> "I haven't found one directly, but here's this other thing" This misrepresentation and miscategorization of people with legitimate complaints about public he

> "I haven't found one directly, but here's this other thing" This misrepresentation and miscategorization of people with legitimate complaints about public health policy is the entire problem with discourse here. The petition against lockdowns made perfect sense at the time and still does today. Countries like Sweden have not seen the long term outcomes models predicted, and these models were used to inform public health policy, despite our knowledge _at the time_ that they were poorly made, in many cases unreproducible, and a poor proxy for empirical evidence. This empirical evidence had led to the CDC guidelines we had for outbreaks that we threw out of the window at the beginning of the pandemic. There is very little decent science around masks. Masks have not been shown to avoid spreading or catching illnesses, even in those professional settings that you mention. For example, take this analysis of 3 RCTs that does not find substantial evidence to support the benefit of even N95 masks in clinical settings: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-0570 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M23-0570 What was produced at the beginning of the pandemic was a doctrine. It was, and still is, not absurd to question that doctrine.