The Government on Wednesday published the evidence informing its recent controversial decision to recommend all secondary school pupils wear face masks in classrooms.
The new document from the Department for Education (DfE) explains that the decision “has been taken on the recommendation of UKHSA and is based on a range of evidence”. It says the Government has “balanced education and public health considerations, including the benefits in managing infection and transmission, against any educational and wider health and wellbeing impacts from the recommended use of face coverings”.
While conceding that the “direct COVID-19 health risks to children and young people are very low” – and rejecting SAGE’s advice to recommend masks in primary school classrooms (yes, really) – it claims that “the balance of risks for secondary classrooms has changed at this point in time, in accordance with the evolving evidence and the phase of the pandemic”.
The document summarises its evidence as follows:
Face coverings can be effective in contributing to reducing transmission of COVID-19 in public and community settings. This is informed by a range of research, including randomised control trials, contact tracing studies, and observational studies – assessed most recently by UKHSA, described in a review conducted in November 2021. The review’s conclusions were broadly in line with those of a previous Public Health England review; however, the addition of randomised control trials and substantially more individual-level observational studies increases the strength of the conclusions and strengthens the evidence for the effectiveness of face coverings in reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the community, through source control, wearer protection, and universal masking.
In fact, though, the UKHSA review from November 2021 found no high quality studies (except, it claims, the ONS study, which really isn’t high quality). Of the two randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that have been done and which were cited by the UKHSA, the one from Denmark found no statistically significant reduction in COVID-19 incidence from surgical masks (the study didn’t look at cloth masks) while the Bangladesh mask study found no benefit from cloth masks and the reported benefit from surgical masks was just 11%, with a 95% confidence interval that included zero. The UKHSA review also considered 23 observational studies, which it said had “mixed” results and many of which were of low quality and small.
This does not seem a strong basis to claim a large effect for mask wearing. A recent more comprehensive review (which included earlier evidence for other flu-like viruses) by Ian Liu, Vinay Prasad and Jonathan Darrow for the Cato Institute, entitled “Evidence for Community Cloth Face Masking to Limit the Spread of SARS‐CoV‑2: A Critical Review“, concluded that: “More than a century after the 1918 influenza pandemic, examination of the efficacy of masks has produced a large volume of mostly low- to moderate-quality evidence that has largely failed to demonstrate their value in most settings.”
That is a better summary of the evidence than the DfE managed.
Needless to say, the DfE gives the propaganda value of masking a nod: “It can be a visible outward signal of safety behaviour and a reminder of COVID-19 risks.”
Notably, there is no mention in this document of the potential harms of wearing a mask for an extended period, such as the impact on breathing, the heart, or the skin. Contamination gets a brief mention, though it’s quickly dismissed:
Face masks and coverings will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. Disposal of single-use face coverings could theoretically pose a risk of transmission for inappropriately discarded face coverings, but it is very likely that the reduction in transmission risk due to reduced droplet and aerosol emissions from wearing a face covering significantly outweighs any potential for enhanced risk of transmission through inadvertent contact with a contaminated face covering. This is likely to hold regardless of duration that the face covering is used.
The reference provided for these claims is a SAGE document from September 2020, “Duration of Wearing of Face Coverings.” This is an interesting document, but it can scarcely be said to support the claims the DfE is making. On harms from masks, for example, it says:
Neither surgical masks nor face coverings are designed for use for extended periods. Wearing a face covering for an extended period can maintain a higher moisture level around the face which can be uncomfortable for some people and may increase the likelihood of skin complaints. Masks will become highly contaminated with upper respiratory tract and skin micro-organisms. A review of the downsides of face masks and face coverings (by Bakhit et al) found 20 studies reporting irritation and discomfort from using masks. Participants in studies with surgical or cloth masks reported difficulty breathing (12%-34%), facial irritation and discomfort (11-35%). More serious symptoms of headache, acne, rashes were associated with use of N95 and goggles. A study among healthcare workers (by Han et al) associates acne with extended duration of wearing. …
In a clinical study of extended wearing (by Chughtai et al), 124/148 participants reported at least one problem associated with mask use including pressure on face, breathing difficulty, discomfort, trouble communicating with the patient and headache. …
Measurements of heart rate during activity (by Li et al) showed significantly lower rates with a surgical mask compared to N95. In a study (by Fikenzer et al) of healthy young male volunteers surgical masks and FFP2/N95 respirators, both had a significantly marked negative impact on pulmonary capacity (FEV, PEV and PEF) while wearing the mask (with a spirometry mask) during exercise.
