There follows a guest post by Dr. Zacharias Fögen, whose new (peer-reviewed) paper in Medicine describes how face masks increase the death rate of COVID-19.
It took a long time, but my study on masks has finally appeared in the prestigious journal Medicine. What is my study about?
It is about whether masks decrease case fatality from COVID-19 (because less viral material is transmitted) or increase it. Increase sounds illogical? Ask yourself if you would wear the mask of a Covid patient. You probably wouldn’t, otherwise you could become infected by inhaling the viruses he or she breathed into the mask.
My study, based on the U.S. state of Kansas, provides the answer: case mortality was significantly lower in counties without mandatory masks. Mandatory masking increased case mortality there by 85%. Even after factoring in the reduced number of cases due to masks, the numbers still remain 52% higher. Over 95% of this effect can only be attributed to COVID-19, so it is not CO2, bacteria or fungi under the mask.
The reason for this is what I call the Foegen effect: deep re-inhalation of condensed droplets or pure virions which were trapped in the mask as droplets can worsen the prognosis. Each of these steps has been documented in the literature.
This effect has now even been demonstrated in animal models. Further studies in humans comparing mask versus helmet or nasal tube show the same result.
Two other, even larger evaluations show the same effect on the case fatality rate. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Cureus shows that there is no association between mask compliance and case numbers in Europe, but there is a statistically significant positive association between mask compliance and deaths. This means: more mask use, same number of cases, but more deaths.
A peer-reviewed study by Adjodah et. al. analyses the effect of mask mandates on cases and mortality (but not case fatality rate) in the USA on a pre-post-basis, and finds that after the lifting of a mask mandate, cases rise but mortality does not, which effectively means that lifting a mask mandate lowers the case fatality rate. Conversely, the implementation of a mask mandate increases case fatality rate.
My study is open access and you can find it here – the PDF version (available via the download button in the left bar) is particularly recommended for its helpful layout.
Discussion
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“As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.” — Robert Gore, April 23, 2020, at the very beginning of the Covid Scam
The most vital urgent and DEEP understanding everyone needs to gain is that a mafia network of manipulating PSYCHOPATHS are governing big businesses (eg official medicine), nations and the world — the evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable, see The 2 Pink Elephants Theory of Reality
And psychopaths are typically NOT how Hollywood propaganda movies have showcased them. And therefore one better RE-learns what a psychopath REALLY is (see cited source above).
But rulership by psychopaths is only ONE part of the equation that makes up the destructive human condition as the article explains — there are 2 pink elephants in the room, and they’re MARRIED (see cited source above) ….
“2 weeks to flatten the curve has turned into…3 shots to feed your family!” — Unknown
““We’re all in this together” is a tribal maxim. Even there, it’s a con, because the tribal leaders use it to enforce loyalty and submission. … The unity of compliance.” — Jon Rappoport, Investigative Journalist
‘Even after factoring in the reduced number of cases due to masks…’
Oh? Where is the data for that?
But then…
‘A peer-reviewed study in the journal Cureus shows that there is no association between mask compliance and case numbers in Europe…’
Well make your mind up.
Anybody else noticed the singular “thumbs down” on almost every post?. Didn’t realise Chris Whitty was registered to the Daily Sceptic.
When the next pandemic comes along, if authorities have learned their lesson, they will do none of the things they did in this pandemic – no masks, no lockdowns, no rush to untried vaccines.
That’s a big if. So far they have learned nothing.
Politicians in governments can never admit they were wrong as the damage they have wreaked is astronomical. They are finished if they do. But that is the state of politics and our governments today, very few competent honest people.
Hey, remember the one about masks when doing CPR? Truly the world went mad.
UK Chief Medical Officer said just this early in the pandemic when PPE was thought to be running short.
Then when the politicians started to claim that masks would save people he magically changed his tune….
This is an extremely important paper. The results are counterintuitive for sure and I strongly suspect if I attempt to share it on LinkedIn it will be taken down, just like my post on the mask-effectiveness study recently published in Cureus, another peer-reviewed study they desperately try to hide from the public.
I’d like to see a similar study on the lockdowns. My intuition is that they had zero effect on transmission because it’s impossible to stop a respiratory virus from spreading in the albeit fewer opportunities adults and children have to interact.
