Many ancient and primitive cultures observe rainmaking rituals. These arise because rain is important to agriculture and the occurrence of any single rain shower is subject to a high degree of randomness. In extended droughts, man will implore the gods for relief, and to underline the urgency of his request, he might do any number of things, such as dancing or sacrificing specific animals or deploying certain sacred stones. Whenever rain randomly occurred in proximity to such an action, a rainmaking ritual was born.
Non-pharmaceutical interventions against Covid were subject to a very similar dynamic. In his recent piece on ‘How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America‘ (which you should read), friend-of-the-blog Michael P. Senger reminds us that key early mask advocates in America were downstream of the crazy ‘Masks 4 All’ movement, which originated with a Czech man named Petr Ludwig and a viral YouTube video he posted on March 14th 2020, demanding that everyone start wearing homemade masks in public. Alongside various terrible arguments, Ludwig insisted that community masking could work, because at that point, Mongolia had been masking since January, and it had only one Covid case.
This advocacy, inspired by mask-happy low-Covid Asia, eventually led Czechia and Slovakia to impose the first mask mandates in Europe at the end of March. As cases remained moderate across the entire eastern half of the Continent, the mask brigade seized the opportunity to argue that the early Czech mandates had been successful. By April the maskers had succeeded in forcing face diapers on Westerners almost everywhere, including the United States. Having borrowed a meaningless ritual from regions where infections were lower for other reasons, these newly masked jurisdictions watched cases decline in the spring weather and concluded that masks were in fact an incredibly successful non-pharmaceutical intervention. The Thuringian city of Jena, for example, imposed the first mask mandate in Germany on April 6th, after Covid had already entered seasonal decline. Experts declared that their early action had prevented untold numbers of infections.
The whole pandemic was exactly this genre of stupid. Even quite obnoxious policies need only have some superficial intuitive appeal and media support to achieve wide public acceptance; and, once adopted, these ritualistic solutions prove very difficult to get rid of, however consistently they fail to do anything. Like that hairdresser mask study which advocates will never stop citing, they just feel right, and that matters more than all the evidence and rational argumentation in the world.
This piece originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Indeed. Stupidity, backed up by dodgy pretend science and bad engineering more or less sums it up – except that there was a financial profit to be made from it. They were not donated to the world by the retailers selling the junk, after all.
This particular topic is just one of the problems that those who are sceptical (and perhaps well educated) have observed. In particular, there has been a strong attempt to exploit the lack of knowledge by the general public. Many just did what they were told, for no good reason; quite scary, after all.
Who exactly are these “stupid” people? The PM at the time? Whitty and Vallance? Jeremy Farrar? All highly intelligent. Nothing to do with stupidity on the part of the people who pushed this – unless you think that every major rich world country and all of their public health establishments suddenly became stupid?
Anyone and I mean anyone who wears a baby shit catcher on their face is stupid.
The morons you cite – Doris, Gollum et al – were actors and no I don’t believe any of them are intelligent. 2 sentences out of their fetid yaps disproves the theory that they operate on a higher plane. They were/are corrupt criminals. Period.
It depends what you mean by “intelligent”. By the normal definition of the word, the people I mention are intelligent. They knew what they were doing was wrong and made no sense, IMO.
Johnson has a literate intelligence rather than a numerate one but it is ridiculous to describe him as stupid.
Whitty and Vallance were speaking sense at the beginning of March 2020, so we need a convincing explanation of why they had apparently changed their minds by the end of the month.
A sudden huge fall in their IQs isn’t that explanation.
I would place a small wager on Johnson being numerate enough if he really wanted to be. Agree about Whitty and Vallance.
In general, lack of “intelligence” has not been the problem with covid – it has been lack of character.
Johnson may be technically intelligent. But he’s certainly not motivated to apply this intelligence to anything than ensuring penile entertainment. And that’s indistinguishable from stupid for all practial purposes.
Yes, but I think the distinction is an important one, morally. Being stupid (behaving stupidly because you don’t know any better) may be seen by some as a defence – and this is rather different from behaving stupidly through laziness, arrogance, greed, recklessness etc.
I concede that point. But I tend to regard people as technical problems and for that, it makes no difference as the outcome is the same.
Yes, I see what you mean.
It’s my observation that the vast amount of people who wore masks, especially as time wore on in the scamdemic, did so due to social conformity, not any real fear of a deadly virus infecting them. Proof of that was when the Dutch government told us several days in advance when they’d be dropping the mask mandates in all areas. So they’d tell us at the press conference on the Tues that mask rules would be dropped on Saturday. Now in what realm can anyone predict that a virus will pose a danger for the next 3 days but it’ll be safe to go face-commando from the weekend? And you know what everyone ( bar a few rebels who felt emboldened ) in the shops did? Bearing in mind it’s late night shopping here on Fridays, almost everyone kept their masks on until Friday evening then you’d go shopping on Saturday and no masks to be seen. Pure pantomime! Asch and Milgrim would be proud!
