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Reggie VanderVeen's avatar

If Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan aren't given the tar and feathers to run editor-in-chief, Karka Soares-Weiser, out of town on a rail, then the entire Cochrane Libary board needs to be dismissed along with her. The way Cochrane has handled this definitive mask study with its capitulation by Soares-Weiser will simply serve to degrade the credibility of Cochrane and scholarly review in general. Stop the bleeding; stop the madness, Cochrane. Support your researchers. They did their job, you tarnished it, and you have atone for your mistake. This is awful. This is scientism and not science...and in the first degree.

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Michael DAmbrosio's avatar

Nice reporting, took out a paid subscription to support your work.

I've been watching this closely, specifically Zeynep inserting herself into the mask debate, again.

I suspect her passion for the mask is that early in the pandemic she aligned with the founder of "MASKS4ALL" Jeremy Howard and put herself on his evidence review paper:

"An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19"

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118

Which made the conclusion that cloth masks could reduce R0 and "substantially lower community tracing".

Even the last remaining mask diehards are likely to concede cloth masks don't work, but for Zeynep, perhaps having name on that paper is contributing to her sunk cost fallacy trap.

Others suggest it is perhaps defense of ego, after the NYT fluff piece "How Zeynep Tufekci keeps getting the big things right" [1], praised her wisdom in suggesting we all mask when the CDC was following the outdated science.

Her rebuke on Twitter following her "Masks work" proclamation last week in the NYT was swift, yet rather than engage with reasonable pushback, she blocked most and accused everyone else of being "Antivaxxers" and Covid minimizers [2]

Then, inexplicably, (perhaps finally reading the room), she argues she was always against toddler masking, that her critics are wrong, see, she can find an old tweet too showing she wasn't pro masking toddlers, as that would be ridiculous. Kids younger than kindergarten wearing them imperfectly? Fair game still [3]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/business/media/how-zeynep-tufekci-keeps-getting-the-big-things-right.html

[2] https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1634926027154546695

[3] https://twitter.com/MichaelDAmbro17/status/1635640791799414792

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