The DfE document omits to mention any of these issues. It does, however, include some recognition of the negative impact on education. It mentions a survey conducted by the Department in March 2021 that found “80% of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half felt wearing one made learning more difficult (55%)”. It also mentions a DfE survey from April 2021 that found “almost all secondary leaders and teachers (94%) thought that wearing face coverings has made communication between teachers and students more difficult, with 59% saying it has made it a lot more difficult”. It adds:
Research into the effect of mask wearing on communication has found that concealing a speaker’s lips led to lower performance, lower confidence scores, and increased perceived effort on the part of the listener. Moreover, meta-cognitive monitoring was worse when listening in these conditions compared with listening to an unmasked talker. A survey of impacts on communication with mask wearing in adults reported that face coverings negatively impact hearing, understanding, engagement, and feelings of connection with the speaker. People with hearing loss were impacted more than those without hearing loss. The inability to see facial expressions and to read lips have a major impact on speech understanding for those with hearing impairments. The worse the hearing, the greater the impact of the mask.
What about the evidence for the claims the document does make – that it is “very likely” that the transmission reduction from wearing a mask “significantly outweighs any potential for enhanced risk of transmission through inadvertent contact with a contaminated face covering” and that “this is likely to hold regardless of duration that the face covering is used”. This is what the cited SAGE document says:
There is a lack of good evidence relating to the wearing of face coverings, with very little data relating to duration of wearing. In particular we suggest that the following aspects would benefit from further research:
• Effectiveness of face coverings as a source control after longer duration wearing, including analysis of the influence of moisture on the performance of different types of face coverings.
• Analysis of the potential risk of transmission due to contaminated face coverings (during and after removal).
• Assessment of the prevalence of skin complaints associated with face coverings, including an understanding of the factors that contribute and potential mitigation.
• Analysis of user acceptability of face coverings for long duration use in different settings.
In other words, there was no good evidence on the things the DfE is claiming are “likely” or “very likely”, or on much else really.
The DfE also carried out its own analysis of the impact of masks in schools.
DfE has also undertaken initial observational analysis based on data reported by 123 secondary schools that implemented face coverings during a 2-3-week period in the autumn term 2021, compared to a sample of similar schools that did not. The preliminary findings demonstrate a potential positive effect in reducing pupil absence due to COVID-19.
What did it find? It found that COVID-19 absences fell by 0.6% more (absolute reduction) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2-3-week period, which amounts to an 11% relative reduction.
In a weighted sample of secondary schools that did not use face masks, the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 1.7 percentage points from 5.3% on October 1st 2021 to 3.6% in the third week of October. This is equivalent to a 32% decrease.
In secondary schools that did use face coverings (either face coverings only or a combination of face masks and additional communications e.g. providing more communications to parents but not introducing any further measures such as increased testing), the average COVID-19 absence rate fell by 2.3 percentage points from 5.3% on October 1st 2021 to 3.0% in the third week of October. This is equivalent to a 43% decrease.
At surface level, this suggests that COVID-19 absence fell by 0.6 percentage points more (an 11% relative difference) in secondary schools that used face masks compared to similar schools that did not over a 2-3-week period.
However, the study had numerous limitations, which made the finding a “non-statistical and unknown clinical significant” reduction, i.e., it may just be chance.
