There follows a guest post by Hector Drummond, a former academic who worked in risk, who says when he came to research his new book The Face Mask Cult on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19 the evidence was threadbare.
In 2021 I decided to write an FAQ on all aspects of Covid, lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). I started with face masks, as they seemed to be the easiest issue to deal with, thinking that the whole mask situation could be summed up in five to six pages. After a few days work I had twenty pages of text, and another twenty pages of reminder notes on further aspects of face masks that I needed to consider and research. Those notes ballooned out in the next few weeks, and I realised that the use of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was a far bigger topic than I had appreciated, and would require substantial amounts of writing, and months of research and literature-reading.
It took until the next year before I decided I’d written enough on the topic. I had read an enormous number of scientific papers and other articles on masks, and gone through some of them with a fine-tooth comb (see Part 3 of the book, for instance). I had spent considerable time analysing, synthesising and rewriting, and my short FAQ article had become a comprehensive 400-page book that tackled all aspects of the issue, as well as a unique resource with its extensive scientific literature review section.
In all my researches I failed to come across very much in the way of convincing evidence that masks work. The papers that were supposed to show that they did all turned out to be poor pieces of science. None were randomly-controlled peer-reviewed trials. Some were observational studies, with inadequate controls for dealing with the possibility of faulty or biased recollection. Some were ‘modelling’ studies, in which a computer program was used to ‘model’ the effect of face masks on disease spread. Modelling studies are generally hopeless at providing any confirming evidence for the effectiveness of face masks as they require the modellers to make assumptions about how effective the masks are when writing their programs. Some were mannequin studies, in which a dummy in a lab with artificial breathing functions, rather than a real person in the real world, was used. Some were simply tests of the porosity of various materials in regard to salt aerosols.
Most studies ignored the issue of face mask gaps, despite it being well-known in the field that gaps around the sides of masks will let such large amounts of virions in and out that any effect that the masks do have will be completely negated. (This is why medical institutions require ‘fit tests’ for masks – not that fit tests are very reliable, as I explain in the book.)
Even these dubious studies that claimed to show an effect for masks didn’t show much of an effect. The less wild ones would typically claim that the cloth masks would stop 5% to 15% of virions, but they never presented any reason to believe the further claim that was often made that this would cause a 5% to 15% reduction in cases, or a 5% to 15% reduction in deaths. The closest such studies got to doing so was when an author would occasionally speculate, in an airy fashion, that if the disease in question’s R0 rate happened to be close to 1.0, then maybe widespread mask use (assuming masks had some small effect) would be enough to push the R0 rate below 1.0, in which case the disease would die out, although of course even if all their assumptions were true and masks did push the disease’s R0 rate below 1.0 it doesn’t follow that the disease would die out anytime soon. It could well be that the disease’s R0 rate would quickly come back over 1.0 again as soon as we stop masking, and so in order to stop the disease spreading again we would have to wear masks for years on end, or even indefinitely.
But what about all those government reports written by distinguished scientists assuring us that there were now truckloads of research proving that masks work? This is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole face mask con. The 2020 DELVE report and its updates, the 2020 Royal Society report, and the 2022 Department for Education’s Evidence Summary were disgraceful pieces of misinformation, as I show in detail in the book. Even more shocking, perhaps, is the fact that there have been so many acts of wrongdoing in the last two years that the scientific butchery committed in these reports is completely unknown to the general public. The fact, for instance, that the Royal Society’s report relied heavily upon a low-grade Chinese study, written in Chinese only, and published in an obscure Chinese journal, which reported fantastically unrealistic results, is never even going to briefly flit through the mind of the average person, because the average person will never come across any reference to this shameful affair in the mainstream media.
I felt vindicated as I put the finishing touches to the book when several prominent advocates of masks, such as Trish Greenhalgh, Jeremy Howard and many others, started to admit that cloth masks were useless. Not that they wanted to us to stop wearing masks – they now wanted us to move onto medical-grade respirator masks, like N95s and FFP2s, as Germany required. Needless to say, these mask fanatics didn’t bother to mention that Germany’s stringent mask policy has been a complete failure.
The book I finished up with is a serious corrective to the endless propaganda we have been fed about masks. It lays out the case against masks in detail, considers the harms done by mask-wearing (harms which are usually ignored by scientists and governments), closely examines many claims made about masks by both sides, and backs it all up with an enormous number of references to the scientific literature. Whenever anyone who wants you to wear a mask says, “Follow the Science”, just show them this book and say, “I already did”.
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“why were there only 7 black managers”
7 out of 92 is 7.6%. What proportion of people in the UK old enough to be managers are black?
