• Login
  • Register
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In
The Daily Sceptic
No Result
View All Result

Why Healthcare Settings Should Drop Their Mask Requirements

by Will Jones
3 May 2022 5:02 PM

Dr. Gary Sidley, a former NHS Consultant Psychologist and co-founder of Smile Free, has a piece in the Critic today criticising the persistence of widespread masking in healthcare settings and summarising the evidence for why masks are a bad idea.

Over recent weeks there has been a marked reduction in the number of people wearing face coverings in retail settings, hospitality venues and on public transport. Given the ineffectiveness of masks in reducing viral transmission, together with the multiple harms associated with them, this transition is both rational and welcome. Paradoxically, the prominent exceptions to this return to a mask-free society are NHS facilities and venues allied to health. Widespread masking of both staff and patrons persists in all hospitals, health centres and GP practices, and most dentists, opticians and pharmacies.

A sphere of society where one might reasonably expect a reliance upon evidence-based practice, is now the outlier in persisting with the unscientific and pervasively damaging mass-masking phenomenon. More troublingly, healthcare’s insistence that staff and visitors continue to wear masks constitutes additional risks to the wellbeing of the people who use these services. Some of the general harms of face coverings are likely to be particularly problematic in these settings, including:

Impaired communication

Clear communication is a central requirement for effective healthcare. By muffling speech and hiding non-verbal signals, masks significantly impede the efficiency of information sharing, potentially impairing the professional’s understanding of the clinical problem and the patient’s understanding of the recommended therapeutic intervention. Those with hearing impairment (estimated to be about one-in-six of the UK population), who often rely on lip-reading, will suffer the most. Given that the elderly population are frequent users of health services, those impacted by this mask-induced communication problem will be even higher in these settings. And the consequences of muffled speech in hospitals can sometimes be catastrophic.

Increased risk of falls in the elderly

By blocking parts of the lower peripheral visual field, and causing spectacles to steam up, masks will increase the risk of falls in older people with ongoing mobility difficulties. Injuries, such as fractured femurs, are more prevalent in the elderly. Expecting face coverings from this demographic, the most regular visitors to healthcare facilities, can only exacerbate the risk.

Aggravation of respiratory problems

For patients with existing respiratory problems, the requirement to cover their airways with cloth or plastic will often inflict additional distress. Masks can make breathing more difficult, a problem likely to be more apparent after long periods of wear, such as those routinely experienced in hospital Accident and Emergency departments. Furthermore, face coverings can inflate the risk of acquiring pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. One study found for example that as little as four hours of wearing a cloth or plastic mask increased vulnerability to bacterial infection. There are also the largely unknown risks from the inhalation of micro-plastics and the exposure to contaminants in the textiles.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Double-masking offers people no more protection than single-masking and may increase their risk of becoming infected, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University and Florida State University. MailOnline has more.

Tags: Face MasksHealth and safetyHealthcare workersLockdown harmsMask MandatesMasks

Donate

We depend on your donations to keep this site going. Please give what you can.

Donate Today

Comment on this Article

You’ll need to set up an account to comment if you don’t already have one. We ask for a minimum donation of £5 if you'd like to make a comment or post in our Forums.

Sign Up
Previous Post

‘Original Antigenic Sin’ Mentioned in the New England Journal of Medicine

Next Post

Covid Hospital Admissions Drop for 22nd Day in a Row – But New Variants in South Africa Raise Questions of What Comes Next

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
Please log in to comment

To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.

Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.

114 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago

Governments ( aside from the Swedes and the odd few other exceptions ) and TPTB never and still do not give a stuff about kids’ welfare, development or education. This is evidenced due to school closures, urging to get a toxic jab they never needed and the sexually explicit and inappropriate material ( as well as woke tosh that states you can identify as anything you want ) being taught in class. Kids are being targeted on multiple levels and the buck stops with the parents because the threat is not going to go away any time soon and it is all under the guise of ”public health”.

”The World Health Organization’s broad definition of health embraces physical, mental and social well-being. Expressed in its 1946 constitution alongside concepts of community participation and national sovereignty, it reflected an understanding of a world emerging from centuries of colonialist oppression and the public health industry’s shameful facilitation of fascism. Health policy would be people-centered, closely tied to human rights and self-determination.

