Smile Free has often highlighted the utter nonsense espoused by the U.K. Government’s public health experts and plethora of advisers on the issue of community masking. Who can forget the flip-flops of Dr. Jenny Harries and Professors Whitty and Van-Tam in June 2020, transitioning from urging healthy people not to wear face coverings into strident pro-mask advocates? Or the absurd claim of Professor Trish Greenhalgh that science is the “enemy of good policy“? But, not to be outdone, the Scottish leg of the U.K. COVID-19 Inquiry has confirmed that the gobbledegook around masks was not confined to England but also infected the ‘experts’ operating north of the border.
After the extended ramblings of Nicola Sturgeon – trying, in vain, to justify the convenient deletion of all her Covid-related WhatsApp messages – we were treated to the appearances of Professor Jason Leitch (National Clinical Director), Humza Yousaf (Scotland’s First Minister), Colin Poolman (Royal College of Nursing Scotland Director) and Devi Sridhar (Professor of Global Public Health). Chunks of their testimonies constitute a mix of ignorance, a detachment from reality and Monty Pythonesque comedy.
Did anyone understand the mask rules?
Clearly, Humza Yousaf (the then Scottish Health Secretary, no less) didn’t. During Leitch’s appearance at the inquiry it was revealed that, in November 2021, Yousaf asked Leitch whether he needed to wear a mask when stood talking at a social event. Leitch responded:
Officially yes. But literally no one does. Have a drink in your hands at all times. Then you’re exempt. So if someone comes over and you stand, lift your drink… That’s fun. You’ll go down a treat.
When challenged by the Lead Counsel as to whether this was an example of a “work-around” to “get out of complying with the rules”, Leitch’s denial was less than concise:
There was an ambiguity here that I faced as well, as we re-opened in this period, of the country, and that ambiguity was that we were allowing social occasions… And there was an ambiguity around mask-wearing when you were seated, eating, drinking, because these events are – often involve a dinner. And there was some difficulty with the interpretation of mask-wearing inside those rooms when you were eating, drinking or moving around… but there were occasions, particularly when the country was opening up again, where there was of course nuance around the guidance and the rules, and this I think was one of those occasions: when you were at a dinner, eating and drinking, and somebody approached you… I think this was a tricky area that I found tricky as well.
Well, that clears things up!
And – as observed by the KC during his questioning of Yousaf – “When you, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, feel the need to clarify the rules about face masks, what chance do others have in understanding the rules?” When this absurdity was put to Leitch, the Clinical Director’s response was, inadvertently, illustrative of the mask nonsense:
I understood the rules and I understood what we were trying to do, but the reality of life and the environment in which we were trying to do these things perhaps suggests this guidance was nuanced rather than entirely right.
If only our leaders had paid a smidgeon more attention to the “reality of life” we wouldn’t all have had to endure the imposition of masks (or, indeed, many of the other counterproductive Covid restrictions).
If only the masks had been a tad smaller
Colin Poolman, representing the Scottish RCN, lamented that the face masks provided were often too large for the NHS workforce. “Nursing is a predominantly female profession and many of the masks were not designed in smaller sizes so we had huge issues at times,” he told the inquiry, implying that a better-fitting strip of plastic would have provided an effective shield against the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. Given that the use of surgical masks to block respiratory viruses is akin to using a tennis net to hold back grains of sand, it’s hard to see how a bit less of a gap around the edges would have made any significant difference to the level of protection afforded.
Neglect of inconvenient evidence
The wealth of pesky evidence demonstrating that face coverings constitute an ineffectual viral barrier has always been a problematic truth to the pro-mask brigade: their guiding rule seems to be, “If the science doesn’t support our ideological preferences, dismiss it.” In Scotland, the doppelganger to England’s Trish Greenhalgh, appears to be Professor Devi Sridhar.
Sridhar is saturated with globalist credentials. She is Professor of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University and has worked closely with the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the Wellcome Trust and the World Bank. During her testimony at the COVID-19 Inquiry, Sridhar demonstrated a conveniently flexible attitude to empirical research. For instance, while bemoaning that “we spent too long debating whether masks work”, Sridar asserts that “in clinical settings they work, surgeons use them, on construction sites, the mask itself works”. This esteemed academic seems blissfully unaware that surgeons primarily don face coverings to avoid potential exchange of bodily fluids (such as saliva and blood) rather than to reduce the transmission of viruses. And as for construction sites, keeping dust and fragments of concrete and masonry at bay is a somewhat different challenge to avoiding inhalation of microscopic pathogens.
Like many of her pro-mask public health colleagues, Sridhar appears to struggle to grasp what happens in the real world. Thus, she rightly acknowledges that “masks at a population level are often not used correctly, people wear them over their mouth not their nose, they take them off to eat and drink”, but then asserts that “if it is used appropriately it is probably one of the best interventions you can use to protect yourself”. So, apparently, in Sridhar’s surreal ecosphere, if people wore masks perfectly all of the time, never tugged and fiddled with them and – uh – stopped eating and drinking, they would provide some benefit. If only we all lived in a parallel universe.
