We’re publishing a guest post today by Dr. Gary Sidley, a retired clinical psychologist with over 30 years’ experience working for the NHS. He sets out all the reasons why mask mandates shouldn’t be reimposed and urges people to join the Smile Free Campaign, which advocates against masking.
On the July 19th 2021, England removed almost all its legal mandates that required healthy people to wear face coverings in community settings. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, however, opted to retain their mask mandates, as did London on its public transport system. Ominously, the Government’s Covid strategy for this winter includes the prospect of a ‘Plan B’ that could see the return of compulsory face masks in indoor settings in England. After a few months of bare-faced normality, how will the general public react to future directives to muzzle up?
Smile Free – a campaign group seeking the permanent removal of all mask mandates – urges each person to consider the responses to the following six questions before deciding whether to hide your face again.
Q1. Do masks help reduce viral spread?
Although some studies claim otherwise, the real-world evidence strongly suggests that masking the healthy does not significantly reduce the spread of respiratory viruses for neither the wearer nor others. Key reasons for this lack of efficacy are likely to include the improper use and storage of masks in the real world and the growing recognition that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for COVID-19) is spread via microscopic aerosol particles that are far too small to be kept at bay by face coverings.
Q2. Will wearing a mask cause me any physical harm?
If worn only for short periods, significant physical harms from wearing a mask are unlikely. However, there is evidence that long term use can lead to a number of negative consequences, including: headaches, skin irritation, fatigue and dehydration, reduced heart and lung efficiency and eye irritation. In addition, face coverings may put elderly people at more risk of injury from falls.
Q3. Do masks cause any social or psychological harms?
The social and psychological consequences of hiding our faces from other people are profound. Humans are social animals. We need to interact with others and communicate to sustain our wellbeing. Face coverings are dehumanising, inhibiting all forms of emotional expression and social interaction. Individuality minimised, identity hidden, the masked population appear broadly the same as they trudge along in their social vacuums. The impact of a masked population on children is even more problematic, denying them access to facial expressions that are so crucial for their emotional development.
Q4. Will wearing a mask help to reassure others who are anxious?
Most definitely not. Acting as a crude, highly visible reminder that danger is all around, face coverings are fueling widespread anxiety. Fear is underpinned by a perception of threat and being masked is a blatant indicator that we are all bio-hazards. Furthermore, continuing to wear masks while we gradually try to return to normality will act to keep fear going, as the wearer may attribute their survival to the mask rather than conclude that it is now safe to return to everyday activities. To recommend face coverings as a source of reassurance is akin to insisting people wear a garlic clove around their necks to reduce their fear of vampires.
Q5. Under the law, do I have a ‘reasonable excuse’ not to wear a mask?
In general terms, if wearing a mask is likely to cause you ‘severe distress’, or put you ‘at risk of harm or injury’, you are legally exempt. Mental health problems (such as anxiety, depression, and paranoia) and physical health problems (such as asthma and other respiratory difficulties) are sufficient and lawful reasons not to wear a face covering. Furthermore, you are not obliged to disclose your specific reason for exemption to anybody other than an official enforcement officer (usually a police officer); any other person who challenges you about not wearing a face covering is likely to be acting unlawfully and thereby risking prosecution. Indeed, a service provider has been fined £7000 under the Discrimination Disability Act for denying access to a woman without a mask.
Q6. Do I risk being fined if I don’t wear a mask?
While it is possible that a fine could be imposed for not complying with a mask mandate, such an event seems rare. Thus, in the four-month period June-to-September 2020, only 89 fines were issued (61 on public transport, 28 in retail settings) across the whole of England and Wales. Furthermore, if you are unfortunate enough to receive a fine and decide to contest it in Court, it is highly likely you will succeed; according to figures produced by the Crown Prosecution Service, all charges under the Coronavirus Act have either been withdrawn in Court or quashed after innocent people were wrongfully indicted.
In conclusion, mandating masks for healthy people in their communities is irrational, counterproductive, unethical and ultimately unenforceable. To help continue the fight against legal requirements to wear face coverings, please consider joining our Smile Free campaign.
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‘Settled science’ may well be an oxymoron.
But the experience of the last three years calls to mind a shorter word: a ‘lie’.
One of my favourite ‘settled science’ topics is Darwinism. I just love the unsettling and uncomfortable reactions of reminding people, especially science types, it’s just a theory that not all scientists concur with 🙂
https://www.hoover.org/research/mathematical-challenges-darwins-theory-evolution-david-berlinski-stephen-meyer-and-david
https://slate.com/technology/2012/10/evolution-of-cooperation-russian-anarchist-prince-peter-kropotkin-and-the-theory-of-mutual-aid.html
Yes, but we do not try to reorganise the global economy and spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers money based on what we think might or might be true about evolution. We ARE doing that with “climate change”. People are free to talk about evolution or black holes without being branded “enemies of science” or “deniers”.
Whenever I try to talk about the origin of the species I get called a Nazi eugenicist…
Agreed. And curious that so many aspects of GangGreenery were launched precisely by the National Socialist German Worker’s Party.
