In everyday life, it only makes sense to initiate a new action if we are reasonably confident it will not result in more harms than benefits. The importance of this notion is amplified manyfold when it is powerful actors – politicians and their public health experts – forcing the change on their citizens. The precautionary principle (PP) in its original form endorsed this important rule and complemented the Hippocratic oath of our medical doctors to ‘first do no harm’. Yet throughout the Covid event we have witnessed a total disregard for this principle with the imposition of a series of non-evidenced restrictions, driven more by ideology than science, where the resulting collateral damage has dwarfed any benefits. One stark example – the focus of this article – has been the forced masking of people in community settings, a practice that continues in many areas of healthcare today.
The precautionary principle initially emerged in the 1970s primarily in response to growing concerns about industrial pollution from toxic chemicals. The central premise was a reasonable one: in situations of uncertainty, innovation – such as the introduction of a novel process or intervention – should only proceed if there was no reasonable likelihood of serious unforeseen harms. In effect, in situations where traditional science had not yet investigated the potential for collateral damage from a new way of doing things, the PP put the burden of proof on the innovators to demonstrate that their novel project would not cause harm. If applied to the specific issue of mass-masking during the Covid era, the experts at SAGE (and all the other multi-disciplinary groups, such as the Royal Society, Independent SAGE and DELVE, who pushed for legislation to compel us all to cover our faces) should have produced persuasive evidence that masks do no harm before making their recommendations.
Instead, those pushing the pro-mask narrative often resorted to tropes and appeals to common sense: “It’s only a mask”; “It’s not much to ask, a small inconvenience”; “If it helps a little at the margins, it’s worth it”; “What harm can it do?”
In early summer 2020, our public health experts would have recognised the validity of two assertions. First, that the scientific evidence that masks significantly reduce viral transmission was – at best – weak and contradictory. Second, that the mass-masking of healthy people across the Western world had never before been undertaken and, therefore, the potential unintended harms of such a policy were largely unknown. Under these circumstances, the original PP would have emphatically advised, “when in doubt, do nothing“: do not encourage or recommend the wearing of masks, and – most definitely – do not even contemplate mandating them.
If only, if only.
If only our public health experts had heeded this sensible precautionary message:
- We would not have stunted the social and emotional development of countless numbers of our young children, many being rendered unable to recognise facial expressions;
- We would not have contributed to the inflated levels of fear in the population, fear that discouraged hospital attendances, exacerbated loneliness, and thereby increased the number of non-Covid excess deaths;
- We would not have re-traumatised many victims of historical physical and sexual abuse, for whom the sight and feel of masks triggered disturbing flashbacks;
- We would not have excluded the hard-of-hearing (one in six of the population) from full social engagement with their fellow humans;
- We would not have polluted our environment with swathes of non-recyclable plastic and contaminated our waterways with potentially poisonous chemicals.
So why did Professor Chris Whitty (the Chief Medical Officer) and his band of academic advisors disregard the precautionary principle?
Paradoxically, the experts who pushed the pro-mask narrative often deployed a corrupted version of the PP to justify their stance. Over the past three decades, the PP concept has evolved – some might suggest it has been hijacked – and is now commonly taken to mean something very different. The re-writing of the PP gained impetus in 1992 at a United Nations General Assembly meeting where global leaders asserted (Principle 15) that: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” Further re-interpretations of the PP followed, culminating in the European Commission, in 2022, espousing the benefits of adopting the “Innovation Principle” in which “the regulatory framework supports and enables the implementation of new out-of-the-box solutions to societal problems”. This revision of the original PP has – inevitably – encroached into the public health sphere, where large pharmaceutical companies welcome the freedom to deliver their ‘innovative’ new drugs to the general population unencumbered by a pre-requisite to demonstrate that their products will lead to more benefits than harms.
The major consequence of this corruption of the PP is this: if powerful, state-funded world ‘experts’ assert that we are facing an existential threat – be it from climate change, environmental pollution or a novel virus – their recommended interventions should be implemented unless opponents of the proposed actions can prove that the likely collateral damage will significantly outweigh the claimed positive outcomes. The burden of proof no longer resides with the innovators. World governments can now impose top-down restrictions on their citizens and (so long as they claim to be acting for ‘the greater good’ or be doing the ‘socially responsible’ thing) the onus is on others to prove beyond doubt that their policies are counterproductive.
Throughout the Covid event those experts beseeching us all to wear face coverings have often relied, to various degrees, upon this warped version of the PP to support their stance. Arguably the most extreme example of an ideologically-driven imposition is pro-mask crusader Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who not only pre-emptively assumes no harms of mass-masking, but also believes that the search for evidence may be “the enemy of good policy”.
So rather than the obligation to carry out a thorough cost-benefit analysis prior to compelling us all to wear masks in community settings, our paternalistic policymakers were – with the help of the corrupted precautionary principle – allowed to fob us off with dubious claims of an existential threat, appeals to altruism and meaningless platitudes like “it’s better to be safe than sorry”.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and a co-founder of Smile Free, a campaign group opposed to mask mandates.
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Bless Dr Sidley and all the work he’s done but I think we’re just labouring the point long after the jury has returned its verdict now. This topic has been done to death. I can sum up in one sentence; if masks were effective against seasonal respiratory viruses we would have been using them yearly during ‘flu season’.
”We must let go of the limitations of this false “pandemic” construct that is labeled covid-19. We need not take the bait that there was a pandemic that had to be dealt with.
