Hey, huge thanks for adding information to the N95 respirator article. (It was getting quite lonely here.) Now I get I might be nitpicking, but... do you happen to have a published source for that statement instead of a preprint? We... tend to prefer published sources here.

If not, maybe you could give info on the background of that paper instead, so I can find a better citation...?

I'm going to be very limited in my edits the following days, so go ahead and respond here and @ me at my alt username (and not my main account).

If you want to create an account, I highly recommend doing so. Randomsalt-unconfirmed (talk) 21:50, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The preprint to peer-reviewed process is running very slowly these days. There's also political interference (sigh) -- Loeb's buddies are trying to slow down the peer review process. Ungrin's article will be peer-reviewed and published sooner or later.

I've gone through Ungrin's article in excessive detail. It's solid. Loeb committed fraud. I have additional citations to Loeb's fraud. The background is actually explained in Ungrin's paper, but it's perhaps made clearer here in an earlier citation: https://first10em.com/the-now-infamous-but-not-very-helpful-n95-trial-loeb-2022/

Basically, early in the pandemic, Loeb and his buddies testified in court to prevent Canadian nurses from getting access to N95s. This was in contrast to legitimate scientists like David Fisman who testified that the nurses should have access to N95s. The courts listened to Loeb and his fake-expert buddies and denied Canadian nurses access to N95s, telling them that loose surgical masks were "good enough". This killed Canadian nurses, something which is now proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Once the death count started piling up, Loeb proceeded to make the entirely fraudulent Loeb 2022 paper, and loudly advertising an essentially-false headline for it, in what appears to be an attempt to conceal his personal liability.

Loeb did not disclose his conflict of interest. When writing his fraudulent paper, he claimed that he had no conflicts of interest. In fact Loeb might to go to *prison* if it is accepted in court that N95s are more protective than surgical masks (which they are). Trying to avoid *prison* is about as severe a conflict of interest as I can think of.

This is the background to Ungrin's paper. When digging into Loeb's fraudulent paper, the number of different types of fraud documented was astounding. Loeb started off with a bad study design designed to give false results, but it still showed that N95s were better, so he changed the study design retroactively multiple times and changed the statistical analysis methods multiple times, and it STILL said that N95s were better, so he added unregistered study sites repeatedly until he finally managed to get the results below "statistical significance" (but it STILL said that N95s were better), and then Loeb loudly advertised a headline saying that surgical masks were just as good as N95s, which is a plain lie.

Loeb also violated ethical standards -- the evidence that N95s were better was so strong by partway through the study that it was unethical to keep handing out surgical masks, but Loeb did so because Loeb had an agenda, an agenda of producing a fraudulent result in order to keep Loeb out of prison.

This is all excruciatingly documented in Ungrin's paper, with full citations.

I do not want to create an account. 67.249.142.24 (talk) 11:18, 1 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]