For two years we’ve been told by senior NHS operatives that the responsibility for assessing the need for masks to be worn in health care settings has been ‘delegated’ to individual NHS Trusts. Decisions would be made based on the local prevalence of respiratory infections and their associated risks.
Work carried out by anti-mask campaign group, Smile Free, has found this to be a falsehood. NHS staff and service users continue to be subjected to the undocumented whims of unaccountable mask mavens; people who appear also to feel that legislation aimed at fostering a culture of openness in public life does not apply to them.
Ever since 2020, when the ‘health service’ portion of the Medical-Industrial Complex – a.k.a the NHS – and its co-collaborators, the Government, flip-flopped on the question of mask efficacy, we, the public, have been sold the sham that a piece of ill-fitting cloth can insulate us from a respiratory infection.
What we know, with absolute clarity and certainty, is that face masks serve only two possible purposes:
- As a comforter and pacifier for the frightened;
- As a means of creating compliance and conformity amongst those wearing them.
The entire schtick of mutual support and care, encapsulated in the psychological nudgers’ weasel words, “I wear mine to protect you”, is founded on a lie. As opposed to the nonsense espoused by Followers of The ScienceTM, real scientific evidence, found in real evidence-based research, has confirmed that the only contribution masks make is to increase harmful effects amongst long-term wearers.
What has the NHS’s institutional response to the facts been?
During these past three years, Smile Free has campaigned vigorously against masks. Twice, in the summers of 2022 and 2023, we wrote open letters to the NHS Chief Executives of the four home countries, co-signed by thousands of doctors, scientists, medical professionals and members of the public. We asked first that they fall into line with other community settings and remove routine ‘requirements’ for mask wearing, and latterly that they issue new guidance explicitly discouraging masking in healthcare settings.
When, or if, we received a reply, the message from the likes of NHS England’s Chief Nursing Officer, Dame Ruth May, was that masking and other non-pharmaceutical interventions were a matter of “local discretion” and may be used “depending on local prevalence and risk assessment”, a feature of the masking system we called the postcode lottery.
(‘Risk assessment’ – a decision-making tool for systematically identifying hazards and associated risks – is one component of an overall three-pronged risk analysis process, the others being ‘risk management’ and ‘risk communication’.)
Call us sceptical, but we harboured doubts about the objectivity of a bureaucratic process that relied on the overweening influence and power of Infection Control Teams. Often under the direction of a pettifogger, we suspected the activation of safety theatre that left thousands of staff and service users badgered to wear the useless face rags might lack the rigour we would have hoped for.
What did we do?
We decided to put the claims of the NHS ‘higher ups’ to the test: we set out to review measurement of local prevalence and assessment of risks arising from respiratory infections in general, and COVID-19 in particular. During the period between September 2023 and February 2024 we identified seven NHS Trusts (Barnsley, East Suffolk & North Essex, Sheffield, Sherwood Forest, South Warwickshire, United Lincolnshire, University Hospital Southampton) that had restarted the mandated wearing of masks across at least some of their estates.
These trusts were chosen because they decided – and announced – that COVID-19 infection levels were “soaring“, and because they think that masks “prevent further spread and protect patients“. (Why they think these things, we have no idea. We think there is zero evidence to support either assertion.)
Via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, we raised with each trust these questions:
- Within the geographical boundaries covered or served by your trust, what were COVID-19 case numbers (per 100,000 people), by month, since October 2022 until the present day?
- What was the most recent date that these mask measures were subject to risk assessment and updated?
- What was the latest risk assessment document used to determine that it is necessary for you to reintroduce face masks?
- What were any and all risk assessments that have been used since March 2020 to determine that it is necessary for you to mandate the wearing of face masks?
What were the results of our FOIs?
All trusts failed to offer any statistics on community COVID-19 prevalence within their catchment service areas. Two, Southampton and South Warwickshire, were able to provide some data about COVID-19 rates amongst admitted patients; but not one collected, retained or even appeared to analyse case data from across their entire geographic field of operation. All (bar East Suffolk and North Essex, who flatly stated that “we do not have that data”) pointed at the UKHSA as holder of the information. None were able to show how they had used these actual numbers as part of a risk analysis process.
