In our supposedly liberal and transparent democratic country, it seems that it was a group of remote and unnamed scientists, outside of the formal SAGE infrastructure, who effectively imposed masks on British citizens. Were they well-meaning academics offering their expertise, or conflicted ideologues engaged in a global endeavour to control the masses? You decide.
The volte-face on mask recommendations and regulations by the U.K. Government and its public health experts in 2020 is one of the many unfathomable policy decisions we witnessed during the Covid era. Within little more than a month, our ministers, senior scientists and medical leaders flipped from a stance of repeatedly imploring us all not to wear a face covering in community settings to a totalitarian one of imposing mask mandates. Who was primarily responsible for this remarkable U-turn?
Based on the recent revelations from former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, it seems that the political whims of Dominic Cummings (former Government advisor) and Nicola Sturgeon (First Minister of Scotland) may have been influential. Nonetheless, the quirks of political figures are unlikely to have been sufficient to achieve a mask U-turn, and support from expert scientific advisors would have been necessary. Which academics performed this role of mask enforcers? Astonishingly, a thorough exploration of SAGE minutes – and the compilation of a decision-making timeline – during the prelude to this policy reversal implicates an obscure multi-disciplinary group most of us will never have heard of: DELVE, which stands for Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics.
What the experts believed prior to March and early April 2020
In the early spring of 2020, the public health experts spoke with one tongue. Here are a few reminders of their collective wisdom:
In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer (March 4th 2020).
“For the average member of the public” masks “are really not a good idea… people can put themselves at more risk than less… you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in.
Dr. Jenny Harries, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer (March 12th 2020).
The global evidence is masks in the general population don’t work.
Professor Jason Leitch, Scotland’s Clinical Director (April 3rd 2020)
We do not recommend masks for general wearing.
Professor Jonathan Van Tam, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer (April 3rd 2020)
The experts were so clearly united in their anti-mask stance that, around this time, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) banned the advertisements of two companies because of spurious claims that their face coverings would protect against coronavirus. This intervention by the ASA won the unequivocal support of Professor Stephen Powis (NHS Medical Director) who said, “Callous firms looking to maximise profits by pushing products that fly in the face of official advice is outright dangerous and has rightly been banned.”
Clearly, mass-masking requirements were not being considered at this time. So what happened next?
The lukewarm phase: April 7th-20th 2020
In the aftermath of the all-too-brief period of sanity – when the wearing of face coverings in community settings was recognised as ineffective and likely to do more harm than good – SAGE undertook a period of information gathering, probing the academic landscape, seemingly in search of a justification for widespread masking. Two weeks into the first lockdown, maybe they were harbouring a thirst for more restrictions or simply reacting to pressure from the media to ‘do something’. However, the expert feedback they received between April 7th and April 20th was generally lukewarm about the potential value of pushing masks on healthy people.
A report (dated April 7th) from UNCOVER – a group based at Edinburgh University – concluded from its evidence review that, “Wearing face masks in the community was not significantly associated with a reduction in episodes of influenza-like illness” and that, “Mask wearing alone, in the absence of other preventative measures, is unlikely to be effective.” The SAGE minutes of the same date also refer to the work of NERVTAG (New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group) who had apparently stated that “increased use of masks would have minimal effect (in terms of preventing the uninfected general population from becoming infected)”.
Given this converging advice that masks constituted a poor viral barrier, did the SAGE experts now accept that no further mask policies were indicated? No: two days later – as recorded in their minutes of April 9th – SAGE asked for more information, and requested that NERVTAG produce another paper on masks, “including any behavioural aspects” (emphasis added) associated with them, “drawing on SPI-B as necessary”. The membership of NERVTAG included staunch Covid-restriction advocates such as Professors Neil Ferguson, Malcolm Semple and John Edmunds. The SPI-B (the behavioural science subgroup of SAGE) would have recognised the potential power of masks to ‘nudge’ people into compliance with public-health diktats. If you were intent on seeking validation for masking people in the community, one might expect these two groups to deliver.
But, perhaps surprisingly, both NERVTAG and SPI-B remained unconvinced about the net benefits of the routine wearing of face coverings by healthy people.