Why aren’t you bothered that 0 were South Asians, when they significantly outnumber blacks?
There aren’t enough Smiths either, not that I have any interest in the ugly game.
A good point!
There are something like 33 million men in the UK and only 92 of them are managers of professional football clubs (the four top English divisions.) 20 come from outside the UK, of whom four are black. And three of that tiny group of 72 are British-born black men, which represents slightly above the percentage of black people – both sexes – living in the UK, so more than twice as many as you might expect if you were forcibly egalitarian about things. One can’t use a tiny, exceptional group of men to create a trend for an entire country.
That’s also before getting into the geographical issue: ethnic minorities, particularly black people, tend to be clustered in a small number of cities. If you don’t live in certain cities, it’s possible to wander around many areas of the UK all day long and never see someone who isn’t white. If you do see someone non-white, they’re more than twice as likely to be Asian as black. On the average day in much of the UK, it’s likely you see far more black people on advertising hoardings and on TV commercials than in your daily life.
Football team managers hail from all over the UK (ignoring the foreign managers) and with black people in large groupings being limited to a few areas, it’s amazing that there are as many managers who are black as there are.
I guess the point is that black men are probably over-represented in terms of the players, so there should be an equal over-representation among the managers, and the fact that there isn’t is evidence of systemic racism, and definitely isn’t because black people are more likely that whites to be good at elite football but less good at management, because anti-racist dogma is that it’s OK to point out under-representation of non-white people, but never OK to point out over-representation of non-white people, OK to point out over-representation of white people but never OK to point out under-representation of white people.
Taking the knee is part of the anti-racism industry/mass hysteria. Hating people solely because of their race/skin colour, regardless of how they behave, seems to me stupid and morally wrong. Accepting that there might be natural differences in outcome based on naturally varying characteristics among races, and just ignoring that fact and treating people as individuals, seems reasonable. But that’s not where we seem to be. This will not end well.
Are you raising a ‘hate incident?’
Send for plod.
The Women’s Euro’s showed what a farce taking the knee has become (if it was ever anything but). It happened at some matches but not others, and at the England vs N Ireland game the English players took the knee but the Irish players didn’t (does this mean the Irish players are a bunch of racist bastards, or just able to think for themselves?).
I only watched the final, plastic fan that I am, but I did clock that ridiculous rainbow captain’s armband. FFS, I can’t move for rainbows! “Paint the whole world with a rainbooow”. Aargh..
I’m confused, too. Do rainbows represent the gender industry or the NHS? Someone needs a new symbol although if I see a rainbow that isn’t in the sky after rain, I have a strong urge to fling a sod at it.
And why do the list of letters keep getting longer? What does the IA+ stand for? They need to add an ‘M’ for ‘mentally ill’ and ‘C’ for ‘confused’ I think. It’s getting ridiculous now. Perhaps the ‘A’ stands for ‘attention-seeker’.
Of course I’m not homophobic but I think its no longer necessary to take to the streets waving a symbol that looks like a pre-schooler designed it whilst shoving your sexual orientation in my face. I don’t have the inclination to shout about my straightness to all and sundry whilst dressed like a bargain basement stripper.
In all the places I’ve worked people have been treat equally, whether they’re gay, non-white, disabled, female, older, foreign etc etc Its just all woketard, political and exhibitionism now I think. Pride used to be fun but now it’s been spoilt.
Firkin
absolutely piss me off.
I think anyone who kneels in front of anyone else is a virtue-signalling nobhead.
It’s not like you to be so brief Mogs.
I’m here more for Covid-related stuff but even that I’m giving a wider berth as it is summer and I don’t want to be all consumed by the “what are the governments gonna pull out of their arses come autumn time?” mentality and if I can’t add any new or different offerings on the subject then regurgitating what I’ve been saying the last 12-18 months holds no appeal. I get bored reading the same old stuff rehashed over and over. I’m interested more in any new developments so that I can keep in the loop, not going over old ground which has been done to death.
The whole thing is tedious and woke. Fans hate it. Viewers turn it off. I wish a team would have the guts to kick off and run for the goal while the other team is still kneeling. The knee-bending is a transplant of American racial politics to the UK where racial dynamics are (were) completely different. Three per cent of the UK population is black. The British Empire was the first empire in human history to abolish slavery and then went to great lengths to stamp it out elsewhere. It’s time the knee-bending ends forever. It has no basis in British culture.
I’m fact black players are over represented in English football. There are too many of them compared to their proportion of black people within the English population..
So perhaps they should continue to take the knee but to fight against racism against white football players in the English game.