But the virus has an incubation period and I think that shutting families and nursing home residents indoors can only give the virus an opportunity to proliferate among that population. Would it not have been more effective to have everyone outside in fresh air rather than indoors? This should be investigated if we want to call ourselves Lockdown Sceptics.
If the government tells you that reconsuming your own waste products is good for public health and you mindlessly comply, you deserve everything you get.
Walking around an outdoor wildlife park today with the family. A family walked towards us with a 10-12 year old boy in tears. He was huddled up crying and my wife and I both had to check with each other to confirm we heard his mother say “stop crying, there’s no covid in here.”
The next group we saw were 4 people all wearing masks. Whether that triggered this kid or not it just shows the damaging effect of the propaganda that’s led to a child (who may well have his own issues anyway) becoming paralysed by fear about a virus that simply is not a danger to him. And if it was the masked idiots who spooked him, again, those are the impacts of these ‘low cost, non harmful’ interventions.
I despise masks and everything they stand for (because to me it was always about having a visible sign of a problem, masks as we all know are useless for a respiratory virus).
I’ll go further than that.
I despise ALL of it. The lies, the masks, the lockdowns, the jabs, the fearmongering.
Spent today with my family. My elderly parent announced that he won’t vote in elections later this week – normally someone who would ALWAYS have voted come what may.
The reason?
He says he doesn’t want to risk getting covid.
All you need to know. Meta-analysis of papers on masks. Useless and dangerous
https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-150-comparative-studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
The study is based on the assumption that mask mandates correlates to mask wearing, yet no work was done to determine if this is correct and to what extent, or which people wore masks.
This is an obvious glaring error in the paper.
That was already done by the Van Dyke study I referred.
So you say there was a study in the counties of the same state, showing the correlation of mandates and wearing? If that is true, then useful but a big omission/error to not include the data in the study.
I have read the referenced paper and it doesn’t not cover the correlation of mandate and wearing. It covers the impact of mandates on infection trends.
Just about every single measure , action diktat and recommendation by the Johnson Government. Hancock,Javid, Whitty , Van Tam, Vallance etc has made the Covid crisis worse.
What an extraordinary coincidence this is! Not just ‘conspiracy theorists’ but surely anyone with a functioning brain would think they were doing it all deliberately!
The contents of this study will be suppressed in the usual way and the sheep will carry on wearing their dangerous masks in their cars and waiting for the new planned mask mandate to be ordered again by Johnson to keep people safe’.
The grave has always been the safest place of all!
And still it goes on. I was leaving my local convenience store this morning where I call often while walking the dog. A brisk, energetic man in his late 60s was entering as I left. He asked the shop employee near the door if he needed a mask. She replied no, you don’t need a mask to go anywhere. So he went back to his car and got a mask…
There was a hypothesis that the greater part of the deaths in the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic were the result of improper mask usage (excessive use, poor mask hygiene, etc) leading to outbreaks of bacterial pneumonia.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/bacterial-pneumonia-caused-most-deaths-1918-influenza-pandemic
I personally of indviduals forced to wear masks in hospitals where they worked who came down with bacterial pneumonia (multiple individuals from the same site). The government has also pushed a ‘jab’ for bacterial pneumonia, which is plausible effective as the bacteria involved are relatively stable DNA pathogen in contrast to the rapidly varying RNA pathogen of SARS-CoV-19.
Did you note that Dr Anthony Fauci was one of the co-authors of the paper?
Maybe he has dementia and forgot.
I must admit I didn’t notice. He has flipped and flopped over masks, and just about everything, blowing with the political winds. It does date back to 2008 before The Narrative aka The Science was fully established.
I picked it up from someone else’s research last year.
His actions on AIDS prevention and treatment in the 80s were also catastrophic.
Read senator Robert Kennedy jnr book the real dr fauci and you will be stunned how this murdering bastard has got away with presiding over the ill health of anation
Also latterly the world
Why is it that your MP never answers your correspondence?
Probably too busy wanking?
Neil Parish: MP resigns as he admits watching porn in the Commonshttps://news.sky.com/story/neil-parish-mp-accused-of-watching-porn-in-commons-to-resign-after-being-told-position-untenable-12602430
Boris Johnson ‘Choking ones chicken in the chamber is a time honoured tradition and I will never do anything that jeopardises that ancient right of honurable members to honour their member’
Unlikely comment from Johnson as he has claimed that from the age of 14 he has never needed to choke the chicken, as he always found someone to do it for him.