In the NERVTAG paper dated April 13th, titled “Face masks in the community” the overarching conclusion was: “Overall there is insufficient evidence to recommend universal use of face masks in the community.” Specifically, they summarised their policy options as:
- Universal face masks in the community: NOT RECOMMENDED
- Facemasks for all for short periods of unavoidable close contact: PERMISSIVE
- Face masks in community for vulnerable individuals for short periods: RECOMMENDED
So apart from those with significant existing vulnerabilities, these experts were opposed to mandating the generalised masking of the populace. The main SAGE minutes of April 16th reflect this conclusion, reiterating the finding that, “Evidence from RCTs are inconclusive regarding the protective effects of face masks when worn in household or community settings”, and raising additional concerns about community masking, including: supply constraints; the practicability for transport and shop workers to wear masks a whole day; and the potential to increase complacency around other restrictions (such as social distancing). Intriguingly, after echoing these research results and their reservations about imposing further mask requirements, an addendum to SAGE’s April 16th minutes commits to providing revised mask guidance by week commencing April 20th. Furthermore, within this addendum, there is an explicit action for the Chief Medical Officer to produce “a summary of recommendations on wearing face masks drawing on evidence synthesis from DELVE” [My emphasis]. Maybe they were already aware of the pro-mask cavalry coming over the horizon?
Meanwhile, the behavioural science ‘nudgers’ in the SPI-B group published their paper on April 20th in which they highlight the potential for both benefits and negative outcomes of recommending masks in the community. Predictably, they promote face coverings as a way to “demonstrate that an individual is concerned about other people’s welfare and is enacting desired social norms” – an effective enforcer of the ‘ego’ and ‘normative pressure’ nudges, to use the language of behavioural science. But, in addition, they draw attention to some of the undesirable implications of mask mandates, including the “negative evaluation and harassment of people who are not wearing face masks, leading to division which could undermine collective solidarity”. So this was far from a resounding endorsement of face coverings in the community.
Then along came DELVE.
DELVE: The mask enforcers
On April 21st 2020, DELVE submitted a paper to SAGE titled, “Report on face masks for the general public”. Given the strident pro-mask content and tone of this review – in stark contrast to previous analyses from other sources – it is reasonable to propose that this group of academics, remote from the mainstream Covid decision-making apparatus, was primarily responsible for forcibly muzzling the British people.
Citing a ragbag of highly selective laboratory and observational studies, along with wild overestimates of the degree of asymptomatic transmission and a corruption of the precautionary principle (assuming the intervention is the safe, default position), the DELVE group clamoured for the general public to cover their faces with plastic and cloth. Their intent was clear from the first sentence of their report:
Face masks offer an important tool for managing forward transmission of COVID-19 within the general population.
The core of DELVE’s flawed rationale is to ignore the consistent findings of randomised controlled trials that community masking achieves no appreciable reduction in viral transmission, ignore the widespread harms associated with mass masking, and to then make three implausible assertions:
- Assertion 1: As many as 80% of infectious people do not have any symptoms. This largely reflects a failure to recognise that an asymptomatic person who tests positive is not necessarily infectious; indeed, research suggests people without symptoms contribute very little to the propagation of a pandemic.
- Assertion 2: Droplets constitute a major mode of transmission. Yet there is a growing consensus that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is mainly spread by microscopic aerosols, so to expect face coverings to act as a barrier is like expecting a tennis net to be impermeable to sand.
- Assertion 3: Face masks reduce the spread of droplets. Even if they do, the invalidity of the two previous assertions renders this one largely irrelevant.
Based on this triad of false assertions, DELVE determined to influence national policy by proclaiming that, “Widespread use of surgical and homemade face masks among the public can have a significant mitigating effect on the spread of COVID-19”. On the back of the DELVE report, other groups with histories of pushing for tougher restrictions joined the clamour to mask the U.K. For example, a paper from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reported that – based on their own modelling, no less – high compliance with face coverings could achieve a “modest impact” on viral transmission. On April 21st, the SAGE minutes included a statement that, “There is enough evidence to support recommendation of community use of cloth face masks.” Subsequently, on April 25th, the British Medical Association urged the Government to mandate masks for the general public when outside of their homes.
Predictably, the Government acquiesced. Commencing on June 15th 2020, masks were sequentially mandated on public transport, indoor retail and leisure facilities, and – shamefully – in schools. Failure to acquiesce to this state coercion put British citizens at risk of fines, exclusion from work and participation in everyday life. People were habitually harassed and vilified for opting not to cover their airways with cloth or plastic. Based on the timeline described above, it is reasonable to conclude that DELVE was primarily culpable for the imposition of a restriction that was both ineffective and harmful, as well as a gross infringement of basic human rights and freedoms.
But what is DELVE, this obscure group spouting half-truths and driving the mainstream mask narrative?
DELVE: membership and affiliations
DELVE is an initiative convened by the Royal Society (a U.K. scientific academy, “dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity”). This learned society with such a lofty aim describes DELVE as, “A multi-disciplinary group… to support a data-driven approach to learning from the different approaches countries are taking to managing the pandemic” (sic). Apparently, the work of this group has been “discussed with and welcomed by Government, who have arranged for it to provide input through SAGE”. I do not recall this arrangement being shared with the British public at a Whitty and Vallance press conference in 2020, but maybe I missed it?