The COVID-19 response has demonstrated how these ideals have been undone. Decades of increasing funding within public-private partnerships have corroded the basis of global public health. The COVID-19 response, intended for a virus that overwhelmingly targeted the elderly, ignored norms of epidemic management and human rights to institute a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned. Without pausing to examine the costs, the public health industry is developing international instruments and processes that will entrench these destructive practices in international law.

Public health, presented as a series of health emergencies, is being used once again to facilitate a fascist approach to societal management. The beneficiaries will be the corporations and investors whom the COVID-19 response served well. Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose. The public health industry must urgently awaken to the changing world in which it works, if it is to adopt a role in saving public health rather than contributing to its degradation.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12531

36
0
Jabba the Hut
Jabba the Hut
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

As I’ve said all along TPTB don’t give a shit about children, infact I think the whole idea is to damage children as much as possible. Any one with half a brain cell could see the negative impacts lockdowns would have on society and yet people still want to cannonise the evil or compromised or both Valance and Witty. This is just another study for the white wash enquiry to ignore.

38
0
Jabba the Hut
Jabba the Hut
1 year ago
Reply to  Jabba the Hut

Another government created problem that the w**kers who promoted lockdowns now want money throwing at.

25
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago
Reply to  Jabba the Hut

Yep, ”we’re coming for your children”, well they did warn us. I say the buck stops with the parents but the problem is when the parents are fully paid up members of the Woke Brigade themselves.

”The city council is sponsoring a five day drag camp which offers 14-year-olds the opportunity to become “divas”.
Oxford City Council is supporting a week long “Drag Camp” which offers 14 to 18 year olds the chance to “create their own daring stage persona”.
The camp, which starts on Monday on Magdalen Road, will be run by T(ART) Productions, which is a queer not for profit community events company, alongside Pegasus theatre group and Doris Field Charitable Trust.

The company promises to help children find their “drag voice” and to introduce them to the “world of drag as a performance art”.
Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend told the Daily Mail said: “Why is Oxford City Council encouraging children to participate in the world of adult entertainment?
“The aim of queer activists is clear in the blurb: to subvert and destabilise boundaries, under the guise of being empowering for children.
“Encouraging children to create a ‘daring’ stage persona means only one thing in the drag world: to push sexual boundaries.
“Blurring the boundaries between adult and child in this way is a safeguarding red flag.”

https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23692650.oxford-council-sponsors-week-long-drag-camp-children/?ref=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR28kUZ0biGeQcMUHpr921MJFyAVYRuz6kXN5a8a3afwkXeHOdQM3FttJZQ_aem_ARKgzhZudJp-IHuWWqlmq017KDJYXZphsVrcAiR8JW_RrLGWiROWEsS3ItThhpqDlh0

19
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago
Reply to  Mogwai

Kids are doomed when the parents are woketards. Case in point. Presumably this is a boy;

https://twitter.com/againstgrmrs/status/1686372574467690496

13
0
lymeswold
lymeswold
1 year ago

Well, the report is here:

https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-07/WP202321-parental-labour-market-instability-and-childrens-mental-health-during-the-pandemic_0.pdf

Not sure what to make if it. Much of the text is given over to explaining the statistical methods used to analyse the multiple choice questionnaire responses and compute the outcomes.

Children are very sensitive to their parents’ emotions. I don’t doubt many experienced an impact on their social and emotional wellbeing. But quantifying it like this … I’m not persuaded.

I fear for children growing up in modern Britain. The COVID debacle was only one of many factors deleterious to their mental wellbeing.

18
0
Marcus Aurelius knew
Marcus Aurelius knew
1 year ago

Stuck record, I know, but please:

“Just as the dust begins to settle from the fallout of the Government’s response to the Covid pandemic…”

There. Was. No. Pandemic!

England and Wales, 2020-2021:
Average age at death overall: 81
Average age at death “FROM COVID”: 82!

Imagine a vaccine so safe you must be threatened to take it, to protect you from a virus so deadly you need be tested to know you have it!

Last edited 1 year ago by Marcus Aurelius knew
47
0
Jabba the Hut
Jabba the Hut
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Aurelius knew

When I’m with my children and the “pandemic” gets mentioned on TV or the radio, I repeat ‘there was no pandemic’. The same goes for the so called “climate emergancy” I repeat ‘there is no climate crisis it’s a scam’. Three sets of ‘oh dad’and eye rolls. I’m not going to let the constant propaganda get to my family.

