All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Mister Mets]

https://www.npr.org/sections/back-to...-19-in-schools

Meanwhile, DeSantis and now Youngkin continue their anti-mask crusader to appease anti-minor-inconvenience conservatives.

There is no consensus on the effectiveness of masks for children in schools.

It remains, at the very least, an open question.

A UK study failed to show any difference.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...id-study-shows

The study cited by the department didn’t provide proof of a statistically significant decline in absences. The research compared 123 U.K. schools that used masks with about 1,200 others that didn’t during the Covid wave fueled by the delta variant.Schools with face-covering rules in October 2021 saw their absence rate drop by 2.3 percentage points, to 3%, two to three weeks later. In schools that didn’t use masks, absences fell by 1.7 percentage points, to 3.6%. However, the sample size was too small and researchers couldn’t exclude the possibility that the higher reduction in schools using masks was due to chance, officials said.

Here's another article if someone doesn't want to burn through limited Bloomberg free articles.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-b1988082.html

The CDC has admit that cloth masks are not very effective.https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01...-vaccine-tests

According to the C.D.C.’s new description of masks, loosely woven cloth products provide the least protection and layered finely woven products offer more. Well-fitting disposable surgical masks and KN95s — another type of respirator mask — are more protective than all cloth masks, and well-fitting respirators, including N95s, offer the highest level of protection.

Writing for the Atlantic, David Zweig looked at the evidence a month ago.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...lensky/621035/

“We lack credible evidence for benefits of masking kids aged 2 to 5, despite what the American Academy of Pediatrics says,” Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote recently. While there are models, and simulations on mannequins with masks, “mechanistic studies are incapable of anticipating and tallying the effects that emerge when real people are asked to do real things in the real world,” Vinay Prasad of UCSF wrote in a critique of the CDC’s child masking recommendation. “The CDC cannot ‘follow the science’ because there is no relevant science.”

This question of “relevant science” is what makes the Georgia study worth careful consideration. Over and over, studies and reports on children in schools with low transmission rates claim in their summaries that masking students helped keep transmission down. But looking at the underlying data in these studies, masks were always required or widely worn, and implemented in concert with a variety of other interventions, such as increased ventilation. Without a comparison group that didn’t require student masking, it’s difficult or impossible to isolate the effect of masks. (This is the error made by Duke University researchers who wrote a report about North Carolina schools, later summarized in a New York Times opinion piece.) I reviewed 17 different studies cited by the CDC in its K-12 guidance as evidence that masks on students are effective, and not one study looked at student mask use in isolation from other mitigation measures, or against a control. Some even demonstrated that no student masking correlated with low transmission.

Children are less likely to have severe disease from SARS-CoV-2, and when infected less likely to be symptomatic, which correlates with lower contagiousness. Those facts alone may account for part of the reason why the Georgia study found no clear benefit for a masking requirement for kids in schools. Though the CDC says that layered mitigation in schools is effective, without studying each of the layers individually, it cannot know which of those measures work, and to what degree, and which don’t. For example, several experts told me, it’s entirely possible that open windows or fresh-air ventilation accounts for nearly all the mitigation benefit in a classroom and other “layered” interventions may contribute only a marginal benefit or none at all.

While masks offer some protection for adults in many environments, as the adage in pediatrics goes, children are not little adults. Medicine is littered with examples of adult interventions that don’t translate to children.

There is also the question of the downside of requiring kids to wear masks in schools.

“Mask-wearing among children is generally considered a low-risk mitigation strategy; however, the negatives are not zero, especially for young children,” said Lloyd Fisher, the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It is important for children to see facial expressions of their peers and the adults around them in order to learn social cues and understand how to read emotions.” Some children with special needs, for example those with articulation delays, may be most affected, he suggested.

[JB]

The news of the CDC conceding that cloth masks are not very effective needs to spread like wildfire in my opinion. The majority of masks I see everyday are cloth masks.

[achilles]

Just do it!

Yes, sorry for that, won't happen again. And yes, if there wasn't a macabre joke in that, I wouldn't have even posted this.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/nike-exec...192125438.html

[numberthirty]

It's in the Constitution, so it can't be changed without a new Amendment. Close to impossible. And there is no real support for doing it.

That's a tough one.

If you proposed a pretty narrow "Someone that is a 'Two Degrees...' distance from a given President cannot be pardoned by that President..." rule?

I think that there might be more support for that than folks might think.

[Gray Lensman]

The news of the CDC conceding that cloth masks are not very effective needs to spread like wildfire in my opinion. The majority of masks I see everyday are cloth masks.

I've been using a double layered cloth mask with a filter between the layers for a while now.

[JB]

I've been using a double layered cloth mask with a filter between the layers for a while now.

Very smart.
It looks like Biden is acting quickly on this news.

Biden plans mask giveaway as Omicron surges
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...n-surge-527335

The Biden administration will announce Wednesday a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of free, high-quality masks through pharmacies and community sites, three people with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO.

The masks will be N95s that are sourced from the government's Strategic National Stockpile, the people said, as part of an effort to ensure Americans can access the more-protective masks during a record surge of Covid-19 cases.

[Kirby101]

That's a tough one.

If you proposed a pretty narrow "Someone that is a 'Two Degrees...' distance from a given President cannot be pardoned by that President..." rule?

I think that there might be more support for that than folks might think.

Not enough for an Amendment,. There are more important things in the Constitution to change.

[Gray Lensman]

Not enough for an Amendment,. There are more important things in the Constitution to change.

More important and actually possible are rarely in agreement though.

[numberthirty]

Not enough for an Amendment,. There are more important things in the Constitution to change.

Personally, I tend to doubt that.

That said, folks supporting it widely is different than Congress being willing to tighten the rules for anyone.

A President has more rules to follow?

Next thing you know, Congress might have to tighten up it's own rules on the stock market.

Cant have that...

[Kirby101]

It's in the Constitution, Congress can't change the rules.

[numberthirty]

It's in the Constitution, Congress can't change the rules.

Sure.

That does not make them players who will simply stay mum during the entire process, either.

They are just smart enough to know that "Increased Accountability..." is not a genie that can be put back into a bottle.

As far as that goes?

A threat to the Executive Branch is a threat to them.

[numberthirty]

Take a Constitutional amendment on term limits for Supreme Court Justices...

Do you think that Congress not have any real leverage there stops them from trying to derail it?

[numberthirty]

Waiting for the part where I hear what the "Catch..." is -

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvk...the-government

Open-Source Vaccines Got More Funding From Tito’s Vodka Than the Government

[numberthirty]

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5...eek-reelection

Two House Democrats announce they won't seek reelection

[CaptainEurope]

In "not getting away with it after all" news:

Letitia James said her office has “significant evidence” in its case against the Trump Organization and is turning up the heat on Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr.

New York Attorney General Letitia James took legal action Tuesday night against former President Donald Trump and two of his children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, to compel them to testify in a civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings.

James filed a motion to compel with the Supreme Court of the State of New York, seeking a court order to enforce the subpoenas and her office’s demands for documents from Donald Trump Jr.