The Royal Society has been staunchly pro-restriction throughout the Covid era, and its commitment to mask coercion is demonstrated by its hosting and promoting of DELVE’s policy-changing output on its own website on May 5th 2020. True to form, the Royal Society followed this up with its own strongly pro-mask paper on June 26th 2020, within which they lauded particularly the value of masks in conveying psychological messages that promote general compliance with restrictions, lending further weight to the premise that face coverings were imposed mainly as a method of people control rather than to limit viral spread. By July 10th 2020, Venki Ramakrishnan (the Royal Society president) was telling the Guardian that “refusing to wear a mask in public during the COVID-19 epidemic should become as socially unacceptable as drink driving or not wearing a seatbelt”.
Inspection of the individuals involved in DELVE is also informative. Perusal of the membership list of its “Steering Committee” – “a high-level expert group to oversee the work and communicate findings to the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor and his networks in Government” – reveals that many have close affiliations, not only with the Royal Society, but with other pro-restriction and highly-conflicted organisations such as the Wellcome Trust and Imperial College London (the latter being the home of the arch-modeller, Professor Neil Ferguson). Members include: Devi Shridar, Professor of Global Health at Edinburgh University, holder of a Wellcome Trust investigator award, Founding Director of the Global Health Governance Programme and with previous involvement in the World Economic Forum Council on the Health Industry; Demis Hassabis, an expert in artificial intelligence whose stated mission is to solve “the problem of intelligence” and then to use AI “to solve everything else”; and Daniel Kahneman, Professor of Psychology at Princetown University and world-renowned behavioural scientist. So these are some of the scientists who decided that the British people would be coerced into wearing face coverings: a media darling of the lockdown-and-jab-them approach to pandemic management, a fervent advocate of transhumanism, and an American ‘nudger’.
Plainly, it was not only the unaccountable scientists at SAGE who directed policy throughout the Covid era. Regarding mask decrees, the hidden technocrats at DELVE played a central role in compelling us all to cover our faces in community settings. In a purportedly democratic and liberal society, should anonymous influencers – prone to bias and corruption – be making decisions that intrude into all our lives? I think not.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign. He blogs at Coronababble.
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I used to find these remnants irritating but on reflection I would rather they stayed as a reminder of what happened. I am not going to forget any of it, neither do I want to, but all the covidians I know seem to have forgotten it completely. It’s never mentioned.
Maybe I should have read the comments and more than the headline before reacting.
Quite a collection of politicians, civil servants, scientists, academics and so on are the cause and now a reminder. It would be good if they didn’t stay and were moved to a specialised ‘museum’ that has restricted access to the permanently housed exhibits.
I’d be in favour of the politicians being moved to a museum.
Permanently.
Absolutely. Lest we forget the most evil political pantomime in modern history.
I had the book Pseudo Pandemic by Iain Davis, it has a yellow and red cover just like those signs. A mate saw that and he said those yellow & red arrows give him bad memories.
I’m finding quite a few of my acquaintances are now acknowledging that the lunacy was “a bit over the top.” Small steps are to be encouraged and I try to move them a bit further along the path to sanity.
all the brainwashed ones i know [ which is most of those i know] say ‘ it’s over ‘ no one cares anymore. well i do. and of course no apologies . one or two ‘you were right ‘ which was very heartwarming but now that realise was from friends who only got the shot to travel so doesn’t count.
they were never on the other side truly. the other side ones no apologies whatsoever
Removing signs won’t help to convey the fundamental mathematics of lockdown, which is that it only gave a reduced, but substantially non-zero probability of catching COVID. A crude estimate may be that it extended the average period before getting COVID from 10 to 20 weeks.
Was it worth trashing the economy just to give us an extra 10 weeks before we got it?
Many people (a majority?) will continue to believe that the govt should have prevented everyone from catching COVID. No doubt this is what the so-called enquiry will conclude.
Hmm. It seems you think that lockdown successfully ‘flattened the curve’.
I don’t think that’s right or the mortality curve (for England and Wales) would not almost perfectly match a natural epidemic curve. If lockdown worked in this way the actual mortality curve would be worse before and better after the intervention took effect. It wasn’t.
Lockdown, given that it did trash the economy, must have had some impact on transmission, but it just reduced the effective virulence, so COVID continued as a infectious disease. It was never going to have a huge impact, given that everyone continued to go shopping and to mix in families.
It wasn’t a proper lockdown. You can’t have a country-level lockdown unless you all starve to death. They had a proper lockdown in Wuhan, supposedly, because they brought people in from outside to keep things going.
“Lockdown, given that it did trash the economy, must have had some impact on transmission”
How exactly?