There is a level of statistical uncertainty around the result. The analysis is non-peer reviewed and with the current sample size, shows a non-statistical and unknown clinical significant reduction in infection in a short follow up period, including that a ‘false positive’ (i.e. finding that face coverings saw reduced absence when the finding is actually by chance) would emerge around 15% of the time; a 5% threshold is widely used to declare statistical significance in academic literature.
Therefore, further work should be done to extend the analysis in terms of scope: for example, looking at different statistical methodologies, capturing different and longer treatment time periods and controlling for a wider number of school and local area variables to ensure this is a consistent finding.
The statistical uncertainty around the result was such that the 95% confidence interval for the effect size included zero (note in the below the upper CI is positive).
What’s more, the control group of 1,192 schools that didn’t use masks were very different to the 123 treatment schools which did, so that the above findings only emerged after substantial weighting was added to the control group schools using a process the document calls “entropy balancing”.
Exploration of the data showed that the control and treatment group had differing characteristics, so weights for the control group schools were calculated using entropy balancing.
Prior to this weighting, the non-mask schools actually had lower average absence rates throughout the study period – though the treatment schools reduced more from their higher starting point.
Prior to weighting, the mean absence rate of the control group increases across the treatment period, whereas the mean absence rate of the treatment group decreases. However, the absence rates in the control group remain lower overall than those in the treatment group.
All-in-all, not exactly robust, compelling evidence of the benefits of masking, particularly given all the well-documented harms, which the document itself either sets out or cites other documents which do.
The document at one point hints at what I suspect is the real reason masks were brought back into classrooms: “In a Unison survey of support staff, 71% said face coverings in secondary school classrooms are an important safety measure.” Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis wrote in the Times this week that: “Face masks have been a central demand of teaching unions.” Sounds vey much like politics rather than science to me. (See this recent Daily Sceptic article by Ben Irvine on the role the teaching unions played in forcing the Government to lockdown in March 2020.)
When are we going to stop harming our young people with pointless interventions to deal with a virus that poses no threat to them and let them live normal lives again?
Stop Press: Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine Carl Heneghan tells Julia Hartley-Brewer he is unimpressed by the Government’s “evidence” for masking in classrooms.
Stop Press 2: The Telegraph reports that some schoolchildren are rebelling. According to Damien McNulty, a national executive member of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers: “Sadly, we have had reports in the last 24 hours of at least six secondary schools in the north-west of England where children, in huge numbers, are refusing to take lateral flow tests or to wear masks. We’ve got one school in Lancashire where only 67 children out of 1,300 [5%] are prepared to have a lateral flow test and wear masks. This is a public health emergency.” Hats off to these young people for standing up for themselves against the unions and authorities who would force them to do harmful and pointless things. May their rebellion grow!
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You can’t power an industrial economy on wind, anyone who believes so is either corrupt, mad or stupid.
Didn’t we try that in the past?
Yup. There is a good reason that coal then oil tool off and windmills and sailing boats got relegated.
You cannot run a country on wind and that is why as well as the wind we have the Smart Meter to ration energy use. ——–Energy is the new currency. Carbon taxation is the new wealth redistribution tool.
Clearly the intention is to make sure that we are no longer an industrial economy.
Net Zero Means Powerless Defenceless –
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
12.000 Bird choppers in the UK coving an area almost the size of West Sussex. 500 dead large birds per chopper every single year. Producing at best 15% of our energy needs. They are not Gaia friendly. Capacity is at best 50% given wind intermittency and the poor quality of battery storage. Per Chopper:
There are not enough rare earth elements to power a wind grid to sustain our economy. Not enough in the entire world and you need to move gigatonnes of tender Gaia’s skin to get at them. All done with hydrocarbon (clean, abiotic) power.
There is not enough land (must be flat, in a wind zone etc). Each MW eats up 50 acres of space (most farms are 3 MW to 5 MW in size). To treble wind production you would have to carpet the equivalent of Kent, Surrey and the Sussexes with the Bird manglers. It is insanity, not ‘green’. The Choppers are placed on farmland or once wild areas. This is not eco-friendly.
