimidation by the executive branch.

But Howell said Perry had taken an “astonishing view” of his immunity that would effectively put members of Congress above the law and free of political consequences for their actions. She ordered him to disclose 2,055 of the documents he sought to withhold — including all 960 of his contacts with members of the executive branch, which she said are entitled to no constitutional protection at all. Some 161 items, she said, were proper to withhold.

“What is plain is the clause does not shield Rep. Perry’s random musings with private individuals touting an expertise in cybersecurity or political discussions with attorneys from a presidential campaign, or with state legislators concerning hearings before them about possible local election fraud or actions they could take to challenge election results in Pennsylvania,” Howell wrote in her 51-page December opinion.

Investigators have long scrutinized Perry’s contacts with Trump, as well as with Jeff Clark, a top Justice Department aide who Perry pushed Trump to install as attorney general in the waning weeks of his administration. Clark was seen by Trump and his allies as sympathetic to his bid to overturn the 2020 election results. The Jan. 6 select committee subpoenaed Perry to testify about his efforts but he refused to appear before the panel.

Prosecutors homed in on Perry last year, seeking his contacts with top figures connected to Trump, including Clark and attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch bid to remain in power despite losing reelection. And in August, Perry’s phone was seized by FBI agents while he was traveling with family.

Thus far, however, investigators have not had access to any of the records because, last month, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to stay Howell’s ruling. On Thursday, those judges heard both public and private arguments about the dispute. The stay remains in place as the appeals court considers whether to leave Howell’s ruling in place, set it aside or modify it in some way.

The judges — Karen Henderson, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao — appeared skeptical of the Justice Department’s position and the breadth of Howell’s ruling, although they discussed her stance only in broad strokes and the details of her opinions remained under seal until Friday.

But the appeals panel’s ultimate leanings remained unclear at the conclusion of the public argument session Thursday. The appeals judges seemed most concerned by Howell’s determination that Perry’s outreach about Jan. 6 was not protected by the speech or debate clause because he was not acting with formal House approval.

That determination was a centerpiece of Howell’s ruling, which she said was rooted in longstanding precedent.

“No matter the vigor with which Rep. Perry pursued his wide-ranging interest in bolstering his belief that the results of the 2020 election were somehow incorrect — even in the face of his own reelection — his informal inquiries into the legitimacy of those election results are closer to the activities described as purely personal or political,” Howell said.

John Rowley, an attorney for Perry, said in a statement: “As a Member of Congress, Mr. Perry had an obligation to be fully informed about his vote to certify the 2020 Presidential election. He is standing up to protect from Executive Branch intrusion the privileges afforded to all Representatives and Senators by the Speech or Debate Clause of the United States Constitution.”

Perry’s communications with the White House and the Justice Department appear to be at the center of one of the investigations now being headed by special counsel Jack Smith, who has been probing the pressure put on DOJ officials to express public concern about unsubstantiated election fraud claims in the 2020 election.

That pressure culminated in an effort to have Trump dismiss acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and install Clark, then the assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources, as acting attorney general. However, after almost every senior Justice Department official threatened to resign, Trump abandoned the plan.

All these great protectors of constitutional privileges are just showing what an inadequate document it is turning out to be when power mad authoritarians are willing to challenge it. Let’s see if it holds up under all these cynical constitutional claims from this guy and Mike Pence and others who are twisting the intent for self-serving reasons.

Laws don’t work well when many people openly defy them. Prohibition in the US is a good example of that. In Iran, it took massive protests against the hijab laws to dismantle the morality police. But what may cement this new tolerance of women showing their hair in public is the simple, casual defiance by many women in their day to day lives:

[S]ince the death last year of Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of the country’s morality police, women and girls have been at the center of a nationwide uprising, demanding an end not only to hijab requirements but to the Islamic Republic itself.

Women are suddenly flaunting their hair: left long and flowing in the malls; tied in a bun on the streets; styled into bobs on public transportation; and pulled into ponytails at schools and on university campuses, according to interviews with women in Iran as well as photographs and videos online. While these acts of defiance are rarer in more conservative areas, they are increasingly being seen in towns and cities.

“I have not worn a scarf for months — I don’t even carry it with me any more,” said Kimia, 23, a graduate student in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj, in western Iran, who, like other women interviewed for this article, asked that her surname not be used for fear of retribution.

Kimia said that many female students at her college did not cover their hair even in classrooms in the presence of male professors. “Whether the government likes to admit it or not,” she said, “the era of the forced hijab is over.”

Iran’s hijab law mandates that women and girls over 9 cover their hair, and that they hide the curves of their bodies under long, loose robes.

Many women still adhere to the rule in public, some by choice and others from fear. Videos of the traditional bazaar in downtown Tehran, Iran’s capital, for example, show most women covering their hair.