Sridhar clearly has an emotional attachment to mass masking in the community, perhaps because it chimes with her ideological beliefs about collectivism, the sense that we’re all in it together and must behave in socially responsible ways. Empirical evidence be damned if it does not support one’s political proclivities. This phenomenon is illustrated in Sridhar’s inquiry interview; when the KC states that the science had concluded that public use of face coverings achieved a “near non-existent” degree of benefit, and then asks her, “Is this the sort of debate and discussion that you think we should have bypassed?” Sridhar replies, “Exactly”. It is reasonable to propose that double standards are on display here; if robust studies had found in favour of masks, Sridhar and her ilk would have been screaming it from the Davos rooftops.
Ignorance around mask harms
Throughout the Covid event, there has been one common factor inherent to all the narratives beseeching us to cover our faces with strips of cloth and plastic: a failure to acknowledge the wide-ranging harms of masking healthy people. This omission – due either to ignorance or wilful avoidance – is evident once again in Sridhar’s Covid Inquiry testimony. For instance, in her attempt to defend her partisan championing of community masking, she asserts that “the cost is slight… so, for me, recommending masks seems a low-cost measure of something easy, like hand-washing, you can tell people to do”.
I sometimes imagine engaging in a prolonged attempt to impress upon Sridhar (or, for that matter, any other pro-mask zealot) the raft of negative consequences (physical, social and psychological) associated with routine masking. And, in this thought experiment, I then envision asking her the question, “What possible harms could there be from masking children and adults in healthcare, education and other community settings?” I suspect her response might be something like:
There are no appreciable harms to masking [awkward silence]. Okay, well apart from dermatitis, headaches, perpetuating fear, stunting infants’ cognitive and emotional development; excluding the hard-of-hearing, evoking fatigue, reducing lung efficiency, tormenting the autistic, increasing falls in the elderly, re-traumatising the historically traumatised, the inhalation of micro fibres, concentration impairment, reducing the quality of healthcare, discouraging patients from attending hospital, impeding school learning, the aggravation of existing anxiety problems, encouraging harassment of the mask exempt, enabling criminals to escape conviction, and polluting our towns and waterways .. [deep breath] what possible harms could there be?
I’m sure the Monty Python team would have approved.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign opposed to mask mandates.
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.
I have a feeling that lockdowns and furlough have inflicted serious damage on the work ethic of a substantial number of people.
This phenomenon has been endemic in Britain for some time now, and as you say lockdowns may have exacerbated it for some people.
A former colleague of mine summarised it nicely: ‘Nobody gets shouted at’.
Yes. I don’t like rudeness but we’re not disagreeable enough – disagreeableness is a trait we needed much more of during covid.
Right on. Calm, factual disagreeableness (with the focus on ‘disagree’ rather than being unpleasant) is vital for progress.
Fake niceness is destroying our civilisation
I am robust in bringing incompetence to everyone’s attention but I compare miserably to my spinster sister in her mid 70s. She is a large lady and needs a stick and she lets no-one get away with anything whether to someone giving her personal service like a cafe or online. Nothing is ever permitted to be below the standard she had assumed she would be offered. Airports, cruise liners, railways, cafes are all ‘fair game’ for my sister.
I have seen grown men grovelling at her insistence on proper service and as she also speaks loudly, everyone else listens in stunned silence, secretly wishing they could be like her because she gets everyone running around her.
Online, she berates everyone with two of her targets being Ebay and Amazon. I have lost count how many things she has be given twice, in their haste to placate her.
Of course, she is not a happy person and that is the rub with most people; they are not prepared to spoil the occasion; so suppliers get away with poor service.
”I don’t believe it!” Ah…classic.
Two episodes from yesterday evening coming to mind here:
I was on a concert (Revocation) at the Dome Tufnell Park London yesterday evening. The last band has just finished playing, the room was emptying quickly and everything was been shut down. There was a sizable queue in front of the cloak room and it was pretty clear that it’ll still take some minutes before everything had been processed there. People were also still emptying their drinks. It seemed unlikely that the counter staff was willing to sell another half pint to me but since I was rather thirsty, I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask. This I did and the reply “No, hahaha! We’re only selling water by now!” I found this rather annoying and thus replied with “I suggest you cut the silly jokes. They’re not making you look sophisticated”, went to the toilet and drank some water. I then obviously got thrown out for being unspecifically abusive. My idea of the situation, however, is that I was a paying customer and not the butt end of jokes the counter staff (a woman, obviously) feel like making and that a simple “No.” would have been a much more appropriate reply to my question.
The train back to Reading reached Slough around 00:55. There, it stopped for about 40 minutes because a passenger had reportedly fallen sick and needed an ambulance. This means GWR made a few hundred tired people wait 40 minutes in the middle of the night, with periodic “We’re sorry but we cannot presently tell when the train wil get going again. Thanks for your patience” announcements as icing on the cake, because it was apparently impossible to get the sick person off the train and under someone’s care who could then wait for the ambulance instead of forcing everone on the train to join in the wait for no particular reason.