Well he did have a butler.
There has been a recent article about plastic fibres being found in the lungs of patients who were having surgery, apparently its quite common and another reason why wearing them is hazardous to our health.
Any chance of a link?
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/microplastics-in-humans-after-blood-scientists-find-traces-in-the-lungs#Microplastics-in-human-tissues
It sounds so juvenile when people who’ve had articles published in journals say “it’s peer-reviewed, you know”.
If you’ve got something to say, say it. And only value responses from readers who aren’t impressed by wearers of uniform, professional or otherwise.
The main point of maskwearing was symbolic. It’s called entrainment. It’s akin to getting people not to object, or laugh, when the authorities insist that a bloke with a todger and a pair of cobblers is in fact a woman.
Peer review only means that people who are signed up to the same group think as you agree that your thinking hasn’t strayed too far from the orthodoxy.
We’ve wound up in this situation due to poor science. We won’t find our way out by adding to it.
I’m astonished that you wrote a whole paper on largely correlational effects and never once discussed the problem of inferring causation in such designs. It is equally likely that severe outbreaks cause mask mandates as it is that masks cause severe outbreaks. Or maybe masks do nothing at all and any associations are spurious?
Perhaps it would be wise to spend more effort on being circumspect and less on naming effects after yourself?
We did not wind up in this situation owing to ‘poor science ‘- you are completely deluding yourself if you really still believe that.
Ever heard of the crack down suppression of ‘real science ‘and real scientists by Government Media censorship and draconian Social Media cancelation?
I share your reservations about this paper and won’t be referring to it or using it in future arguments. The methodology seems extremely fragile.
As you astutely note, the paper seems to go straight for correlation = causation. The claimed effect size is unbelievably massive. A risk ratio of ~1.5? If masks were actually driving COVID to that extent then the same argument often made against mandates applies: it would have been immediately obvious from just eyeballing case death graphs before/after mandates. You’d see a massive jump in cases right after masks were forced and a massive drop right after they were removed, and you’d see it everywhere and always. The paper generalizes from just a few months in Kansas to the entire world. If the effect is real it should be easily demonstrable in many places. Yes, Kansas had differences at the county level in mandate policy but this is true of many places. Despite 2+ years of pandemic, the study only look at about 3-4 months of data. That data is being adjusted, dropped, rescaled, even arbitrarily rewritten all over the place. E.g. “To correct for the CFR outlier of Gove County, the number of deaths in Gove… Read more »
When I’m asked, I give 5 simple reasons for my opposition to mask mandates:
How about something much simpler? It’s impossible to determine the effects (or lack thereof) of face coverings in community settings. They may be positive, negative or non-existant. We do not and cannot know this. Hence, they must no more be mandated than five daily prayers must be mandated. Millions of people believe in the necessity of them. But a mere belief, no matter how strongly felt, doesn’t justify an impositions on the freedom of those who don’t share it.
Best post on this topic by a country mile.
This is all masks should ever have been – nothing more than a personal choice for the absolutely terrified.
ad 1. what’s the argument?
ad 2. You know what confidence intervals are?
ad 3. The article lists 2 other peer-reviewed studies showing the same effect for USA and Europe
ad 4. what kind of reasoning is that?
ad 5. Gove County is a “convenient” outlier as it is a mask mandated county with exceptionally high CFR.
Look at the scatter plot.
ad 6. you’re misquoting me to claim that I misquoted?
You know, I named it after myself so I could easily find out who is not interested in a serious discussion.
Had you read the paper, you would have noted that the period I took had mandates established and unchanged for four weeks.
I still haven’t worn a mask. Still not jabbed. Still not dead. Still not believing a word the media says.
Ditto and I still don’t know anybody who has died of or with Covid. Over the past 2+ years I have personally known of 12 people who have died, all elderly except for 1 who was 62 but over 30 stone.
Ditto.
Patient – ‘Doctor I’m struggling to breath!’
Docotor -‘ Here put this mask over your face to make breathing harder’.
And have some midazolam to supress your breathing.
Surely all the mask wearers are brimming with the latest vaccine and are now the most super safe people on Earth?
(Unlike those crazy anti vaxxers who were supposed to die last Christmas but didn’t for reasons were choose to ignore).
