Before ‘The Science’ flipped in the spring of 2020, the consensus among Western epidemiologists was that community masking doesn’t affect the spread of respiratory pathogens like influenza. As Jonathan Van Tam said on April 3rd 2020, “there is no evidence” to support the general wearing of face masks.
Although masks might block large droplets in close-contact settings like hospitals, and thereby slightly lower the risk of transmission, they can’t block airborne particles – which simply go through/around them, and then remain aloft for minutes or even hours.
As a result, large indoor setting like supermarkets, transit stations or classrooms soon fill up with airborne particles – even if everyone’s wearing a mask.
A new Spanish study strongly supports the pre-Covid conventional wisdom that masks don’t stop transmission of respiratory pathogens. The study uses quite a powerful design, which makes its results all the more convincing.
Ermengol Coma and colleagues analysed data on a large cohort of Spanish children aged three to eleven, whom they followed for the first term of the school year from September to December of 2021. During this period, there was a mask mandate in place for children in primary school (aged six and up) but not for those in pre-school (aged three to five).
Hence the researchers compared outcomes between children aged five (who were not subject to the mandate) and those aged six (who were subject to the mandate).
This constitutes a relatively well-controlled comparison, given that the two groups differ by only one year in age. In other words, since six-year olds are only one year older than five-year olds, you wouldn’t expect the rate of transmission to differ much between them for reasons other than the mask mandate.
The researchers estimated the incidence of Covid, the secondary attack rate and the R number separately for the two groups. If mask mandates work, you’d expect all these quantities to be higher among the five-year olds. However, the researchers found no statistically significant differences between the two groups.
What’s more, they found a strong positive association between measures of transmission and age across all the age-groups in their sample. In other words, transmission was higher among older age-groups, despite the fact that these groups were subject to the mask mandate, whereas the younger ones weren’t.
Ermengol Coma and colleagues’ findings suggest that mask mandates do essentially nothing to reduce the spread of Covid. And given that masks plausibly impede both learning and social interaction, on top of being uncomfortable, there’s no good reason for children to wear them. Indeed, the fact that they were ever made to is a scandal.
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Good news. 0% should believe that man made plant food does anything or causes anything. It doesn’t. But at least the sheeple are moving ever so cautiously in the right direction. Given the literally trillions of £ / $ in endless propaganda and funding
over 40nay 140 years, this is indeed surprising. See Rona Fascism for a template and more information.The propaganda didn’t work for BREXIT either. Sometimes my faith in human nature is restored (a bit).
In the Brexit referendum, both sides used propaganda, but the Leave side’s propaganda was much more effective.
The fundamental reason Leave won was that there were three broad mutually exclusive outcomes for the country – Remain, Hard Brexit and Soft Brexit – but only 2 options on the ballot paper. And the Leave side took full advantage of this major faux pas by Cameron … and the rest is history…
I’m sorry but that is mostly nonsense.
I doubt if many people today could give you a coherent definition of hard versus soft Brexit.
The majority of people realised, to at least some degree, that the EC was dominated by venal, corrupt, bureaucratic incompetents who they could never, even theoretically, replace. And that the UK was being milked financially whilst the EC wouldn’t even give Cameron the fig leaf of a Neville Chamberlain style ‘piece of paper’ when he asked for some very modest reforms.
It was even then felt very widely that the pace of immigration was much to great and that “rubbing their faces in diversity” was in fact affecting ordinary working class people much more than even the “leafy suburb” Tories.
Cameron, to give him his due, put a lot of effort (and a Hell of a Lot of our money) into his ‘Project Fear’. But he had seriously underestimated the level of resentment about the EU and the fact that the European Elections were an even more blatant charade than domestic elections.
Whether people today could give a coherent definition of hard versus soft is somewhat irrelevant given we are now 7 years later. But, at the time, there was much discussion about a Canada-style free trade deal and World Trade Organisation rules (hard Brexit) and the Norway option (soft Brexit).
In the Referendum the result was 52:48 (Leave: Remain). Let’s assume the Leave vote split roughly 50:50 between Hard and Soft. Given we now have a Hard Brexit, for your argument to prevail logically, you are effectively saying that virtually all those voting Leave and wanting a Soft Brexit would rather have a Hard Brexit than Remain. Which is clearly nonsense, I’m sure you will agree.
There was never a hard or soft Brexit. You either leave an organisation or you don’t.
