Top all-time · #8544
Ian Miller
Personal blog · ianmsc.substack.comhealthpolitics
Ian Miller writes Unmasked, a personal blog at ianmsc.substack.com about health and politics. Since 2021, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this Substack for posts on COVID-era evidence, including counter-correlation examples against mask mandates and cross-country comparisons of Sweden, Germany, Norway and Israel on vaccination and outcomes.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
COVID Data, Charts and Sarcasm.
Most-linked posts?
- Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-09-19
- Every Comparison Shows Masks Are Meaningless – By IM – Unmasked2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-10-01
- The More Masks Fail, the More We Need Them2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-22
What Hacker News says?
"the advice that wearing a mask doesn't protect you very well from getting Covid has held up pretty good; they're a lot better at protecting everyone else from the mask wearer." They're actually no good at anything. You can compare places that were right next to each other and which differed only in mask mandates, or look at the times mask mandates were introduced and removed. Cases don't shift. See the graphs here,…
Comment linking /p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are
on “Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt”Submitted Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore? as a story · 196 points
HN discussion> From where I stand, given the evidence, the people who say something like "vaccination has no impact on R" are not far from people claiming the earth is flat. I mean maybe the earth is flat. Even the guy who responded to me saying I was wrong then changes his mind on that Judging from the statistics of high vaccination rate countries like Israel vs Sweden,[1] there are a few important questions to respond with suc…
Comment linking /p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-about-sweden
on “YouTube deletes rapper's 'Let's Go Brandon' song claiming medical misinformation”Submitted A New World Health Organization Report Once Again Proves Sweden Right as a story · 28 points
HN discussionAnd many studies say the opposite, unfortunately studies are more or less junk. Non-profit research just isn't usefully reliable. Fortunately we don't really need studies here. A study is an attempt to figure out what would happen if everyone were forced to wear masks, but we did that already. Mask mandates get added, removed and changed at different times even in places that are physically next to each other, allow…
Comment linking /p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are
on “Delta CEO wants U.S. to put unruly passengers on 'no-fly' list”Submitted How Can Anyone Still Believe in Covid Policy? as a story · 14 points
HN discussion> The messaging IIRC was a little more nuanced, but delivered poorly No, there was no nuance here and everyone in this thread is mis-remembering or mis-understood what actually happened. Masks don't work against COVID. They never did. They don't reduce viral load or anything else either. In fact there was no evidence of masks doing much of anything in the scientific literature pre-COVID (post-COVID it's been pollute…
Comment linking /p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are?s=r
on “Why the WHO took two years to say Covid is airborne”Submitted The More Masks Fail, the More We Need Them as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIf you want some fun examples of counter-correlations, this is a good article: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/the-more-masks-fail-the-more-w... Yes, those examples are cherry-picked, but if you're defending the null hypothesis - mask mandates don't work - that's a perfectly valid argument for your case. If you argue that mask mandates work, it's on you to explain every single counter-correlation, you can't cherry-pic…
Comment linking /p/the-more-masks-fail-the-more-we-need
on “Lockdown, distance learning likely to increase social class achievement gap”Submitted Every Comparison Shows Masks Are Meaningless – By IM – Unmasked as a story · 8 points
HN discussionMasks don't work at all and never have, so your school is just making your kids unhappy for no reason. https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a... They don't "whine" because they know it's pointless and the school/you will punish them if they do. Adults have more options.
Comment linking /p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are
on “Truck driver leads NJ Senate president after spending $153 on campaign”Sweden has the same numbers as Germany. Sweden and Germany are very similar with respect to culture, clustering of people in cities, percentage of people with a migration background. Norway and Sweden are not. Turns out that Sweden and Germany have similar results: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-abou...
Comment linking /p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-about-sweden
on “The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate (2015)”Incubation period was/is definitely not 14 days, more like 3! Two weeks could easily be infection to death at the start. No, mask mandates should have shown a very sharp and artificial drop in every case where they were enacted, but that never happened. "Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree" So you assert yet nobody can show it doing so in the real world data. Places geographically next…
Comment linking /p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are
on “Stop Equating “Science” with Truth (2017)”There are some compelling arguments brought against this idea here: https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/no-masks-do-not-work-against-t... . That's not the complete story on these past two years and the flu of course, but according to the narrative presented in that article, we don't have much evidence to suggest that masks had anything to do with it.
Comment linking /p/no-masks-do-not-work-against-the
on “Ask HN: Why did US flu cases plummet US from 38 MM to less than 2k this season?”
