Those who thought they had seen the last of mask mandates were badly mistaken.
It starts with the message on masking, and ‘let’s see how the public reacts’. It won’t be long before governments resort to reintroducing compulsory mask use to address the ‘winter crisis’. They say masks will decrease the number of respiratory infections that are the major cause of the recurring winter crisis.
Readers will recall that in early December, we challenged the evidence base cited by Lord Markham as proof that masks work. We wrote:
According to the UKHSA, the official scientific rationale for mask mandates in the community is based on a review last updated in the summer of 2021 of 28 studies, two of which are trials and the rest studies of abysmal quality. The review, identified through a Parliamentary Question, is in two parts: the main body and supplementary tables reporting the data. The problem is that the review is full of errors: the two parts do not match and appear to have been written separately and not even proofread.
Most of the studies in the review are observational, making claims such as an 80% reduction in cases after mask introduction – making mask use a miracle, not a human intervention. If that were the case, SARS-CoV-2 would have been sent packing years ago, and with it all the other respiratory viruses.
We also cited the co-author of Mr. Hancock’s pandemic memoir, revealing that Johnson, Whitty and Hancock knew from the start that masks do not do the job, and yet they went ahead and coerced Britons to wear them.
The reality is different. Clinical trials in various settings – across vastly different ranges of circulation rates, from low influenza-like illness to pandemics – have failed to show any effect. Which tallies with everyone’s personal experience of mask ‘protection’. So, why the sudden reintroduction?
Something odd is happening. We live in a world with more information and reactive media that fail to grasp the reality of the problem. Managing the message becomes more important than fixing the problem, particularly when you know you won’t be in your job much longer. Masks are a distraction.
The reality is a merry-go-round as new ministers, advisers and experts pop up. They look to a simple solution to placate the public anxiety rather than fixing the long-term structural problems in the NHS.
We learnt this painful lesson with Tamiflu in the Swine flu Pandemic. Ministers reiterated, as did public health officials, that what mattered is they needed to be seen to be doing something. Whether it was evidence-based or not was immaterial. A complex problem requires a simple fix – a highly visible one. Masking fits the bill perfectly.
Part of the problem is officials go unchallenged, no one asks for the evidence, and if they do, they feel intimidated – as an anonymous BBC reporter disclosed. You can virtually state anything in this modern era without worrying about evidence. By tomorrow the media will have moved on.
However, for now, let’s follow the jungle cry: do something! What? It does not matter; we have to be seen to be doing something!
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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Very much in tune with Dr. Tina Peers, being interviewed by Nigel Farage on GBN this evening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOMrgFYfDIE
With any luck, many more will declare exemption, in effect, and simply ignore the rubbish idea.
It ain’t gonna work this time. I feel it in my bones.
Last time I ignored it unless challenged and then politely refused to oblige. This time anybody challenging me is getting both barrels – they CGTF.
Can anyone provide a link to the Tamiflu issue? I’m not familiar with what that was about.
It’s a bit complicated. Takeaway: Tamiflu isn’t much use, but the empirical data was ignored or hidden.
Thanks for replying.
The UK government (and others) spent ££billions stockpiling a drug we didn’t need and didn’t work. Big pharma profited as usual. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26954482
Thanks, @yorkshirekate, for the reply and for the link which is very helpful.
It’s time to turn the tables.
This time call up people for wearing masks. Look alarmed or if forced to speak to them ask them why they are wearing those nasty things again. Ask them if they are doing it to reassure others or protect themselves.
You know the rest.
Time turn over the money changer tables….
Enough of this Sheite already.
People should have a right to wear a mask if they want to, without being harassed or coerced, just as people should have a right to refuse a vaccine without being harassed or coerced.
If you don’t question the irrationality of totalitarianism you will be a slave to it. Each brick in its wall needs to be loosened.
You do you.
It’s not ‘totalitarianism’ for an individual to choose to wear a mask. A mask may work like a comfort blanket for them, to ease their anxiety. We don’t know the psychological state of people we see wearing a mask.
Wearing a face mask in the present day is the same as wearing a Nazi armband.
Evidence and logic actually prove that they are harmful, increasing and making worse Covid and many other illnesses.
Which really leaves only psychological reasons for them: their functions as virtue signaling devices, fear awareness and fear raise devices and opponent identification devices or, in short: their function as Gessler hats, like the Hitler salute and swastika armband were ones.
Only that the Nazis wouldn’t go near harming their own people with the gesture itself.
That is new and unique in those Gessler hats long history, and that introduction was left to our modern day senior public health and health professionals with their God complexes.
My multi-vaxxed, mask-obsessed aunt is falling ill all the time. She blames it on people not wearing masks and berates people on public transport who aren’t wearing them! What can you do with that attitude except tell the person to FO?
In Belfast, where I live, 99% of people don’t wear a mask, not even staff in organisations and companies which recommend that masks should be worn. Most of the few whom I see wearing a mask are Chinese/Asian.
We now live in a democratic socialist fascist society.
Umberto Eco, fundamentals of fascism
‘3. The cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.’
Socialist fascism is alive and well and its name is ‘Our NHS’
“Socialist fascism is alive and well and its name is ‘Our NHS’”
And the BBC. To (mis) quote Maggie Thatcher they are both “States within a State”.
I have just written to my MP about this urging him and his fellow parliamentarians to fight this nonsense. He is a Socialist MP so presumably I’m barking up the wrong tree but it’s important to let him know our feelings. I urge everyone here to write to their local representative as the more dissent there is the less likely this draconian, demeaning rubbish will be reintroduced.
It’s pathological… these people just can’t let the CoVid faux-crisis go.
They need treatment.