It delayed at best, and as Yedon said; the faster the young get immunity, the better for the elderly. They also disregarded the fact that some old people have, and also need, a social life.
A nonsensical comment because the existence of the C1984 is very much up for debate. Are you implying that colds and ‘flu equal this mysterious C1984?
They are supposed to be there for guidance, nothing more. All in the Public Health Act that they used & abused.
Knee-jerk reaction from me:
I’ve only read the headline. No. Leave the signs as a reminder of the arrogant stupidity of the authorities.
I disagree entirely. The problem is, the longer they remain in place the more we get used to them and accept them as normal. Weren’t we all afraid of the “new normal” of masks, “stay 2m apart” and the retarded bumping-elbows?
Well you make a reasonable point but I don’t think many people thinks those things are “normal” – they have now conveniently forgotten it all. I don’t think those restrictions will reappear any time soon, but being reminded of them will remind people not to be so easily fooled next time.
Bang on. They act as the equivalent of the whip to a horse – a constant reminder of who’s in charge. As long as they remain so does the subjugation of the human spirit.
I was a sp!ked reader at the time in 2020. But I didn’t need an article from them or anywhere else to find the ‘New Normal’ deeply disturbing.
With a sign next to them showing the names of those that authorised them, and how much public money was spent and who authorised that.
Seconded
To me this doesn’t even warrant discussing. The fact that a major newspaper has to introduce the idea that temporary measures (pointless as they were) have finally to be taken away, is like arguing that temporary roadworks lights should be removed once the road’s fixed. The remaining signage, screens and announcements are a bit like a row of bollards left on the road still restricting traffic flow months after the work’s been finished (with the obvious difference that they didn’t accomplish anything, and merely made life worse for the majority of us).
I say leave the signs there, precisely BECAUSE they are a reminder of the futility and madness of the whole shitshow.
It wasn’t even a pandemic, for Christ’s sake.
The only thing the NPIs achieved was to focus more people in fewer places for more of the time. So, the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do. Which they wouldn’t have managed to do even if they hadn’t or if there was even a problem to fixed in the first place. The whole thing was so topsy turvy it needs to be remembered.
Absurd in the extreme.
Perhaps they could be replaced with a sign saying “sign not in use ” like you get on the motorway sometimes.
Socially distanced is an oxymoron, a bit like Socialism is also.
“Together, Apart”
“Breath is Death”
Our local doctor’s surgery literally boxed themselves into their back room offices. There were two counters. One is still boarded off, the other is a mass of perspex and wooden battens. In order to speak to the dragon on reception you have to crouch down and speak through the small gap they have left. In addition, they have never reintroduced the table full of magazines that kept you occupied while you wait. If they claim this is infection control, its a load of nonsense because the table is full of NHS leaflets for you to read. Having read this article I am going to challenge them about this remaining rubbish covid ideology.
“they have never reintroduced the table full of magazines that kept you occupied while you wait.”
Which rather begs the question…
‘What am I doing here?’
When a doctors surgery doesn’t understand infection control we have to question why they are still operating.
Told you so.
4 years and counting.
“museum of Covid futility, failures and – as with vaccine passports – petty fascism”.
Or as Abby Robberts puts it….Great Wall Of Cu/ts!
Keep them up as an embarrassment to the swines who imposed it on the sheep who clapped for it.
I am for removal but only after acknowledgement of the futility and madness of these measures.
I gather only last week Arlene Foster stated in the Inquiry that she should have locked down sooner.
We may think people realise how mad it all was, but I am not convinced the signs will not be resurrected if/when there is another scare.
People will call for lockdowns simply because they think they are going to get more paid time off work. For some people, the height of covid was the happiest time of their life.
Had a conversation with a mate from Kenya yesterday, even though we didn’t agree in 2021, he is now much more awake and knows that in Africa, they didn’t need a ‘vaccine’ to get out of Lockdowns, because they had very few of them and are better off too.
Futile, cost a fortune, wrecked the economy and millions of lives …… and they’ve just love us to “move on.”
They can remove the physical evidence of their tyranny, but I for one will never forget and never forgive them.
I have been removing them where possible ever since they started to appear (e.g. stickers on mirrors in public toilets etc) as an act of rejection.
I took action to remove every accessible sign during the ghastly period of covid insanity. It was very satisfying to rip instructions on hand washing and distancing from walls.
I went for a walk in the city , about a few hours after lockdown announced, all the lampposts , pavements were already signed up and stencilled with social distant Cummins style signage ! There was no way that such huge national donate could have been designed , approved and implemented in those few hours ! It was planned . That’s when I know it was a fraud
On the day they imposed Lockdown, I went to see if the Gym was open, just be the off chance. It was closed with no notice on the door as to imply the bloody obvious.