But videos of parks, cafes, restaurants and malls — places popular with younger women — show more of them uncovered. Many prominent women, including celebrities and athletes, have removed their hijab in Iran and while representing the county abroad.

The state has long promoted the hijab law as a symbol of its success in establishing the Islamic Republic, but enforcement has varied, depending on which political faction was in power.

After the election in 2021 of Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-liner, as president, the rules have been increasingly enforced, and with a strictness and brutality that have enraged Iranian women, many of whom were fined, beaten or arrested by the morality police after they were said to be in violation.

But anger over the law boiled over in September, when the young woman, Ms. Amini, 22, died in the custody of the morality police, and as the street protests that broke out across Iran quickly morphed into broader calls for an end to being ruled by the country’s clerics.

The protests have largely fizzled amid a violent crackdown by the authorities that has included mass arrests, death sentences and the executions of four young protesters.

But many acts of civil disobedience continue daily, including chanting “death to the dictator” from rooftops, writing graffiti on walls and tearing down and setting ablaze government banners.

And women have been going out in public without their hijabs.

Officials said in December they had disbanded the morality police, and they have not been seen on the streets since. For the moment, the authorities are only occasionally enforcing the hijab rules, according to women and activists in Iran.

The authorities recently shut down two pharmacies, one in Tehran and another in the northern city of Amol, after female employees were reported for not wearing a hijab. And in the religious city of Qum, they reprimanded the manager of a bank for catering to clients without hijabs. The judiciary has also opened a case against Ms. Kazempour, the engineer, according to Iranian news reports.

Officials say they are reviewing the enforcement rules and plan to announce updated measures. One conservative lawmaker has said that alternative enforcement methods are being considered, like warning women by text message, denying them civic services or blocking their bank accounts.

“Head scarves will be back on women’s heads,” the lawmaker, Hossein Jalali, was reported as saying in December on Iranian media.

But the defiance remains too widespread to contain and too pervasive to reverse, women’s rights activists say.

“The core and heart of this movement is really the revolutionary act of these women turning their head scarves into the most effective and most powerful weapon against religious dictatorship and deep layers of misogyny and patriarchy,” said Fatemeh Shams, a women’s rights activist and an assistant professor of Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

The women who have stopped covering their hair say that they are determined to do as they wish, but that they are in favor of a “voluntary hijab.” They also say that they respect the rights of women who choose wear scarves.

Leila, 51, who lives in Tehran, said she and her teenage daughter had been dressing in public as they did in private and when they traveled abroad — in dresses, skirts, skinny jeans and tight sweaters.

“I recently had to travel and struggled over whether I should wear the hijab at the airport because there are a lot of security agents, but decided against it,” Leila said in a telephone interview. She was stunned to see the majority of the women at the airport that day had also ditched their hijabs. “We all got through security and passport control with our hair uncovered, and they said nothing. Our power is in numbers.”

Hathis, 25, who reviews books and movies online, posted a photograph of herself on Instagram in December sitting, hair uncovered, with a friend at an outdoor cafe in Tehran. “Is this what it feels like to feel the cool fall breeze blow through your hair? And for 25 years I was denied this?”

I can’t imagine this. It’s fine if someone wants to wear a scarf or even a burka. But to force women to wear them is medieval. It’s inspiring to see them taking this issue into their own hands and simply saying, “no.”

Will it last? I have no idea. But this is the sort of widespread defiance that can make it very difficult for even authoritarian governments to contain. I fervently hope these women succeed. It’s inspiring.

DeSantis’ latest attempt to win back the suburbs

It seems he’s had a change of heart:

A NEW BILL was introduced in Florida this week that would give Gov. Ron Desantis more power over state schools, and allow the Republican politician to ban gender studies and critical race theory, along with diversity and inclusion initiatives, at Florida colleges, CNN reports.

The legislation, which follows through with DeSantis’ promise to ban universities from spending money on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, was filed by Rep. Alex Andrade from Pensacola on Tuesday. If passed, Florida state colleges would be barred from offering major and minor programs in intersectionality, critical race theory, and gender studies.

Core classes would also be prohibited from touching on these teachings or presenting history of the U.S. as “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” the bill reads.

Currently, the state’s main university, the University of Florida, features a “Chief Diversity Officer,” along with a “Center for Inclusion and Multicultural Engagement.” The bill would put these positions and centers aimed at fostering inclusivity and diversity at risk.

Last month, the Governor said he had major plans for “higher education reform” that would force Florida public colleges to be “grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization.”

“We’re holding our breath,” Sergio Cartagena, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, told Rolling Stone last month. “We don’t know how this might affect the activism that we might do with our organizations, and in classes, if what we’re trying to learn might be restricted.”