This prompts the question that if these trusts don’t record or analyse these numbers over time, how can they ever know whether COVID-19 prevalence is changing within their service area, or whether changes are suggesting increasing or decreasing health hazards and associated risks? How were they able to make any scientific decisions on mandating, or even just recommending, the wearing of face coverings as ‘protection’ against a respiratory infection?
Just as worrying is the reality that none of the trusts were able to provide evidence of formal documented risk assessments – let alone risk analysis processes – for all parts of their estates. (One, Barnsley, provided a risk assessment template that it said was used to “inform” discussions about mask wearing within its Emergency Department.)
Within this context, three FOI responses, from Southampton, Sheffield and South Warwickshire, are most illuminating, both for their candour and as a realistic representation of what has been happening across the NHS after the ‘top down’ mandates disappeared and were ‘replaced’ by local protocols in 2022.
Firstly, in answering the questions related to documented risk assessments, Southampton stated that these were:
Not held. Use of face masks would have been reviewed at meetings and we do not have a record of these.
Sheffield’s response followed the same form with its admission:
We do not have a formal risk assessment. However Covid prevalence is monitored by a trust-wide expert group who review and agree all actions required depending on the Covid prevalence level.
South Warwickshire went further and replied that:
Mask wearing was implemented in line with the national requirements to wear masks throughout the Covid pandemic, however we did step up to universal mask wearing approximately one week before it was mandated in April 2020. When the national universal masking requirement was stepped down, we did not then undertake formal risk assessments. Instead, local epidemiology, Covid incidence within the hospital, staff sickness and ward outbreaks are closely monitored and discussed each day at ‘Silver Command’. Masking is stepped up or down in line with this picture, erring on the side of caution. This continues to be reviewed on a regular basis at Silver Command. In addition, we have always supported mask wearing (either FRSM or FFP3) through personal choice.
The major takeaway from these responses is that the idea of formal local risk assessments being undertaken is a bogus one. Based only on a disproven axiom that ‘masks work’ and an unwillingness to acknowledge the real evidence about mask efficacy, there was:
- No systematic risk analysis methodology applied;
- No formal risk assessment carried out;
- No evidence of formal risk management procedures;
- No official documentation related to a risk analysis process created, stored and updated over time;
- No consideration of scientific evidence on the comparative benefits and harms conferred by masks to their wearers.
Instead, what happened is that people who believe masking makes sense imposed – and continue to impose – their views on the rest of us. Why? Because they feel no need to ever re-evaluate or challenge their pseudo-religious beliefs; and because, in the words of South Warwickshire NHS Trust, they want to “err on the side of caution”.
But that’s not all, folks
As concerning as the lack of any rigorous, data-led, local measurement and evaluation of risk from respiratory infections might be, there is a second aspect of our work that is more worrying. And that is the seeming lack of respect exhibited by some NHS Trusts for the regulations that underpin the FOI legislative framework.
Of the seven trusts that we directed our FOIs towards, three (Sheffield, Sherwood Forest and United Lincolnshire) failed, by a considerable margin, to respond within the stipulated timeframe. The worst laggard was United Lincolnshire, which was overdue with its response by more than two months!
According to the law, an FOI response must be created within 20 business days. Despite numerous nudges of our own to these trusts, they failed to comply. In the end, in the form of formal complaints, we escalated these delinquencies to the Information Commissioners Office (the ICO) who then gave the trusts a final ‘10 day’ ultimatum to respond.
Why were they so late? We can guess, but we couldn’t possibly speculate. Suffice to say the excuses given were in essence a variety of the ‘dog ate my homework’ type. Intermediate responses cited problems locating the information and the difficulty of finding a suitable senior manager to sign-off the response.
Our conclusion
We began this exercise with the notion in our minds that, when it comes to face-masking, the NHS has spent the past four years simply making it up. We feel no different now, except that we’ve now got confirmation of this inkling.
