Table of Contents
Introduction
A recently published study has concluded that the airborne route is the primary mode of transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and that extreme lockdown measures, including stay-at-home and universal mask-wearing orders, have been effective at reducing the spread of the virus. However, the conclusions that the authors draw do not follow from their findings but are arrived at through fallacious reasoning and dependent on a fraudulent premise.
The study, written by Renyi Zhang and coauthors and published on June 11 in PNAS, the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, is titled “Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-19”. In it, Zhang et al. claim to have proven by analyzing case data from Wuhan City in China, Italy, and New York City that airborne transmission “represents the dominant route to spread the disease.”
Taking that conclusion further, they claim that extreme lockdown measures implemented by government “are insufficient by themselves in protecting the public” but are effective when accompanied by orders of universal use of masks in the community setting. “We conclude that wearing of face masks in public corresponds to the most effective means to prevent interhuman transmission,” they state in the abstract.[1]
However, to arrive at these conclusions, they depend on the counterfactual assumption that the cumulative number of cases in each location would have continued to grow indefinitely in a linear manner had it not been for mask-wearing orders. An examination of the data from New York City reveals that this assumption is not merely counterfactual but falsifiable.
The study is therefore a useful illustration of the phenomenon of professional propagandists masquerading in their role as scientists to serve the function of manufacturing consent for government policies, similar to how throughout the pandemic the fearmongering mainstream media have typically been doing policy advocacy rather than journalism.[2]
Great research and writing. Thanks!
Thanks, Frank.
Hi Jeremy: good logic….amazing research…and hopefully timely. Please consider the data…stats of infected may be based on wildly inaccurate rtPCR antigen tests and the newly emergency approved FDA titer for antibodies. Hence, all parties in this debate are working on assumptions that in time may be amended to more accurate levels. I’ve wondered about the govt germ theory and airborne transmission rates. FYI, I’m more a Bechamps Terrain type. I did get the weird symptoms last March for 3 days and 5 aspirins. I stayed home. I may go for the titer antibody test. Please consider mentioning we funded Wuhan level4 lab for $7.4 million …dunno how a gain of function research and weaponizing can not be the same .. opps…or am I linking coincidence with causation?
Your my go to expert. Again, you’re appreciated.
Edwin P
Hi Edwin. Thanks for the feedback. Keep in mind, if you get that antibody test, that a true negative result wouldn’t necessarily mean you haven’t been infected and acquired immunity. Numerous studies have now shown that cellular immune responses, which include immunological memory, appear to play an equal or more important role than antibodies. ;)
Jeremy Hammond hello;
A very interesting report indeed. Thanks.
I noticed something striking in the graphs about NYC. If you take a line from the peaks in “stay at home” to the drop level just before the masks mandate went into effect you would get a more serious drop in cases then we saw with the mask mandate. A conclusion could be drawn that had the mask mandate not gone into effect there would have LESS cases.
Yes, I point this out in the article.
How can you use case counts for any analysis because the number of tests are varying? Should you not use the test positivity rate?
The authors perhaps should have considered the test positivity rate along with case counts, but my purpose here was to show how their argument fails on its own terms.
Interesting how they can use the “correlation and causation” when it suits them, but when used for the thousands if not millions injured and killed as a direct result of vaccinations we cannot use that.
Precisely.