Follow the money. Lots of millionaires in the supply chain of the Bird Eaters.
I hear in Germany the Red Kite is virtually wiped out. —Birds of prey are always looking down. They don’t see the blades coming.
Used to see lots of birds of prey in the hover in Caithness when driving down the A9. Haven’t spotted one in ages now, but the area has been industrialised with turbines.
In many areas in Scotland the formerly beautiful landscape has been ruined by bird choppers. Who would want to go hill walking in apparently remote areas if these areas have disfiguring structures, concrete and roads all over them, and you have to listen to woop woop turbine noise instead of wildlife and the breeze?
When you return from holiday and are emitting all the “dreadful CO2” you look down at Scotland and it is starting to look like a giant pin cushion.
I didn’t think the models were GIGO, I thought they were just GO
All these scams such as ‘green energy’, electric vehicles, HS2, Cv-19 ‘vaccine’ etc should be filtered out by honest and wise politicians to whom we cede responsibility to make decisions on our behalf. They in turn are answerable to the PM who we trust will be a wise and pragmatic leader. Where are they? They’re certainly not to be found in Westminster.
Without the above, any pseudo-expert, fake, charlatan, flanneler, cheat or phony (yes, Ferguson, I’m looking at you) can hold sway and stuff us all.
The Simpsons monorail episode comes to mind. Sinking our money into inadequate solutions to a made-up problem.
Those who claim to ‘follow the science’ clearly don’t understand the scientific method.
I keep wondering where all the British green jobs are. Minus 3000 in Port talbot is the only relevant statistic I can think of.
It’ll be minus 6000 in Port Talbot by the time the knock-on effects of destroying the steel plant there play out.
Indeed, as I have been pointing out since this criminal and sad announcement.
No need for coal, much of which used to come from a relatively local open cast colliery (Felin Fran, near Merthyr – although I think that is now our of action), nor any iron ore, which arrives by sea via the local docks, or else by train from other ports. Quite a while back, when there was another steel plant at Llanwern, east of Newport, all the iron ore arrived by sea at Margam, which can handle the large ships, and a large chunk of it was hauled by train from there to Llanwern.
Worth observing that the Met Office uses 1991 to 2020 for long term average sums at present. Incidentally, another story that undermines the concept of “Net Zero” is the latest delay to the Hinkley Point C project – now delayed to 2029 at the earliest.
“[Hydrogen] Highly explosive, low kinetic energy compared with hydrocarbons” surely chemical or potential energy, not kinetic?
We know the drill by now and that is to destroy our economy, our society and our way of life. None of this surprises me. What really does surprise me though is the level of abject ignorance demonstrated by MPs. You would have thought that the people actually representing us would have some inherent ability to discern, to weigh information, to be curious, to have some innate intelligence… Apparently not. They, almost as one body, seem to possess no curiosity, no outrage (when the only steel furnace is about to be extinguished), no ability to discern or to look further than the end of their paychecks and expenses and the possibility of jumping on a gravy train here or there, usually funded by some billionaire or other, to endlessly pontificate on matters on which they are not fit or able to speak about. As a whole, bar a very few, they have let us down badly. They give credence to organisations like the CCC because they’re just too lazy to do any digging into the subject themselves or they’re too cowardly to sabotage their careers by speaking out. These are the best in the land?? How the F did they end up where they are? Perhaps it is us who are the lazy ones in not skewering their nominations to be MPs to forensic examination in the first place. One thing I know, from the council politics down here in the shires, is that only those people who know the game and tow the line will be put forward onto the ballot – basically they’ve already been corrupted before they’ve taken one step through the doors of Westminster.
“No outrage”???—-Correct, but plenty of outrage if we want to process illegal aliens in Rwanda who chucked away their documents. Plenty of outrage if someone swears at a Muslim. Plenty of outrage if Braverman uses a perfectly good word that appears in the dictionary—“Invasion”. Plenty of outrage if a father does not want a man that has suddenly decided he is a woman in his daughters toilet. ——Yes outrage is very selective for the parasite class of UN lackeys pandering to pretend to save the planet politics who don’t give a jot whether it impoverishes us all and is actually doing that RIGHT NOW. Just take a look at your energy bills. Just ask people in Port Talbot.