DeSantis is currently in a legal back-and-forth with the College Board, after the governor attempted to bar AP African American Studies in the state, calling it part of “a political agenda.”

The College Board also refuted reports that it caved to DeSantis and his administration’s criticism and made changes to its program. DeSantis has said Florida would not allow the course to be taught in the state unless significant revisions were made. This is in part due to Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,” legislation that went into effect this past summer banning the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) to the state’s K-12 students.

“There continue to be conversations and misinformation, and we felt the urgency to set the record straight and not wait another day to do so,” a College Board spokesperson said, per the Tampa Bay Times.

DeSantis last year signed into law another bill, nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, barring teachers in Florida schools from discussing gender and sexuality. This is all part of a larger right-wing movement to demonize discussions of race, sexuality, and privilege.

Do all those suburban moms want their kids going to colleges where the Governor (president?) is dictating what their kids can and cannot be taught?

This may be the biggest assault on education by a state actor in US history. Is this what Americans want? I guess we’re about to find out.

lol…

Better her than me

A cabal of Muslim, communist, socialist refugees is coming for you. But you knew that.

During most of my Hullabaloo tenure, I worked in a cubicle. Posting during work hours being frowned upon, my social media engagement until recently was more limited. And I wasn’t about to waste limited down-time watching Fox. The staff at Media Matters does that for a living. Presumably, they get an alcohol allowance.

Kat Abughazaleh is building her online audience commenting on the slime from your video
| Oozin’ along on your livin’ room floor. She sits in her cubicle in Washington, D.C. collecting clips to post to TikTok and Twitter (Clare Malone ofThe New Yorker):

“There’s that stupid voice,” Kat Abughazaleh, a twenty-three-year-old senior video producer for the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, said. She and I were watching Carlson’s show in side-by-side cubicles at her organization’s offices, in Washington, D.C. Abughazaleh, a pair of sunglasses perched on her head and a vape pen always within reach, was flagging moments from the episode to post online. One clip, of Carlson declaring that “the F.B.I., as an organization, has joined in the hunt for Christians,” went immediately to Twitter. “I was so excited to hear that hilarious Christian line—it was so good,” she told me during a commercial break. Another clip, an interview with the “pro-life Spider-Man”—a baby-faced young man who climbs buildings without ropes to protest abortion—was saved for an end-of-week roundup. (“Abortion is just like climbing a skyscraper,” the pro-life Spider-Man had said. “It’s a matter of life or death.”) Abughazaleh films her roundups on Fridays and posts them to TikTok, where she’s building a following. Her most popular video, which includes a clip of a Fox News host comparing Washington, D.C., to Somalia, has just under a million views.

Behold:

“I watch Tucker Carlson so you don’t have to,” the bio spaces of her social-media accounts read. Abughazaleh has been professionally watching Carlson, who has around three million viewers a night, for nearly two years. “You don’t know Fox News until you are watching it for a job,” she said. “You see all these patterns emerge.” The Fox universe is a place with a different “news” sense than most of the country, she said—narratives about I.R.S. armies, food shortages, race wars, and predatory trans activists—but its niche story lines are likely predictive of what we’ll be talking about over the next two long campaign years. Though, in Abughazaleh’s view, Carlson has floundered a bit since the midterms. “I think he’s still kind of lost right now,” she said. “He’s not really sure what direction to take it.”

My heart bleeds strawberry jam.

It helps that Abughazaleh appears on the surface to be the flavor of blonde that Fox viewers are accustomed to attending to.

Writes Malone, “Her YouTube audience is seventy-five-per-cent male, Abughazaleh told me, and on TikTok it’s sixty-five per cent. It’s not so much that Abughazaleh is seeking male attention; it’s more that she’s using herself as live bait—a way to point out misogyny and sexism in real time, or to simply tweak the conservatives who hate-follow her.”

“I think it takes a certain type of personality to do this job,” Alicia Sadowski, Media Matters’ research manager, said. “A lot of times, it can be taxing, it can be consuming, in a sense that you’re living in a reality that the people around you are not.”

Doing this every morning after watching news feeds much of the day is stressful enough.

A shit ton of caveats

We’re not done yet.

Digby referenced on Friday a tweet thread critiquing the recent Cochrane study on masking that has the right wing huffing and puffing even louder, “Masks don’t work!” Bret Stephens in the New York Times brought eye-popping attention this week to Cochrane’s overstated findings by quoting multiple masks-don’t-work and make-no-difference statements.

Then, buried down in paragraph 10, we find “the analysis does not prove that proper masks, properly worn, had no benefit at an individual level.”

Whoa! What?

Kelsey Piper at Vox points out in the meta-analysis that most of the “randomised controlled studies” among Cochrane’s 78 are not about Covid, were not performed during the Covid-19 pandemic (or other epidemics), and only two were “about Covid and masking in particular.” They are examining the effect of mask mandates on community-level spread, not individual protection, as Stephens thoughtfully dropped into paragraph 10.