Everything we’ve heard from these NHS Trusts speaks to an unchallenged over-reliance on models, non-existent data and a Pollyanna-like mentality where being seen to ‘do something’ is better than following the well-established Precautionary Principle and waiting until we understand and, even better, have evaluated properly the facts.
It seems to us to be a disgrace that the ‘national treasure’ which is the NHS can act in such a cavalier and unaccountable manner.
Paul Stevens is a member of Smile Free which campaigns for the end of mask mandates and masking.
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“The Wall St Journal editorial board has pronounced its verdict on Dr. Fauci…”
…and it is a wishy washy, half -assed, let’s not say too much, ‘Thanks Tony.’
The sort of lame guff that apparently passes for journalism these days.
The preliminary verdicts are coming in on Fauci and his ilk, and they are bad and about to get a lot, lot worse. Good. Let’s hope that where appropriate it leads to criminal proceedings.
But there’s another verdict which needs to come in: that on the stupidity of the vast majority of the public who went along with this garbage, lapped it up unreservedly.
The public who supported this need to be held to account – at least have the mirror held up to their faces so they can see themselves and how they’ve fallen short, woefully short.
Hear, hear.
That’s an argument I’ve made several times and I’m glad you’re making it too, because it’s so important.
Much as I dislike Fauci and the technocrats like him who have sought to govern our lives since March 2020, if we use them now as scapegoats to unburden ourselves of our responsibility for the horrors that have been perpetrated – lockdowns, masks, coerced jabbing, vax passports and censorship – then we make it more likely that it can happen again.
Each and everyone of us has to learn from these terrible mistakes.
(N.B. By we I mean our society. Many of us on here have been fighting all this insanity from day 1.)
It’s not a comparison that I like to make, but I can’t help think of all those Germans who in the 1930s so enthusiastically gave the Nazi salute – and in doing so were collectively doing so much damage to themselves and wider society. For the most part they weren’t evil in themselves, just plain naive and stupid.
For me, wearing a mask was the equivalent of giving the Nazi salute in 1930s Germany. (I never once wore a mask btw.)
See https://brownstone.org/articles/they-thought-they-were-free/
Many thanks for this – started reading earlier and will finish later (long read). Haven’t seen it before – I thought that the Germans had a collective guilt trip after the War, but this says differently.
Until and unless our society faces up to what it has done (up to and including jabbing children with the MNRA poison, FFS), I have this gut feel that we are heading for another disaster, even worse than what we’ve done so far. There absolutely has to be a Reckoning, one way or another.
A society that has degenerated as far as we have is absolutely, sure as night follows day, headed for the rocks.
Of course there will be another disaster,, chemical and biological was always going to be a nightmare this century unfortunately.
It was talk of a medication that people could receive by breathing in the exhalations of other people who have had it so you can’t avoid it unless possibly by keeping well away from anyone who has had it). Who knows what horrors await us?
A really powerful article. Thanks for posting.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZeELwaE7Xk
Absolutely. Very much in line with my view of it. I guess we could interpret it in a charitable fashion, in as much as understanding why so many citizens tolerated what they were persuaded to believe in and do in the 1930s over there. And don’t forget how quite a few people in East Germany behaved until the wall came down; ‘mitarbeiter’ with the Stasi and so on.
Not that long ago, I went to a museum on that topic in Leipzig. Educational, and quite chilling.
I wonder if the German socialist regime of the 1930s would have happened without widespread fear among many of the other socialists in Russia.
I wore a scarf instead maybe 3 or 4 times to go to church and a funeral, never an actual mask though. Luckily enough I found an anti-lockdown church that actively encouraged us to consider if we might be exempt (it turned out most of us were). However it is an utter disgrace how people were forced into impossible and heart-rending (and often very damaging) “choices” and how places like, for example, Durham cathedral collaborated in “vaxports”. Never again.
