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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Brilliant! Thank you.
A bit of vindication and reassurance to all of those, us, who, however endowed with self confidence, must have, at times (I know that I did) wondered, shocked, whether they really were the selfish batty deluded and dangerous fanatics that virtually the entire country made us out to be (and kind of still do in so many cases).
All best wishes to the Trump campaign. It offers the best chance of at least some semblance of reality and reckoning to arrive at the highest level in the United States of America and so, perhaps, to spread elsewhere.
For once I am in complete agreement:)
Aargh. The Shock!
Drumpf is the AntiChrist.
Can’t you bring yourself to name people you don’t like properly. It seems a childish. I should know, I used to do it myself but I think I have grown up now.
You are showing your ignorance of your hero.
“Drumpf” is the original family name of the AntiChrist’s German Jewish ancestors, who changed it to “Trump” when they emigrated to America. Many immigrants did this, especially the Jewish ones.
It is not his name now and hasn’t been for how many generations? The ‘Antichrist’? You are showing that you are an hysterical, hyperbole spouting fool. Get a grip!
trumps family is from scotland
On his mother’s side yes, but on his father’s side from Germany.
Excellent article; thanks
I still don’t understand why Zuckerberg did that astonishing thing, out of the blue.
Maybe, like Elon Musk, he has had an actual change of heart, and soul?
But since Musk supports Drumpf the AntiChrist, his change of heart cannot be real.
Maybe Zuckerberg’s is? I’d like to think so, but who knows what games the Illuminati play?
Thanks to Jeffrey Tucker for pointing out the sheer enormity of Zuckerberg’s telling the truth to the people.
Isn’t that what Jeffrey Tucker is saying in the article? Zuckerberg is, from his digitally informed position, presumably genuinely concerned that the mood music might well have changed by the end of the year, and is getting his excuses in early..
Have just rewatched Adam Curtis’s Century of the Self (hidden in plain sight on BBC iPlayer of all places!), 22 years after it was released and even more relevant now than then.
Edward Bernays was the most important person of the 20th Century that most of us had never heard of.
Whatever your view of Trump, he would be a better choice than Harris for president.
Somehow the US needs to get back to being a meritocracy or the entire planet is lost.
Drumpf is the AntiChrist, as his fawning admirers will discover.
You would be less tiresome if you found a pulpit in some fanatical Christian fringe sect somewhere? There you can fulminate and froth to your hearts content.
“on Woodstock and the 1969 flu”….If that article was also on Sp!ked (remember them) then I remember reading it and mentioned it a few times on various platforms.
Because he can see what people are saying, can analyse it, and knows better than any Polling company the likelihood Trump will win.
i sure hope so! a nd with rfk jr bobby kennedy in the white house too theres hope again!
I think it’s called “Getting your excuses in early.”
In this case “A big boy made me do it.”
Why?
For exactly the same reason Harry wants to return to the UK.
Both men, along with the whole rotten establishment American blob know Trump wins in November.
Between now and then, you’ll witness a variety of rats of all shapes and sizes leaving the ship.
Why? Could it be because it looks like Trump might be the White House next January?
“People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced.”
Indeed. I said 2-3 years ago that one of the most horrible aspects of this most horrible period of human existence was the success the authorities enjoyed making folks like us believe we were lone voices.
Having said that, I know I was the only person in a 200-strong crowd queueing obediently and silently in a snake line to the IKEA checkouts who wasn’t wearing a face nappy. I was alone then, and that was not some constructed reality on social media… Nor was the very threatening red-faced and sweaty man, shouting at me from behind his face nappy, “SOMEONE HASN’T BEEN PAYING ATTENTION!”
To whom I responded, quietly, and while casting my arm over the massed, silent, calm members of the IKEA Congregation… “Sir, is this really what you think a pandemic would look like?”
What a great comeback – how did he react?
What a rat Zuckerberg is. Think of all those people who spoke up and suffered for it. And now I’m going to forward the article to those of my friends who rolled their eyes when I ” want down a rabbit hole”. Thank you Toby Young for Lockdown Sceptic
What about Nick Clegg ?