Why would they (establishment, career party politicians) change when the people continue to go out and vote for them time and time again no matter how incompetent, disinterested or morally corrupt they undertake their role.
The most important commodity is ENERGY.———— Price and availability of energy is directly tied to prosperity, good health and life expectancy. The one billion people in the world that don’t even have electricity and the other 2 billion that only have enough to power a fridge will testify to that. So why are our politicians seeking to take away cheap reliable energy and replace it with expensive unreliable energy? ——-Hey Jim Dale answer that question will you? For anyone who does not know who this idiot Dale is, then tune into GB News where he is the resident climate change activist. Well Dale won’t answer that question because he thinks if a Mars Bar goes up 1p it is all because of “Climate Change”. He will claim the cocoa beans got wet or some other squirmers excuse. But enough of silly activist weathermen. ——-Why do government want to remove cheap reliable energy? ——Do they have evidence that the CO2 from the coal and gas is causing or going to cause dangerous changes to the climate? NOPE. The Chinese and Indians who emit 40% of that CO2 don’t think so and continue to use reliable affordable coal. They are using more coal than we did since the beginning of time, so there cannot be a climate apocalypse heading in past Jim Dales house now can there? —So WHY? ———-Because of UN politics. The Politics of Sustainable Development that says the prosperous west has used up more than its fair share of the fossil fuels and we are to leave it in the ground. Eco Socialism with climate as the plausible excuse and we all fall for it. Ask your friends and family. They will almost all think that the climate is changing and it isn’t the same as when they were young. They think they can look out of their bedroom window and see climate change. They see storms on the telly and think “Wow Greta was right”——Wakey wakey people you are being manipulated. —-Look at your electric bill and if you thought that was bad “You ain’t seen nuthin yet”
The good thing about CLS’s Royal Society report was that they looked at 37 years of weather data and considered the impact of variable weather on electricity supply from renewables (see image from their report below). That’s what’s blown the CCC out of the water.
But the RS report had a big weakness in that it didn’t consider the impact of variable weather on energy demand. It turns out that back-to-back low wind years like 2009-11 are also colder than normal so demand for heat is higher. Once we’re all using heat pumps (!), that demand will have to be met with electricity, so we’ll need even more storage than RS calculated. So, the RS has blown themselves out of the water too.
It’s like a green circular firing squad.
The costings in the RS report were a total fantasy too.
Covered in depth here:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/royal-society-large-electricity-storage-report.
Perhaps you could use wind power to manufacture gas, oil and coal.
Not really. The first large-scale practical application of a steam engine was using the Newcomen atmospheric engine to pump water out of collieries. This superseeded horse-powered pumps, not wind-powered ones.
Aside: Why haven’t the netzeroes thought about horse-powered dynamos for electricity generation so far? Horses not being sufficiently renewable because they fart?
They never used to give it a name when it was a bit blustery. I agree that the climate in this country has deteriorated very rapidly but I think the reasons are entirely deliberate and man-made and not a by-product. Just look at how many measures have been introduced recently in order to reduce the worldwide harvest and thus reduce worldwide population. They will carry on un until about 7 billion are dead and they are convinced of their righteousness.
I agree that the climate in this country has deteriorated very rapidly but …
How does climate “detetiorate?”
It might help persuade the zealots that they are on shaky ground if they were forced to relinquish all items that they own that are dependent on fossil fuel, in particular oil. All plastics? No more Nespresso? No phones, tablets or desktops? A large proportion of their wardrobes? It would be interesting to determine exactly what they would have to do without…
It’s like being in a recurring nightmare. Doesn’t matter how much the obvious lie is exposed the zombies keep moving in the same direction towards destruction of our country.