Who needs a mask when you have replaced your blood with Pfizers vastly superior alternative?
The masks were always just theatre …. intended to generate fear by continually reminding the sheeple that there was a virus circulating. But it’s good to have a study showing that rather than protecting people, they make them more vulnerable.
I was holding onto the hope that the covid response was just a massive cock up until they made us wear masks in the middle of summer where according to their own numbers there was no covid anywhere.
So, basically we – the soon to be top dog unjabbed – should make sure we keep at least two metres away from anyone who is masked in order to avoid inhaling any remnants of pure virion and or hypercondensed droplets.
It’s almost as if your mother was right, and fresh air is good for you, after all.
Mind you, she also told me that Greens were good for you!
How many lives were saved by walking clockwise as opposed to anti clockwise in shops and pubs?
Will we ever know?
Neil Ferguson produced a model showing that both methods were 18.73% more effective when a scotch egg was being eaten.
Probably forgot to include the Coriolis effect
Shit!
A side order of Coriolis does wonders for a Scotch egg.
Of course we know. It’s Zero.
Was it the other way round, I wonder, Down Under? Perhaps that’s why they went nutso down there!
Blind Obedience is the aim …… rehearsal for straight into the showers… no argument!
The problem is that papers such as this do not get traction in the press. I am still seeing some people wearing masks in England while in Scotland there is still a depressing number of mask fanatics. We have a cruise booked and I am shocked to discover that the cruise company requires you to wear a mask – bitterly deplorable.
And because they don’t get that traction, people don’t care. It doesn’t matter what the quality of the evidence is; or how distinguished the researchers are.
What matters is whether or not it’s accepted and promoted by the usual media sources.
I’d cancel.
What sort of holiday is that going to be for you? Is it worth it?
Cancel the holiday.
For ‘get woke, go broke’ to work we’ve got to stop spending money with these clowns.
You didn’t think to ask beforehand?
It was booked three years ago.
Alternatively, just say that you’re exempt. They’re not allowed to question why.
Ask to see their evidence-based risk assessment for mitigating against the transmission of bacterial pnuemonia encouraged by improper/poor mask hygiene.
Firms like Law or Fiction will have text on their website. From that you can draft and serve a *notice of liability* on them if they don’t withdraw the requirement.
As you probably don’t want to be surrounded by sheep, it sounds to me if the best is to tell them you intend to withdraw from the holiday due to their breach of contract.
Also demand compensation for inflation since you booked it. That’ll probably be 10-15% extra on what you paid …
‘Traction’ ? They are spiked burned shredded and trashed.( by order!).
I’d cancel it if I were you and travel with a company that treats its clients as thinking humans.
Does this mean we will all need to change to wearing visors?
Fully enclosed helmets.
Don’t give them ideas!
Deep Sea diving suits…
Current recommendations are that you should wear a pair of tights on your head (like a bank robber)
That way you can keep the dreaded covids out of your mouth, nose, eyes and ear holes.
Faucci says that despite tights having holes in them that are far too large to stop dust getting through never mind something as small as a virus that they should be warn. And if you wish to be super safe and virtuous you should wear double tights.
Faucci also recommends that the gay community wears tights in the convential way to avoid bum covid.
Only the hermetically sealed plastic bag will do. Recommended for anybody who still believes in masks in 2022.
Remember: Gates’ target is 15 %
That will probably work for a few months until somebody discovers that air circulates happily around and underneath it, carrying the virus back and forth as it goes. After a few more months of discrediting this discovery while cases and deaths continue to soar, TPTB might eventually decide that visors are no good after all, and of course they never said that they did. No, the only solution will have to be airtight plastic bags over the entire head.
I’d suggest another effect.When covid is expelled as droplets and caught on the mask, it starts to dry. Eventually the mucus is dry enough that the regular movement of the mask as masked people talk to others, causes the mucus to break apart into a fine dust. And, unlike the original mucus droplets that are big enough and heavy enough to rapidly fall to the floor where they get entrapped by the floor material … the dust from a mask sits in the atmosphere for ages and, goes straight through masks and deep into the lungs.
Interesting theory, but I would have thought that masks would tend to be damp when worn (moisture in the breath) although clearly they will dry out when in your pocket, or when chinned or ear dangled.
Are you aware of any credible scientific papers that prove sars-cov-2 could be transmitted from one person to another?
