Now that the Big Tech companies have permitted us to speak out against the accepted doctrine that COVID was spread by bats or other things that crawl and fly in the animal kingdom, do we have enough courage to ask other relevant questions? Considering some new as well as some very old overlooked information, perhaps we should.
So, did the political-medical community bamboozle us into wearing masks?
Time to Take a Deep Breath
After lo these many months, masks have finally been ripped off the faces of Americans. As we take a collective and long-overdue breath, inquiring minds want to know: Was it worth it? Did it really make a difference? If you read Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails, there is reason to wonder.
The New York Post’s Karol Markowicz astutely observed:
“In a Feb. 5, 2020, email to a Team Obama health official, the virus guru wrote that masks were for infected people, and that ‘the typical mask you buy in a drug store is not really effective in keeping out the virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.’”
Fauci maintained that stance for a while, including in a nationally broadcast 60 Minutes interview. Then he did an about-face, the media rushed in to do his bidding, and, voilà, millions of people were forced to mask up. Suddenly mask-wearing became accepted solipsism, i.e., an idea known to have the same clarity as the existence of oneself.
Taken at face value (no pun intended), wearing a mask seemed to make sense. However, were we so fearful of the alternative that we ignored some obvious information that doubted the accepted norm? Original research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine studied this question. In a randomized controlled trial conducted by DANMASK-19, a Danish study concluded:
“The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection.”
Their medical research also found “… a recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, incident SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with no mask recommendation.”
Sadly, the Danish report simply mirrored what was already known about the efficacy of masks. In a 2009 NIH study, researchers concluded, “Face mask use in health care workers has not been demonstrated to provide benefit in terms of cold symptoms or getting colds.” In 2017, yet another bit of medical scholarship was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. These medical scientists observed, “Self-reported assessment of clinical outcomes was prone to bias. Evidence of a protective effect of masks or respirators against verified respiratory infection (VRI) was not statistically significant.”
We could go on and on, but you get the picture. The advocacy media were better than average at whipping up a COVID frenzy that Americans may have been all too willing to accept. So, when medical and governmental authorities pressed forward with mask mandates – saying, in effect, “jump” – instead of questioning them, we said, “How high?”
Some might counter that it was better to be safe than sorry and that there are no deleterious effects to mask-wearing. But again, that might not be true. A 2009 randomized controlled trial published on PubMed.gov reported that “… subjects in the mask group were significantly more likely to experience headache during the study period. Subjects living with children were more likely to have high cold severity scores over the course of the study.”
Liberty Nation’s Pennel Bird wrote about a scientific study that “asserts that nanofibers in the masks we are wearing by the billions could put us at serious risk for respiratory inflammation and even cause a cancer known as mesothelioma.”
It may be years or decades before the medical community connects mask-wearing with cancer. Therefore, an informed public plays a crucial role in public health. But how can we make educated decisions when half the information is not made available to us, and the other half is for the express purpose of persuading the public to toe the line?
Former University of Ottawa professor and researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., may have put it best when he wrote:
“By making mask-wearing recommendations and policies for the general public, or by expressly condoning the practice, governments have both ignored the scientific evidence and done the opposite of following the precautionary principle.
“In an absence of knowledge, governments should not make policies that have a hypothetical potential to cause harm. The government has an onus barrier before it instigates a broad social-engineering intervention, or allows corporations to exploit fear-based sentiments.
“Furthermore, individuals should know that there is no known benefit arising from wearing a mask in a viral respiratory illness epidemic, and that scientific studies have shown that any benefit must be residually small, compared to other and determinative factors.
“Otherwise, what is the point of publicly funded science?”
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Read more from Leesa K. Donner.