Actually the ones that are really discriminated against are South Asians. They are very poorly represented in English football.
So one knee before the first half for the whities and one before the second half for the South Asians.
Football is the perfect meritocracy. If you’re good enough, no-one cares what colour you are. I’d be perfectly happy with 11 black players in the England team, if they were the best 11 English players available. Trying to put percentage representations on it shows how stupid the whole intersectionality thing is.
I quite agree. Thing is, you will then be asked to explain why the black players don’t become managers at the same rate, and that’s when the trouble starts.
Of course the whole business is utter madness – condemn binary categorisation but then categorise people into races when it suits your point – the wokesters decide when it’s OK to put people in distinct boxes and when it isn’t. Race doesn’t exist, except when we say it does.
Well said. And why aren’t there many black football managers? I’m not a footie fan and even I’ve noticed that.
It depends who you ask. Some would say it’s because of systemic racism, others would say that taking arbitrary groupings and expecting them to be equally represented in every sphere of life even with a completely even playing field is unrealistic. I would take the second view, which seems to me pretty much self-evidently true, but this opinion is now almost taboo and would get me sacked from many jobs.
Why do you think it is? If you don’t feel qualified to answer as you’re not a football fan, I’m sure you can find many other examples of specific racial groupings (which as you must bear in mind don’t exist but exist at the same time) are not evenly represented in specific professions or sports or whatever.
This is where the trouble starts. Someone points out there are not as many black managers as one might expect, and you say “so what?” and they say “it’s racism”. What’s your answer? If you say it’s not racism, they say well what is your explanation? So what happens is that people just go along with the idea it’s racism, whether they believe or not.
Yes and we could move the same sort of arguments to other professions quite easily. Why are most chefs male? Why are most secretaries or primary school teachers female? There’s disproportionate representation in many professions but that’s usually just sociology at work, nobody’s being discriminated against or over-looked in the job application process. If more females apply for secretarial positions than men then they are the ones that are most highly represented. Its really that simple in my non-expert opinion. Its when people read too much into something and start playing the racial/sexual discrimination card that it opens a can of worms totally unnecessarily. To my mind, if its not broken why fix it?
I feel the same way about any work place. It should be based on who’s the best candidates for the roles, not meeting some quota of staff based on gender or ethnicity.
Or just go down on both knees at the start of the match. Or go down on both knees at the start of the match and then just go the whole hog and play the game on their knees….be a good laugh if nothing else.
Better not give them ideas though.
The need to “virtue signal” seems to signify the possession of obscene wealth in conjunction with a limited critical thinking capacity.
In Australia, a Rugby League team recently sprang on its players a “pride” jersey for a single round.
Funnily enough, 7 players, all from Pacific Island heritage, where Christianity runs strongly through the culture, refused to wear the jersey on religious grounds.
It was fun to see the woke left tie themselves in knots trying to simultaneously demonise the “transphobe” players whilst also trying to avoid appearing racist.
Perhaps they could start ‘taking the arm’ as a mark of respect for people who have died from or been injured by the Covid injections.
Brilliant.
Now we’re talking.
Do they also kneel before rugby matches? I’m just trying to envisage the parody spectacle of the NZ All Blacks kneeling then breaking into their Haka, how massively weird and stupid that would look. Please tell me that isn’t already an established thing!
I think that generally the ‘knee’ annoys and aggravates more people than it pleases..that’s if anyone even notices at all….
I watched a good interview with JP Sears and Tucker…JP had just done a video called virtue signalling for the Ukraine..(hi, I’m the guy who supports the current thing)
and what he said was that virtue signalling can be easily adopted and as easily throw off because it isn’t based on any fundamental or deeply held convictions…and I think he’s right.
I’ve noticed on Twitter that Ukraine flags are being dropped from bio’s or additions are being made with the Taiwan, and even the Kosovo flags! Easy come, easy go….LOL….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toGMjVVhkiM
Should we not also be showing regret for our role in the slave trade?
I know the WEFfers are intent on bringing it back but before our history is erased forever we could at least make a gesture.
They could perhaps hastily dig themselves into holes to commemorate the 24th of October 1916.
A presumably little know fact about the grande nation is that it periodically refilled the depleted ranks of its WWI infantry regiments by catching^Wpersuading black people from Africa to join the ranks who were then literally whipped into action. But that was ok since history has decided they were the good guys back then.
Yes, I can see why these millionaire football players take the knee. Because it is a meaningless gesture and they have no,idea just how meaningless it is. Wouldn’t we all LOVE to see just one of them giving something back to their community. Until they do, taking the knee is meaningless and laughable and serves NO purpose guys.