Healthcare
DOD On USNS Comfort Departing NY: ‘Expectations were far worse…than what we’ve seen’
The US Navy Ship Comfort will be departing New York City after President Donald Trump deployed the ship at the request of Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio nearly three and a half weeks ago Jonathan Rath Hoffman, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, told reporters Friday.
Moreover, although he didn’t provide exact numbers on the matter, Hoffman said that the “expectations were far worse… than what we’ve seen.” For that reason, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio are returning this ship to DOD’s Northern Command.
“If you look at a city like New York, the expectations were a far worse situation than what we’ve seen,” he said addressing questions of whether deploying Comfort was a waste of DOD resources. “Having our forces and having our people forward deploy with that capability and not needing it was far better than not having them there and needing it.”
The Defense Department, Hoffman said, will be consulting FEMA to pinpoint the vessel’s next deployment location and to expect a decision on the matter in the “coming days.”
“We expect the Comfort will be heading back to Norfolk, where it will go through kind of the normal post-deployment cycle, where we will restock it. It will be just prepared for the next deployment,” Hoffman said.
“We have said from the start… we wanted to be very careful with our deployment of those assets because we wanted to ensure that they are mobile, that they can be used somewhere else. So our goal all along has been to use them in New York as needed and then when the need no longer exists, to prepare them to move to the next location,” He added.
The ship holds over 1,000 medical care workers and has the capacity of 500 beds, which Hoffman indicated that the number of patients never hit that number, but that there were a “fair number” of patients cared for on the ship. As of last Friday, 71 of its 500 beds were occupied, CNBC reported.
There are currently 146,139 people infected with the coronavirus in New York and 10,746 have died from the virus statewide.
Healthcare
Prestigious Science Journals Confirm Censored Views: Masks at Best Don’t Reduce COVID Infection
Just The News reports that a prestigious science journal has confirmed what was highly censored among social media regarding the novel coronavirus pandemic: “the best-case scenario for one of the most common COVID-19 interventions may be that it has no measurable effect on infection.”
A systematic review of studies of mask mandates for children, published Saturday in the British Medical Journal‘s Archives of Disease in Childhood, found “no association” with infection or transmission in 16 of the 22 observational studies and “critical” or “serious” risk of bias in the six countervailing studies. It got the attention of Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter.
Emails turned over under public records requests show that National Institutes of Health officials were privately questioning the effectiveness of cloth masks and forthcoming vaccines just a month after then-NIH Director Francis Collins appeared to plot with colleagues to organize a “quick and devastating take down” of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration.
Self-reported SARS-CoV-2 infection was higher the more often people said they wore masks, according to a Norwegian study accepted for publication Nov. 13 in the Cambridge University Press journal Epidemiology and Infection.
An analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Nov. 20 suggests that “scientific censorship is often driven by scientists” and not just “authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance,” as popularly believed.
The paper, co-authored by dozens of scholars known for challenging orthodoxies in their fields, cited “self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups” as motives for censorious scientists.
Heterodox COVID scholarship may suffer hard-to-prove “camouflaged censorship” by way of “double standards” applied to such research, the paper states.
The findings cast further doubt on the practice of not only public health authorities but scientists themselves in demonizing science-based skepticism of the effectiveness of COVID interventions, particularly in relation to their potential medical, mental and social harms.
That’s now two major reviews in top journals (Cochrane and BMJ) revealing no benefit to public masking. At this point any mask mandate is essentially political, unscientific, and yes–cruel.
Bravo @TracyBethHoeg et al and the work of many others in this space @VPrasadMDMPH… https://t.co/iemhr6sTJj
— Artur Adib (@r2r) December 4, 2023
“Masking recommendations appear to be entirely based on mechanistic and observational data,” they wrote, noting that a much broader systematic review of mask RCTs by the research collaborative Cochrane concluded masks make “little to no difference” against flu or COVID.
(Cochrane unilaterally reinterpreted the study to downplay its findings, over the authors’ objections, after facing media scrutiny.)
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