How humanity views itself within the framework of nature is relevant to anthropocentric perspectives and how we proceed with how ‘the crowd’ will continue to interact with nature. Part of the global economy reorganization is continued urbanism(smart green cities) and thus continued isolation/separation of humanity from nature…as opposed to spreading out and being part of nature and it’s natural order without a control system of intellectuals that consider humanity to be and accident that ended up being a parasite and then telling people who see themselves as part of nature how to live. AND in some circles you will be considered a heretic and banished for disagreeing with Darwinism and big bang… and on the other hand everybody is actually still free to discuss climatology outside of the status quo…one just has to not use the technocratic/blackrock/vanguard media platforms. Check out…
https://judithcurry.com/
Anyone else finding the site suddenly full of dodgey click bait junk adverts? Strewn all over the article, top of the window, bottom of the window? So many that they’re often overlapping? And for scam like things such as non surgical fat removal, or the like?
Not what I expect from a reputable subscription news site. Has it been hacked?
None at all. No doubt it depends on your setup. If you look at the image below, it shows part of how I’ve got Firefox set up – note the tick box against “pop-up windows”. Loads of other things you can manipulate as required.
Thank you!
Yes.
When using my android phone the ads have invaded everything. Make it quite hard to navigate.
Not sure about my computer.
Is Toby aware?
Re “settled science”, just follow the money.
Opera browser is an alternative with ad-blocking built it.
I use Brave. No ads.
Use Brave Browser. I don’t see any crappy adverts – neither on PC nor Android.
Then donate directly to Daily Sceptic.
Of course, you could just install Brave Browser and not donate, but that would be cheap, and only the rich can afford cheap shoes.
But then you do, because you’re commenting!
Yes. I thought it was my system, but I suspect interventions…
Keep your anti-virus up!
Yes. Site appears to be hacked.
None at all. I’m using iOS Safari. It could be that something nasty had got installed on your browser perhaps? Not saying Safari is better at all, just that I’m not seeing anything so suspect it’s something specific to your set-up.
Try DuckDuckGo (DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.). You can add it in as an extension to most browsers.
You can use it for searching instead of google which I recommend. Also, to control your privacy when visiting web sites. I use it and don’t get adverts or popups here.
I got the same thing on the Telegraph. Popups telling me that my McAfee subscription had run out (I don’t use it) and I should check my details. No doubt a phishing attempt. Turned on the DuckDuckGo privacy and no more popups from there.
Hey, this is an important thread!
Don’t kick it sideways with an irrelevant browsing problem!
That’s why they are now switching to ‘scientific consensus’.
Achieved by ignoring, cancelling and refusing to debate any scientific dissenters.
Religion’s a culture of Faith – just believe what you’re told.
Science is a culture of Doubt – question and test everything you’re told – even that which you’ve told yourself.
This is why politicians don’t like science and scientists – it’s all just too bloody slow and awkward for them and their little agendas.
Not to mention their tiny Arts Grad minds.
“Settled science” is an oxymoron. But a simpler explanation would suffice: The scientific method is predicated on uncertainty and embracing possibilities and the unknown, and once anything is claimed to have been settled, there is another word for it – dogma. It is no longer science if it is considered beyond question, since science is the systematized art of questioning everything to arrive at an ever-refined understanding of the phenomenon in question.
It is a highly typical uniquely human flaw to instinctively try to calcify our perceptions and interpretations into concrete and immutable meanings. And this kind of perceptual rigidity has reached into the arbiters of scientific discourse through the scientific age. The doctrine of neo-Darwinism, for example, has a death-grip on many academic institutions and is routinely taught as fact to students of the biological sciences when in reality it is a theory that has more recently been superseded by various other contenders.
Can’t remember when exactly, but sometime around Isaac Newton’s time a prominent scientific commentator of that era proclaimed that no further understanding of the life and the universe was necessary – only a refinement of that understanding. Along came Albert Einstein and threw a fairly hefty spanner in the works – unsettling “The Science” by doing more science!
So the claim of “settled science” is really nothing new under the sun, can be taken with a pinch of salt, and is merely the product, as most of this readership would agree, of an agenda-driven news media that so many mistakenly take as being representative of real scientific discovery. It’s not settled – it’s just become a fashionable meme.
‘The phrase ‘settled science’ has nothing to do with scientific truth…’
Agreed, and yet some science is settled. The earth is round, the solar system is heliocentric, the blood circulates, micro-organisms are agents of disease, the continents were once conjoined, the speed of light is constant for all observers,… I could, of course, go on.
It is settled and agreed that only cranks disagree with this settled science.
The triumph of the green maniacs is that they’ve achieved the same cranks-alone-dissent status for their theory of man-made climate change.
Some of the best articles in Daily Sceptic have come from this author, Dr James Alexander. I have not read one of his many articles that has intrigued and educated me and in many cases enforced my thoughts and beliefs. He is spot on with his remarks in this short piece and I have continually brought the subject of ‘settled science’ up as a nonsense – it is not science and it is not settled.
My own method of ‘getting’ to people on this subject is to bring it down to items that they can understand from the likes of that awful man, Attenborough. There are more polar bears than ever before; there is 18% more coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef and last Winter was the coldest Antactic winter on record. Nowadays, ordinary folk do not have a clue about statistics or understanding graphs – they only understand the Daily Mail’s headlines and nothing more and the BBC uses this apathy all the time to further their woke ideology.
We have a prolonged fight on our hands!
From an online lecture by very highly rated climate scientist William Happer, he quoted Shopenhauer who said:-
“All truth passes through three stages; First it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and thirdly it is accepted as self evident.”
Happer then said the truth that CO2 is not harmful, but is actually good for the planet is somewhere between the stages of ridicule and violent opposition.