The vast majority of people will always be somewhat indifferent followers of whoever happens to lead who are primarily concerned with living their own lives despite of it as good as they can, this being due to both a lack of talent for leadership and a lack of time to empoy on leading others. This doesn’t excuse the leaders from their responsibility for the course they had chosen. Fauci is the guy who could have made a difference and didn’t (and profited handsomely from this). The traumatized girl with the chirugical mask behind a drug store counter I basically fled about an hour ago because I couldn’t stand her sad, faceless half-existence at that moment is a victim of the likes of him.
I think deliberate instigators of evil and folly are morally more culpable than those who go along with it or fall victim to it through their own lack of awareness.
That said, in a so-called democracy there’s an obligation on those participating to be vigilant especially when flagrant breaches are evident, and the majority failed the test and were often quite happy to see the minority victimised or bullied. Countries work better if the populace is a bit more awake when they need to be.
During the second world war, it was an open secret that the democratic British government was basically waging an extermination campaign[*] against German civilians based on the misguided notion that this would, if not outright win, at least shorten the war against German soldiers and a majority of the people of the UK were opposed to that. This didn’t make one bit of a difference and the extermination campaign basically ran on until the German capitulation.
The theoretical souvereign of a so-called representative democracy is (intentionally) a pretty powerless entity.
[*] Would-be extermination campaign, to be precise. While indiscriminate mass-killing of non-combatants all over Germany was intended and achieved, the actual number of casualties fell far short of the politically desired number of them.
Well of course the populace needs to escalate the reaction if the government doesn’t take any notice – mass civil disobedience and upwards, depending on how flagrant the breach is. Easier for the government to get away with under the pretext of an emergency (war, fake pandemic).
In reality the extent to which the government is kept in check isn’t perhaps what it would ideally be. The fact remains that our leaders are less bad than those in North Korea, and that life in most reasonably functioning democracies is on average better for most than life in dictatorships or whatever. Of course, covid has put a big dent in that.
I do try and favour the maskless girls at checkouts. Fortunately that is most of them now though you do still get a few shoppers wearing them. One wonders why.
I never fail to ask when the screens are coming down too. When faced with “Oh, I don’t know” I reply with “They have been removed in Marks and Spencers” (which they have – at least my M&S).
Agreed.
I believe we should always keep this in our thoughts:
Never Forgive. Never Forget.
The sight or sound of one of the perps – bozo, Truss, Sino, Fauci, Ferguson, Whitty, Raine, fond of Lying, Turdeau, Ding Don Dan, Billy, Klaus, Soros, Charlie and his bunch of whingeing kids, and the thousands of others – should propel
Never Forgive. Never Forget.
to the front of our brains.
Many people would say we should always leave a space for forgiveness and indeed that is the way I was brought up, but when the evil that is being pushed threatens everyone on this planet I owe it to myself and all those around me to keep my anger and hatred at least at a vigorous simmer.
I will never forgive. I will never forget.
I recall noting in my lockdown diary in April or May 2020 that there was news of people protesting this shambles “at last”. On day 1, many of us didn’t know what to do or who to turn to. I hope that that at least will be different in the future.
And initially I was really wondering what I was missing. It just did not make sense.
But they never wil see it. You only have to look at the Guardian and listen to Benjamin Butterworth on GB News to know that. The question then arises – is this country worth saving, given that half its population are stupid and a large proportion of the rest don’t speak English?
Well I live in it and I want to enjoy the rest of my days in some kind of peace so yes selfishly I would like to save it for myself and my kids
Perhaps it will just about see us out, but it’s too late for your kids. Has anyone ever expressed it better than Enoch Powell, sixty years ago when he said:
“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
But who is responsible for this stupidity? My vote would go the educational blob, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have dumbed down scientific education for the past generations in pursuit of what we now call ‘woke’ ideas’. The propaganda didn’t work for everybody.
Fauci is the perfect exemplar of the career bureaucrat. A total mediocrity who has filled his pockets with vast sums whilst providing no useful good or service.