I can’t find them.
I don’t mean computer models or laboratory work where they assumed that there was a virus that caused infection and then set up manikins firing out simulated coughs and sneezes but actual credible evidence that the claimed virus could be spread and cause disease in real people under real circumstances.
My wife was very ill in Nov 2019 before they had named sars-cov-2 or covid19.
She was relentlessly coughing for weeks, massively fatigued, low oxygen levels all the symptoms associated with covid.
Yet no one else in the household became ill, we had elderly relatives visiting her and none of them became ill.
If the theory that viral particles float around having been coughed out and are then inhaled and infect others I don’t get why only my wife was ill, our house must have been swimming with particles for weeks.
“If the theory that viral particles float around having been coughed out and are then inhaled and infect others I don’t get why only my wife was il”
That’s the discredit germ theory – if there are virons floating around you *must* get ill.
That’s a fatalistic belief that discounts the adaptive human immune system. Each of us has a unique one with strengths and weaknesses.
We have to remember that our ancestors spent a lot of time dying from infectious disease so we don’t have to. The more your ancestors died, the better you are at not dying.
My wife and daughter had the same bug in November 2019. They were both very ill yet nobody they were in contact with caught it. I came down with it in late December 2019 weeks after my wife had got rid of it. My daughters husband never caught it.
Same here, Nov ’19 …… I had what I described to my work colleagues/friends as “a nasty little virus” …… 3 days of feeling very tired/unwell (but took paracetamol and still went to work, as you did) and then a cough which took about 3 weeks to clear. I’m unjabbed; not bothered taking any precautions and I’ve not been ill at all throughout the Covid scam.
Did you or the others catch it later,
it’s most likely that you did catch cv around that time, most likely very mild and what they term as asymptomatic.
no tests back then so you won’t have known.
i was I’ll for 3 days in March 2020, worst cold I’d had in years, no one else seemed to catch it, this year though child got it (mild headache 1 day pcr the following day showed cv while last flo was negative), then misses after child recovered, then apparently me but adults had no symptoms.
just because someone in close proximity does not catch it does not prove that germs do not exist.
Being asymptomatic used to be called being healthy, as in you were not even slightly ill.
Being an asymptomatic carrier and spreader of a disease only became a thing in the covid era, the claim was disproven by a large Chinese study.
‘just because someone in close proximity does not catch it does not prove that germs do not exist.’
I agree with that statement.
But the more I look the more it appears to be the case that viruses do not exist as pathogenic entities that can be transmitted from one person to another.
If we are to believe that these super tiny things (that only experts can see with special equipment) can make us ill and that isolationand lockdown can stop their spread then we need convincing evidence that the claim is true.
Term as misused for Covid transmission invented by Whitty in one of his Horror Broadcasts! I remember it.
Something causes people to fall ill. If we start denying that then we are playing into the cabal’s hands. A few hundred years ago it was ‘miasma’ or ‘the vapours’. Then for Typhoid it was found to be foul water. If we accept that virtually none of the prominent experts on ‘our’ side of the fence are making a lot of noise over the existence or not of viruses it’s probably better to fight other battles. Unless of course you believe Yeadon, Gupta, et al are operating a false flag campaign?
Causation and Correlation in reverse. No infection does not mean it’s not possible. Assume for a moment that your wife did in fact have C19, as opposed to any one of a number of other seasonal viruses. As the DP numbers show, the vast majority of people have some level of natural immunity to the worst effects of C19. ‘None became ill’ might be a well intentioned statement but is hardly a scientific factor to hang a theory on. A sniffle or a sore throat may be all a person gets, and is probably dismissed, especially in the winter. Couple that with a very small sample size and with the utmost respect I don’t believe this proves your theory.
Let’s face it, you haven’t looked.
there are lots of examples of people exposed regularly to highly infections diseases who do not catch them. It turns out that individual variation is a huge confounder…
In January 2020 before the panic, experts were saying over 80% of those that are exposed to the virus will never develop the disease and never have any symptoms. That is precisely why mass testing for the virus is useless. Then the fear mongering started and all of the messages which said maybe the virus is not the worse killer in history, were forbidden.
Shame there has never been an experiment with ventilation to find out the best way to disperse virions…
Kinda obvious.
‘We think you should partially suffocate yourself to protect others.’
No thanks!