I’ve come to regard both as typically English: Service personnel is always (not always, but really frequently) impertinent because any customer complaint can be dealt with by having customers manhandled by the bouncers. And Nothing works but nobody’s responsible for that! aka Nobody here is getting paid to think on the job! is just the way people employed by large companies always operate.
I’d say that’s not untypical.
Service usually better from family-run businesses where the owner is present most/all of them time and/or staff working there (family or otherwise) feel they have a stake in it.
My mindset at the moment would lead me to think the passenger was another casualty of mRNA injections, although that time of night other substances might have been involved.
When everyone owns everything, nobody owns anything.
Nobody cares, because nobody has personal responsibility nor their own money on the line (so they think).
Travelling from Cyprus to Stanstead in 2008 my plane arrived on time and there was nobody there at the immigration desks. We all had to wait an hour before the work-shy civil servants turned up to let us in.
I recall another occasion in which I travelled from Budapest without a hitch, only to find that the trains were restricted to 20mph for some reason connected with lack of track maintenance.
The current shambles has been a long time coming.
I thought the author was Toby Young until I got to the end, but thanks instead to David. The pyschology, the cultural degeneration. Well analysed and expressed.
And in other news, Sweden are forced to chuck millions of doses of bioweapons away due to lack of demand. Word’s getting out then…
”Finally we have some good news, this time coming out of my home country of Sweden.
Just a few weeks after a massive conference in Stockholm where top doctors warned about the dangers of the mRNA shots, news is coming out that Sweden has thrown away almost 8.5 million doses of the covid shots.
That means that around 1/5th of all covid vaccines Sweden bought has been destroyed. The cost to the taxpayer of buying in these shots only to be thrown away was a whopping $144 million. That is money that went straight down the drain because the state bought something that people do not want.”
https://petersweden.substack.com/p/throwing-away-doses
The other observation I have is that some employees have got used to being little dictators, bossing their customers.
i went to the Vermeer exhibition yesterday and these were timed tickets. You were given a wristband and I put this clearly visible on my handbag. One of the guards asked me to put it on my wrist. I asked him ‘why’. He then told me ‘these are the rules’…!
This now works on me like a red flag to a bill….so I asked him again ‘give me one reason….’ He could not come up with one reason, so I suggested he started thinking for himself.
All very childish, I know, but I am jus my fed up with this level of bullying.
My (CONservative) MP is so concerned about the wreckage his Government has created over the past 3 years that he’s stopped bothering to respond to my emails.
THAT’s where the problem starts and ends: with our Pretend Democracy and the low calibre MPs who have been foisted on us by the Party Machines.
Very well observed & assessed, also have you noticed how many roads including main trunk roads are Closed for various works even during normal hours ! It seems now that lockdowns have been perpetrated ,anything is possible by TPTB without a flying F- – k for the public that they used to have to serve with a modicum of perceived respect .
You should try Godfrey Bloom. He fit the bill. And he’s been right on all this Covid nonsense from the start.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
They’ve all got pound shop degrees in communications and they’re the same vapid clueless drones who force me to be friends with inanimate objects. In my gym, the broken machines are hung with signs that chirp “I’m afraid I’m feeling a little under the weather today.” And my plastic bag in the supermarket introduces itself with a “Hi, I’m you’re new sustainable bag for life.”
Coming soon: “Hi, I’m your handy new digital pound app and carbon footprint pal.”
The deliberate infantilisation and dumbing down of everything is an important step when you’re trying to build a global tyranny.
M&S and Impronouncible Syllables introduce your new, sustainable bag for life. It was designed by the artist Impronouncible Syllables inspired by his experiences working at M&S and supposed to bring out the dreamer in all of us. The object thus advertised being a rectangular plastic bag in gratingly mismatched semilight orange, yellow, blue and green forming an unclear pattern of lines, splashes and dots. I guess the message must be Working at M&S on LSD means a bad trip is guaranteed.
How many readers are aware that it is still impossible to go to your post office and post a normal small parcel overseas?
Only one person I know was aware.
This started on 10 January when (allegedly) Royal Mail suffered a ransomware cyber attack. Googling tghis throws up a few results from a month ago and the odd extra result more recently. But basically, little publicity.
I have a Grandson in New Zealand who has a birthday mid- March. My wife bought him a tee shirt, some socks and a card and on 23rd January, having wripped it, worked out postage and stuck on £7.75 worth of the new self adhesive stamps with QR codes and a completed customs form, took it the the Post Office, only to be told they weren’t allowed to accept it. I hadn’t heard about the “cyber attack”.
Googling Royal Mail I found the appropriate announcement and noted that letters were “now accepted” and also business’s online ordered tracked and signed parcels (the most expensive and most dependent on Royal Mail’s apparently ‘poorly’ IT service.)
Even now, my Grandson’s pre-paid economy parcel can’t be accepted although it requires only handing over and dropping in a sack.
Noone cares that there is now no cheap way of sending presents or goods abroad. No-one cares that Royal Mail hasn’t recovered from this problem after a month!