Public health: “How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America” #MasksForAll

Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard played a decisive role in shifting CDC guidance and ushering in mask mandates across America. Zeynep’s role in the COVID story goes far deeper than most realize.

Source: How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America

Howard, a self-taught data scientist and founder of several tech firms, founded #MasksForAll. He applied his data science skills to reach the false conclusion that homemade cloth masks worked – see the last paragraph below for how this false conclusion was reached. He was convinced Covid was spread by droplets (which was false). The Washington Post had him write the first column in the U.S. advocating for face masks, turning him into a celebrity expert.

Jeremy Howard and #MasksForAll promoted the The Republic of Czech as having ended Covid through the use of homemade cloth face masks; today Czech has the 10th highest mortality rate.

The NY Times propelled Zeynep Tufekci, a former software engineer and now university sociologist, to celebrity status. She argued the use of simple cloth face masks kept Covid cases low in Slovakia. Today, Slovakia has the 11th highest mortality rate in the world, well above even the U.S. Tufecki also used her new found fame to argue for mandatory, China-style lockdowns in the United States (but has since deleted her social media posts on that). Her promotion of putting everyone on ventilators led to the deaths of thousands of people.

These “experts” made the incorrect assumption that Covid struck all regions, simultaneously, and equally everywhere in the world. We would see this false assertion repeated later when comparing Blue states versus Red states in the US. But given time, the outcomes changed dramatically across the countryside. These early and false claims served their political ideology and that of public health, which is 90% political ideology and 10% science.

Today, we can no longer believe one word from Howard or Tufekci. Neither has acknowledged their errors, their errors in logic or the role they played in this fiasco. If we applied their own rules they promote for others (especially Tufecki), both should be deplatformed for life. And Tufecki should be hauled up before a tribunal for her arrogance that led to harms and deaths.