Furthermore (Cochrane itself):

Our confidence in these results is generally low to moderate for the subjective outcomes related to respiratory illness, but moderate for the more precisely defined laboratory‐confirmed respiratory virus infection, related to masks and N95/P2 respirators. 

The observed lack of effect of mask wearing in interrupting the spread of influenza‐like illness (ILI) or influenza/COVID‐19 in our review has many potential reasons, including: poor study design; insufficiently powered studies arising from low viral circulation in some studies; lower adherence with mask wearing, especially amongst children; quality of the masks used; self‐contamination of the mask by hands; lack of protection from eye exposure from respiratory droplets (allowing a route of entry of respiratory viruses into the nose via the lacrimal duct); saturation of masks with saliva from extended use (promoting virus survival in proteinaceous material); and possible risk compensation behaviour leading to an exaggerated sense of security …

That’s a shit ton of caveats.

To make a point about taking such studies with a grain of salt (and about reading before sharing), well:

You’re welcome.

Update: Fixed spelling on Bret Stephens’ name. Hate getting those wrong.

There’s a lot of back and forth going on over a new study that people say suggests masks are useless to stop the spread of an aerosol based virus. The NY Times, which has been a bastion of COVID mitigation skepticism, featured an op-ed by Brett Stephens that’s as misleading as what you can find on Breitbart any given day.

Here’s Dr Tom Friedan:

Masks have been an effective tool throughout the Covid pandemic, despite erroneous claims to the contrary.

The widely cited Cochrane review on masks was poorly done and even more poorly communicated. Regrettably, researchers analyzed the wrong datasets, in the wrong way, and overstated their conclusions—leading to sweeping and inaccurate characterizations.

Many nuances around mask type, setting, behavior, and policy are explained in this helpful piece by @dr_kkjetelina. http://bit.ly/3ErwuNN 3/

The CDC did an excellent review citing extensive evidence that masks are effective, from multiple studies. http://bit.ly/41oDV1W

Vox also provided a good sense of some of the biases and inaccuracies in the Cochrane review and the idiosyncrasies of the lead author: http://bit.ly/3kr4jaX

Although randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are extremely important, especially for many clinical questions, they are not the best method for every scientific question, as I outlined in @NEJM several years ago: https://bit.ly/3m5ZvYM

The question of WHAT masks are being used for needs to be assessed. Where most transmission is in the household and masks aren’t worn in households, then they cannot be expected to prevent that transmission.

What also needs to be assessed isn’t whether a behavior is mandated, but whether it occurs. For example, mandates in an area already using masks at a high level will provide limited incremental benefits, and mandates that are ignored of course don’t reduce spread.

Different masks provide different levels of protection. And “two-way” masking (i.e., both on the person with Covid and the person being exposed) is much more effective than protective masking—it’s a form of source control. Better masks (N95 in particular) control much better.

Given its glaring weaknesses, including limiting to RCTs and inappropriately combining flu and Covid, the only valid conclusion of the Cochrane review is RCTs of masks in Covid found them to be slightly protective, that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and that many other studies with excellent methodologies show efficacy of masking is proportional to the quality of masks used, consistency of their use, and risk of Covid in the environments in which they are used.

Community-wide masking is associated with 10-80% reductions in infections and deaths, with higher numbers associated with higher levels of mask wearing in high-risk areas.

Bottom line: Masks work if they are worn in settings where Covid is spreading, and especially if they are higher quality, such as an N95 or KN95.

Of note: Cochrane included only two actual studies of masking during the pandemic. The first, from Bangladesh, showed a marked reduction in infections. The second, from Denmark, suggested a 20% reduction but it had methodological problems and limited power to detect differences.

I wrote about the errors in the flawed Denmark study in November 2020. The shortcomings of the Cochrane review really are shocking.

Originally tweeted by Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) on February 23, 2023.

I don’t wear one constantly anymore. But I always have an N95 and a KN95 with me and I use it when I’m in an indoor public space with a lot of people when transmission is high. I try to sit outdoors in restaurants and coffee houses whenever I can which is easy since I live in Southern California. I’m sure it ends up being pretty random but I’m not a young person and I am determined to try to live my life while still trying to be conscious of the threats. And I’m not the only one. I’d guess that at least 20% of people in most public places I go on the westside of LA are wearing masks, and many of the workers are too. (I’m happy to try to protect them too. )

Anyway, don’t throw your masks away even if you’re no longer wearing them. And don’t believe this nonsense they are spewing saying they aren’t useful at all. If we get hit with a new airborne virus for which we have no immunity and no vaccines or treatment, which is entirely possible, you’re going to want to have a good mask handy.