A New Trial of Air Filters is Making the Rounds. It’s Bait.
Here's What You Need to Know
Long time readers of the PAI will know that I grew up a fisherman, often getting up at 2AM to hit the water before dawn. At one point, my father and I set a personal record of hitting 49 weeks in a row catching at least a single fish. I was even published in a local periodical showing off the highly effective “Butt Ugly” fly fishing lure that I designed and tied myself.
The hard technical science of baiting and catching fish (Rule No. One: If You Don’t Go, You Don’t Catch Any!) does not come naturally to many. It takes hard work, dedication, and patience in order to put food on your family’s table. Tricking a smallmouth bass into thinking he’s chomping down on a minnow instead of a one-way ticket to deep-fried tartar town takes some cleverness.
Like fishing lures, not all scientific research studies are created equal. As we all remember, there is a long history of COVID cranks attacking studies which invalidate their uninformed opinions to be “Covidian” and effectively worthless. On the other hand, these sorts of “Evidence-Based Medicine” gurus just love cherry picking individual studies that validate their personal opinions, no matter how flawed they are.
Which brings us to a recent trial evaluating the effectiveness of HEPA air filtration units in care homes that was endorsed by John Mandrola of Sensible Medicine, liberal COVID minimizer Adam Gaffney, and Alasdair “Immunity Debt” Munro. It was written up in The Conversation UK by Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine of the University of East Anglia. Now, Paul has produced an extensive stream of unscientific pro-pestilence propaganda over the years, even going so far to claim in 2021 that people positive for COVID-19 should be encouraged to spread a deadly & disabling virus around their community as if they had the common cold.
Looking critically at the study these men endorsed, “High-Efficiency Particulate Air Filters to Prevent Winter Respiratory Infections in Care Homes” published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the errors are obvious. For starters, the researchers ran the devices at the lowest settings - at 2 ACH (Air Changes Per Hour) against the consensus of aerosol engineers, which is at least 6 ACH to reduce the transmission of airborne viruses. There was no control group - thus not an RCT, so time to STFU! The researchers also didn’t bother to measure indoor air quality, a critical metric. If I was intentionally designing a bunk study as bait for EBM zealots, this would be it.
The only conclusion one can gleam from reading it is that not knowing what you’re doing, refusing to learn from those with relevant experience & credentials, and doing a half-assed job simply doesn’t work! I could have told you that for free!
The thing about the arrogance of EBM Zealots is that, if you spent years advocating for the abandonment of any and all precautionary measures COVID-19 related - even going so far to compare pediatric COVID-19 to head lice, in Munro’s case - and there are effective technologies that work to prevent the onward transmission of awful deadly and disabling viruses, then you start to come off looking like a massive jerk. So at this point in 2026, you’re committed to the gimmick. This is the problem with improper use of social media in medical and scientific debates: You have to be humble enough to admit error when the evidence contradicts you. This simply doesn’t happen if you’re a mercenary academic advancing the agenda of wealthy interests.
That agenda is the same one we have fought for centuries: that industry simply doesn’t like public health in any way, so they’ve went ahead and decided that you can’t have any. The public simply needs to get used to…seeing babies die from poisoned milk, or their neighbors shitting themselves to death from cholera, or their loved ones dying or being disabled by SARS-CoV-2 as human sacrifice for others’ profit. Academics who enable this conduct with their “expertise” should be discredited, not paraded around the media as critical voices worth listening to over those who actually have the relevant knowledge and experience.
See, the thing is, if we can prove the effectiveness of technologies such as HEPA air filtration (or FarUVC lighting, respirators, etc.) to prevent the spread of airborne viruses, then it suggests that perhaps we should be deploying them in schools and workplaces to prevent needless death. It implies that perhaps the government needs to get involved and facilitate this happening, even if industry - after centuries of temper tantrums over government regulations against public health hazards - needs to be dragged by the ear year again, pissing and moaning the entire way, into a new, better era. All these “Evidence-Based Medicine” propagandists are doing everything they can to keep us in the past.
It must feel weird to work at a university while dedicating yourself to making sure people know less about the world.