Someone kindly posted this yesterday, sorry don’t remember who, but for anyone that missed it here’s a monologue from the stalwart Tucker Carlson of Fox News in the US, laying into Fauci and the covid cult, no holds barred. Well worth watching all the way through, including a wonderful grilling of Fauci but another stalwart Senator Rand Paul.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6311272948112#sp=show-clips
Sadly the people in UK broadcast media likely to feature such a comprehensive and forthright demolition of the covid narrative don’t have anything like the high profile that Carlson and Fox have in the US, which reflects the better resistance that libertarians and conservatives and nationalists are putting up there as compared to the UK.
“[The crook Fauci] should be prosecuted” (Senator Ted Cruz).
Interestingly, back in 2016 I hoped that Ted Cruz would become “president” of the so-called United States. Oh well, maybe next time. Or maybe De Santis. Or maybe the election will be stolen, perish the thought.
The little folk here (and many of the not so little folk) can hold our heads up high and say,
“WE SAW YOU COMING, FAUCI! YOU AND YOUR KIND! RIGHT FROM THE START! AND THE TRUTH WILL OUT. THEY GRIND SLOW, BUT EXCEEDING FINE!“
I hope this guy gains a new function of being behind bars for the rest of his life.
Although, the chance of this is infinitesimally small. The best we can hope for is that the thought of causing death and destruction will haunt him regardless of what he says in public. He knows he’s culpable.
I reckon the chances of criminal proceedings are higher than many people now think.
Why has Fauci resigned now? I have no doubt that it’s to do with the looming mid-terms, the inevitable ascendancy of the Republican Party, and thus a Congress-led investigation into Fauci and his ilk. (Tucker C. was alluding to this yesterday – see link in transmissionofflame post above.)
I don’t know the details, but I’m guessing that as a Federal. employee Fauci may be more vulnerable to a Congress investigation than he would be as a private person – as such he will doubtless be able to call in the lawyers, delay and obfuscate, probably for years.
So I reckon Fauci is indeed clear in his own mind that he needs to start preparing to defend himself against, or at least delay, some very, very serious charges.
Incidentally, with Fauci gone, and thus his rule of terror (as described by Robert Kennedy, The Real Dr Fauci) over, one wonders if others will be more willing to break ranks and start spilling the beans.
The crook should indeed be behind bars. I may forgive, but I won’t forget, and want some form of justice.
Not just Americans …… I’m British and I don’t believe a word our Public Health Bureaucrats or Government Ministers say.
I’ve never had much interaction with my GP or the NHS in general, having looked after my own health all my life, but my policy going forward is to stay well away. I have no faith that they will “first do no harm.”
Those of us who have had a lot of experience as patients probably learn a fair bit about the internal structure, and how it seems to operate. It is not really monolithic, and competence varies quite a bit geographically, even within the same building. Sometimes you’re lucky about who you come across, sometimes they just do their best without complete understanding of a problem at hand. Been there, done that, etc.
More evidence of one of Fauci’s finest legacies. The grievous bodily harm of millions of children.
https://www.hartgroup.org/yet-more-worrying-data-on-myocarditis-in-children/
I’ve pronounced my verdict on the Wall St Journal editorial board – and it isn’t pretty. Conclusion: “Their legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust the mainstream media in the same way again.”
The creed or whatever the mainstream press follows isn’t working and is the SINGLE biggest problem of our time. They’re still at in the UK – the BBC now even has FOUR doom & gloom fear inducing headings on its website: War in Ukraine, Cost of Living, Cornovirus & Climate. Rewind two years and none of this existed.
Experts
The shyster should have been put out to grass years ago – preferably a minimum of 6 feet under it. He’s one of the most evil men in the annals of history.
And that’s a position that’s not up for
debate.
AIDS – Fauci was at fault way back there !!… He is responsible for untold suffering in plain sight !!…
Happily killing black people in the US and Africa with his poisonous, so called, ‘vaccines’
He’s stepping down ahead of the mid term elections because he fears that once the GOP has control of the House and the Senate, which it will, his collar is going to be felt.
Good riddance to a very bad actor!