We voted to leave – reaching a “new deal” with the EU was not on the ballot paper.
We haven’t left: they simply created the terms of the “outer tier” which will, in due course, be applied to the likes of Turkey, Ukraine and (probably) the north African states bordering the Med.
Norway is in the Single Market but not in the European Community, so it clearly is possible.
The bastards don’t care what normal people think.
True, but normal people care what normal people think, and there is only so far that we can all be pushed. Some can be pushed much, much further than others, of course, but in the end, normal people are quite capable of digging in their heels and saying no.
9 out of 10 to the Uni that came up with a organisation name with an acronym that sounds appropriate.
I believed in the official climate change narrative up until 2020, as I didn’t know much about it and believed that virtually all the scientists in the world (as we are being led to believe) would hardly be wrong, up until I saw how “debate cancellation, modelling, invented attributions and data manipulation” were being used on a worldwide scale to push lies about Covid and Covid vaccines.
I wonder if many other recent climate change sceptics have had their eyes opened about climate change in a similar way.
Same here, exactly describes my scepticism history. Now my default position is to not believe any official pronouncements in either the public health or environmental areas without solid evidence.
Really pleased that you’ve seen the light.
The whole things been a scam from start to finish. When ‘Global Warming’ turned into climate change, and then to climate emergency, I just knew they were adjusting the narrative to suit there purposes.
The whole wretched nonsense is just another multi-faceted control mechanism, developed by the likes of Maurice Strong and the Club of Rome way back. In plain English.. the eugenics driven billionaire club. Check out their book in PDF format.. ‘The First Global Revolution’.. they tell you in that exactly what their aims were/are, and how they’re going to achieve them.
Research Maurice Strong and the 1992 Earth Summit.. IPCC.. the truth is out there, but being removed, smothered and mollified as I type this..
I believed that CO₂ might be a factor until I attended a teacher training course when anybody (students, staff) who was sceptical about this (and some other political agendas at the time, notably Slave Trade Reparations) found themselves separated from their
gonadsfunding. I sought in vain for “The Science” (especially “The Climate Model”) so that I could assess it for myself. Then I too got cancelled, but escaped, biologically intact at least. (This was about a year before Climategate.) Blow me down, the same thing happened two decades later to anybody who questioned the Covid Narrative, and again regarding the Trans Narrative. It’s not that Critical Thinking is dead in the UK, its more that Critical Thinkers are culturally excised in a sort of anti-science, anti-technology, anti-maths Cultural Revolution, which is forcing Real Scientists© to become DeliverEat drivers delivering insect pizzas to The Great Gullible coming out of schools.With me it was the reverse – after a few years wondering and reading I came to the conclusion that we are in a Propaganda State regarding sexuality and gender, race, and not least climate change. I wrote an e-book on it in 2019.
When COVID arrived it was immediately clear to me that the whole thing had shifted up several gears, and that the threat to the culture was immediate, not future.
Climate Sceptics Rise
ignore climate lies
***************************
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“Climate catastrophe, spouted on a TV near you since 1970”
(And we are still here!)
“Climate scepticism” — what a silly phrase. No-one is sceptical of the fact that there is such a thing as climate. What we’re sceptical of is man-made global warming. Stop conceding to their slanders by adopting their loaded language.
The zeal of the liars with the microphones can actually damage their cause in some cases. I know of one person who woke up to the C19 fraud while actually watching the TV alarmism. They were trying too hard. But don’t tell them that.
I’m in my early ’60s. I live in southern England and have done all my life (although I’ve moved in stages from east to west).
The climate now is no different now to when I was a girl. We get the occasional very hot summer and occasional very cold/snowy winter. We sometimes get prolonged dry spells and sometimes prolonged periods of rain. Flooding is more common but that is due to environmental action/inaction (building on flood plains; failing to keep waterways clear; failure to build flood relief schemes) than anything else.
I believe the evidence of my own eyes; there has been no discernible climate change over the past 60 years. I’m immune to the propaganda pumped out at us by the Government and the likes of the BBC. I don’t believe a word they say …. about anything.
Encouraging article Chris – thank you.
I regularly rebuff alarmists on twtr, mainly JSO, XR, the UN’s new bit of fluff, and many nutty professors, and am seeing both fewer comebacks from them and a significant increase in R/Ts. I hope the trend increases.
This is about science not about what people believe.