Yes, it’s the same in Belfast. Currently people are still required or advised to wear a mask in hospitals and surgeries (my friend tells me) and staff in some chemist shops still wear them, yet despite this clear medical message, nobody wears a mask anywhere else, including crowded buses and trains.
Yes well don’t get me started on the flaming NHS, where apparently ”guidelines” trump both evidence-based practice and logic. Where both rationality and critical thinking go to die! Less National Health Service and more National embarrassment I’d say. When I had the misfortune of visiting Hull hospital on a visit back home it was like I was the only sane person in a mental asylum, and I got told to leave because I refused to conform to their cult-inspired dress code! It was all very weird and a bit too ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ for me.
There’s something of a commercial bandwagon being hopped on by those who would exploit the pandemic for financial gain. What I mean by that, is that previous pandemics have not resulted in even a whisper of a suggestion that everyone should mask up. But now trending in recent years is an increasing obsession with the use of PPE, with our burgeoning Health and Safety industry – it’s an extremely lucrative economic “wave”.
The viral video linked to above (there’s an English version linked to below the youtube video, if you have the stomach for it), supposedly claiming that the Czech have got their cases down by muzzling the population, might as well be an advert for facemasks!
I’m sure that isn’t the entire story, and that almost certainly masks were an aspect of SPI-B’s strategic directive to perform dirty little psychological tricks on an otherwise complacent and disobedient public. But you’ve still got to follow the money.
The WHO endorsed them despite their own experts saying it wouldn’t make much difference. Why?
Chinese manufacturers made an enormous amount of money from selling them?
Yeah, maybe western Europe and the US decided to imitate Mongolia, Czechia and Slovakia.
It would be the first time, I think, that those countries were considered an example to follow by western Europeans and Americans, who generally consider themselves superior and the example to follow. But hey, anything is possible.
Personally I think it’s much more likely that a coalition of commies and the pharma drug cartel saw in masks the route to their dreams. For the first, the dream of subjecting everyone to their diktats. For the second, the perfect way to panic the world into being terrified enough to take their extremely dodgy experimental drugs.
But I’m just a crazy conspiracy theorist. What do I know.
Coincidences? God give me strength. Not stupid, evil. It was a POLITICAL decision that came from the WHO.
I distinctly remember reading the WHO report that supposedly endorsed masks, published in the summer of 2020.
It was a joke. You could clearly see that the authors’ hearts weren’t in it and didn’t believe for a minute masks made any sense.
It was.almost surreal. The entire report was basically a summary of the evidence to date for masking, i.e. none.
Then it went on to conclude that even though there was no evidence that it would help much, we should maybe give it a go, just.in case.
The three reasons for trying anyway were 1. It might do something, 2. It will help remind people about the dangerous virus going around and 3. It might help some people in poorer places make some money from selling masks.
I kid you not. That 3rd reason was there. I read it as a message from the authors that they were hostages to a political stunt, so ridiculous and pathetic was the reason.
The medical journalist Deborah Cohen, who was working for the BBC at the time and was generally playing with a pretty straight bat, tweeted that the technical committee of the WHO had decided against recommending masks but were overruled by the WHO bosses, for political reasons. She never revealed her source, quite rightly, but I don’t think her information was ever disputed. Hitchens picked up on this and mentioned it in one of his MoS columns, IIRC.
Yeah, it was all that pressure from what Mongolia was doing that got to them.
Lol. Eugyppius writes well but honestly this just gets my goat: “The whole pandemic was exactly this genre of stupid. ”
There was no pandemic except for a pandemic of evil lies.
And a pandemic of Mass Psychosis
At the start of the pandemic I tried to trace the origin of masking, too.
Like Eugyppius, I also traced everything back to Masks 4 All. They were a shadowy group who had suddenly and mysteriously sprung up, with advocates all over the globe.
If you believe that Masks 4 All were a genuine grassroots organisation that spontaneously appeared and their video went viral completely randomly, then I have a bridge to sell you.
I spray 2k paints for a living (unfortunately) and being a regular wearer of industrial masks I did some research and as suspected I found the whole poor fitting bits of rags that folks were wearing beyond ridiculous and far from the “science”
Isocyanates are in these paints, the nastiest of products, the masks I wear filter 40 microns (0.04mm),infact regs were introduced some years ago that would deem me breaking the law as I should be air fed, however…
The recommendation is to be clean shaven, as the mask will not seal effectively around the face, this gives you some idea of the requirements to prevent inhalation of atomised particles no smaller than 40 microns.
The airborne Covid particle is 100 nanometers in diameter which is 0.0001mm……
You can perhaps now know how I feel when I STILL see sheeple wearing these ridiculous things..
Utterly gullible and beyond deluded.