There was certainly a global hysteria, but it was a psychological hysteria. There was no global viral emergency, because the vast majority of the global population was not significantly threatened by this supposedly devastating disease. Had the world been caught up with say, some other “emergency” on our minds, “the pandemic” would have just been written off as another human respiratory illness season.
If anything, the lesson to be learned is not to put your trust in the hands of the government, which, either through malice or reckless indifference, encouraged widespread iatrogenic injury as the solution to a nonexistent pandemic. It wasn’t “the pandemic” that devastated the global economy and wrecked civilization, it was the top-down dictates from above that caused millions of excess deaths worldwide, all to supposedly combat a disease that was not out of the ordinary whatsoever.
Covid-19 was just the flu. There was no pandemic, but just a run-of-the-mill respiratory season, weaponized and fueled by a continuous global hysteria.”
https://www.dossier.today/p/there-was-no-pandemic
Yes.. ‘global hysteria’ sums it up nicely.. Mog..
Too many Big Egos bought and then sold the narrative
Eg HMS Mordaunt – there is no way these beasts can row back and say
”Soz kids I got it wrong”
Didn’t all MPs vote for fax mandates?
Even Bridgen?
Only when all the guilty are dead will posterity look back and say
”What the suck were they playing at!”
This reasoning and explanation is sound, if mask mandates ever were about health.
But they can’t, weren’t and as such also never will be.
Elites ??? I’ll correct that.. scumbag parasites.. how’s that.. 😉
Arguments about theories and principles aside, there were known risks of these masks that have been completely ignored, both at the time and now.
Cotton lung disease is a known phenomenon, related to inhalation of cotton particles by workers in the textile industry. Obviously a cotton mask is not the same thing, but how could one exclude the possibility of continued wearing of cotton masks for extended periods of time, particularly by young children, be excluded? Especially when a great many of these cotton masks were either home-made or come from countries with dubious quality controls?
The ‘surgical’ masks look like paper, but are made of plastic – plastic micoparticles are a known phenomenon, how can the possibility of inhaling plastic microparticles through extended wearing of any plastic rag over one’s mouth, particularly cheap ones, be excluded?
In NL and Belgium, but I assume in many other countries as well, whole lots of face rags were junked as they were covered in dangerous, carcinogenic chemicals? It would be impossible for authorities to state that they managed to find all such harmful masks, so another known risk was imposed on people.
The real unknown is what depriving young, developing lungs of proper inhalation for hours upon hours will have done to them, aside from the above problems.
Screw the theories, there was every reason to assume that whatever theoretical benefits were to be had from the face rags, the KNOWN physical and psychological risks were always going to outweigh them.
I would like to add to that list of the price paid for masks one more.
It took me time to cone to terms with this but for me being forced to wear a mask is nothing short of traumatising. I hate it. So much so that I changed my behaviour significantly to avoid wearing one.
I’m not given to self victimising. I’m from a generation that was brought up to “just get on with it”. But for me, being forced to wear a mask felt like abuse.
I don’t need to be partially deaf. I don’t need to be vulnerable in some other way. I am a perfectly norrnal person with no mental or health issues. And still the idea of being gagged with a mask, for someone else’s purely imagined benefit was extremely distressing. It’s dehumanising.
I can imagine that it must be something similar for women forced to wear burkas against their will.
“…the onus is on others to prove beyond doubt that their policies are counterproductive.”
In practice, the onus is to prove those things in the face of censorship, job loss and public demonization.
Most importantly, reversing this burden of proof to put the onus on the objectors means that there is no objection at all when you ban their opinions and arguments as misinformation. On a side note, it makes me angry to hear the Osbournes and Davies stating the harms in the covid inquiry. These were truths us sceptics weren’t allowed to say at the time.
And then they were made Lords and Ladies whilst people like me have to “explain yourself” at work for saying NO. ??
why does our elites reward the undeserving? those who weaponised a so called pandemic to feather their own beds, gain more state control and take the establishment praise?
And now we have a ‘Lady’ in charge of a falsely named unbiased inquiry, asking those participating in person to test ! Another false Lady then?
Will she also be rewarded with a HuGE salary, a gold medal, a seat at the table, an invitation to the Kings garden party and a handshake pension.
I am in the wrong pastoral educational job maybe I should join the souls who sell to the highest horned devil and cash on too.
“How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way
that leads to life! Few are those who find it.”
I have no doubt you are on the right path whilst the professional and managerial classes related to above will lead tormented lives.
Hopeful
The corruption of language
A good analysis. The other issue is that part of the Civil Service knew that it was possible for anyone to declare exemption, and actually produced and issued online all the paperwork required to make exemption badges and so on. I’ve still got them on file, and I never used the junk at all. The other minor point is that they never used the term “mask” in any official publication, rather they used the term “face cover”, presumably to avoid difficulties with BSI standards for “real” masks, along with other tactics re product labelling to avoid being done under trading standards, if any zealous Councils tried to prosecute the traders for that junk being sold to us all.
COVID policies also extensively rested on another definition of precautionary principle which is really an appeal to ignorance in disguise: We must do this because we don’t know for certain that it won’t help (and we need all help we can possibly get). We don’t know for certain that it won’t help obviously implies that We also don’t know for certain that it will help and not hurt which is – in absence of actual information – equally possible. But this was obviously never mentioned.
The precautionary principle implies that if you have any doubts (i.e. uncertainties) do not allow yourself to be bolted inside a carbon fibre capsule and dropped into the ocean. And yet …