We just walked out and quit the study today. Stanford medical dropped all masking requirements and the researchers running the long-Covid paxlovid study have stopped masking while tending to long covid participants. It’s frankly abhorrent, selfish behavior, and not only does it demonstrate a complete lack of regard and understanding for the illness in question, in my opinion it calls into question the legitimacy of the entire study. We’ve been traveling hundreds of miles for months in order to try to participate in their study and provide THEM with data about the illness, and this is what they think of us. Just want to make everyone aware in case you also have the misfortune of being a participant.
EDIT: Aside from the obvious lack of regard for the safety and well being of their patients/subjects, I should point out that this is also just a terrible choice for the study. Want to know how to get consistent study results? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve dramatically changing the study conditions 3/4 of the way through. Not only are they callously risking people's health, they risk invalidating the entire project and its data by suddenly increasing the odds of reinfecting their participants and negatively changing the course of their health.
I don't remember when I learned how awful the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic actually was. It probably was 1990/1991. I watched the movie Awakenings and it has a connection to the pandemic. I must have asked my mom about it. She was a doctor and she used to be my google.
But it wasn't until 2020 and the start of the pandemic that I learned how insane things were. Those infographic charts were shocking. I'm talking about the ones showing US cities with masking and cities without. At the time I thought "That's batshit but at least this time masking will be the norm." How wrong I was. And just yesterday I scanned a NYT article that "questioned" the efficacy of masks.
The US is going through an insane era and it's weird because such craziness nearly always happens when a country's economy is in chaos. In that situation - I can empathize because chaos can be frightening and disconcerting. But what excuse do Americans have? It's like 10,000,000s of Americans have decided that thinking itself is too hard so they'll just follow along with the majority. Everybody doesn't mask because everybody else doesn't mask. And why would they? The media, politicians, etc are all "over" covid.
Yeah, it’s not like the American economy is in chaos or anything :hasan-ok-dude:
Bro we can’t afford housing or food