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.
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Great work Gary. Leitch and Shridhar are under qualified blowhards who demonstrate the Peter principle. Both low wattage numpties and Gauleiters who loved the limelight and along with the shrieking ranter Reicher at St Andrews kept the Scottish public scared and thankful or so they thought. Now we are no longer scared or thankful. We see you.
Sridhar’s qualification is in Anthropology. Allegedly. WTF use that is in understanding global health God alone knows.
No chance that any of these morons with power will pay any price whatsoever for any of the damage they helped cause, is there.
On the contrary, Hamza Yousaf has been ascended to governor of Scotland. And this non-entity of a person in the photo will no doubt be now in some new nicely paid job in the Gates Foundation, or the UN or some other agent of global government.
Spot on. Rewarded for their complicity in the Great Rona Fascism. Crime does pay. Ask Fraudci the drug salesman who created the AIDS and Rona scamdemics then retired to buy a U$18 million Potomac river estate. Undoubtedly this non-entity is financially enriched as well. ‘Expert’. Another word redefined.
I rather like the Hindu’s religious belief in Karma. I like to think that all the evil people who inflicted the tyranny on us will return as rats and die a lingering and painful death through poisoning …… over and over again.
“in clinical settings they work, surgeons use them, on construction sites, the mask itself works”.
And criminals use them so you can’t recognise them, meaning that viruses won’t recognise you and infect you either.
Leitch is, of course a dentist. When did dentists start using the title “doctor” btw?
Shridhar is apparently an anthropologist with a first, two-year degree course in biology.
Both experts or chancers?
From the #RKIfiles:
They knew that there was no evidence for recommending masks, and specifically recommended against the later mandated FFP2 masks:
Masktards, you’ve been conned!
“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.”
These are good credentials? Who decided that and using what measurement?
With credentials like that all I can see is a prison term for Devi.
One can hope, but that would require a return to the Western Scientific traditions as practiced by Jenner, Snow and Nightingale. Sridhar practices the Vegan version of science – completely meat free.
👍😀😀😀
…Or the absurd claim of Professor Trish Greenhalgh that science is the “enemy of good policy“?
I followed that link and what I thought was an article critical of masks turned out to be all in favour. The article is on science.org but it is evident that the editors don’t seem to realise that you need a bit more than the name ‘science’ to even sound as though you understand science.
Yet again we see that the Inquiry is barking up the wrong tree. Where is the testimony of the clinicians looking after patients? When will there be any assessment of what they did wrong when dealing with the suddenly sick, and why? Where are the questions to the high-ups asking why they ignored the expert clinical advice from the likes of me – advice that would have saved lives? Pandemic organisms only matter if they kill people and this is where the focus of the Inquiry should be. The rest is irrelevant other than to confirm that the wrong experts were being consulted by governments.
When stood talking.
I am not going to read articles by people who do not know basic English grammar.
Dear Devi, the truth is coming out, slowly, but it is coming out. The cdc has now had to take down all their warnings regarding ivermectin. What is next? Be on the right side of the truth Devi, before time runs out.
I found this section most extraordinary, when asked about scientific research having found no significant evidence of benefit ‘“Is this the sort of debate and discussion that you think we should have bypassed?” Sridhar replies, “Exactly”.’ A charitable interpretation is that maybe she didn’t hear the word ‘bypassed’, but I doubt it. It is amazing that someone this boneheaded can be given any sort of responsibility, there is just no point confronting these sorts of people with reality, they have their own version and that’s it as far as they’re concerned. I guess some people get ahead by rampant self-promotion and brown-nosing, and Sridhar looks to be one of those. God help us, because ‘the science’ won’t with this lot in charge.