Following on from yesterday’s article about useless masks, I thought I would expand a bit on the actual data contained in the British Medical Journal study on the effectiveness of masks. The reality is that your mask is as useless as Jacinda Ardern.
The tyrant Jacinda Ardern misrepresented the article by claiming that mask wearing reduced transmission by 53%. The data in the report does not say that.
One of our commenters correctly summarises the true outcome of the study:
As to the science, I wish people would understand even just a bit of statistics 101. Getting clear about absolute and relative risk would be a good start. The PM’s 53% reduction from spurious data (vide supra) is relative risk .
I quote from the BMJ – serendipitous that THEY have a guide to this.
AR (absolute risk) = the number of events (good or bad) in treated or control groups, divided by the number of people in that group.
ARC = the AR of events in the control group.
ART = the AR of events in the treatment group.
ARR (absolute risk reduction) = ARC – ART.
RR (relative risk) = ART / ARC.So you can have a control group having 0.6% of their group having an event and the study group having 0.3% of the group experiencing the event. The RR is 50% but the ARR is 0.3%.
Quoting RR is often misleading and exaggerates how helpful something may be. The 53% we are being beaten with is RR. Do you think the person beating us with it knows the difference between ARR and RR? Do you think if she does, she cares?
David Theobald
As you can see, the tyrant has engaged in disinformation – spouting forth the relative risk at 53%, when the absolute risk reduction is so small it would pass through a mask.
To that end I’ve designed some new T-shirts to ram home the message that your mask is as useless as Jacinda Ardern:
Please share this article so others can discover The BFD.