Last edited 1 year ago by Jabba the Hut
29
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago

I know how it’s affected me… and I’m in my late 40s. I can’t imagine the effect on youngsters. By using something so extreme on them so young, I guess it makes it easier to force ‘global boiling’, ‘climate catastrophe’ on them, because they’ve already been softened up by the powers that be.

28
0
Marcus Aurelius knew
Marcus Aurelius knew
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Well they haven’t softened up our two. We are taking all of this abysmal episode in human history as a very valuable “teaching moment”.

20
0
crisisgarden
crisisgarden
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Aurelius knew

With my 16yo (14 at the start of the plandemic) ’lockdown’ was very damaging to his development; although he was fully inoculated by his parents against bullshit and manipulation – and poisoning – it came at a point in his life when he needed routine and to knuckle down and work. Despite the fact I’m a teacher, I am well aware of the evils of state education, but the discipline and routine it brings are, I think, important, particularly for boys in their mid-teens. He struggles now to do anything reliably, and I put that down in part to the PTB shitting on his adolescent years.

25
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  crisisgarden

Yeah. I’m 48 and I’m not as good as I used to be. I used to be super-organised. Now I find I either go like the clappers to get things done or have no energy even to read – it’s one extreme or the other. I work from home now, living like a recluse, and haven’t even seen anyone I work for since the start of 2020.

15
0
Marcus Aurelius knew
Marcus Aurelius knew
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Get to your local Wetherspoons mate

16
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  Marcus Aurelius knew

That’s because you’re ‘one of us.’ How many kids live in homes where parents say the ‘anti-vaxxers’ belong in jail?

14
0
crisisgarden
crisisgarden
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Significantly fewer than one year ago. They’re more likely to live in households where you can’t even bring up Covid because everyone’s too embarrassed!

13
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  crisisgarden

So true! The husband of my Mum’s best friend was saying a year ago that people who refused the vaccine should be locked up. That would include me, who has cooked for him and his wife in my home and has eaten with him and his wife at theirs. When people pontificate like that – as we saw through the scamdemic – they forget the individual human face, which might be one they know!

Now my Mum’s best friend believes the vaccines are killers, in no small part due the the fact that my Mum now has a defibrillator-pacemaker in her chest because she developed a serious heart condition following the third booster jab.

21
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago

I’ve got mixed feelings about all these impressive (and expensive) sounding studies.

I think they might serve to obscure rather than enlighten.

There was no pandemic. Respiratory viruses cannot be stopped by humans. We are social animals. Life must go on. Any extraordinary measures are harmful on their face – no complicated studies or cost benefit analysis required. To me this is orthodoxy – to most it’s now considered heresy, I think to this day.

18
0
DomH75
DomH75
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Can you imagine if the human race behaved like this when TB was still an issue? We’d still be in the pre-industrial era!!

8
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  DomH75

Seems like some people want us to go back there…

9
0
Sforzesca
Sforzesca
1 year ago

Shock.
And all to protect the poor vastly underpaid bloody teachers. How many actually “caught covid” from kids and died.
Long gone are the days when they actually cared about kids.
Didn’t they realise all they had to do was chop 6″ off the bottom of the doors to Stay Safe.
Cowardly and selfish doesn’t even begin to describe the majority of them.
Supermarket workers, delivery men etc. kept working

17
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago
Reply to  Sforzesca

Ah yes, the vaccine that only works if others get vaxxed too. It’s always been the unjabbed people’s fault, the scapegoats of society, despite the fact if you had a vaccine that actually worked then why do you give a crap if anyone else is jabbed or not?? You’re allegedly ‘protected’ because Fauci, Biden et al said so, and they assured us repeatedly! Same non-logic can be applied to masks. And on and on the unfunny comedy sketches would go. My philosophy was always; my immune system is 100% effective with zero side-effects and it hasn’t got me killed or hospitalized yet. I’ll take my chances!

20
0
ebygum
ebygum
1 year ago

Very similar story in the Telegraph today….”Lockdown’s severe damage to children”..this is brilliant Bob’s reaction…

Bob Moran
@bobscartoons

Thank you, @telegraph
, for firing me when I tried to defend children against those who wished them harm through lockdowns.
Great to see such ethical consistency.

LOL! …..has anyone done any studies showing the way all the green zero zealots and their ideas will affect children?….thought not…..so no lessons learned then??

23
0
Mogwai
Mogwai
1 year ago

This new pro-narrative, vax-pushing, fear-mongering paper is crap, and the fact it has passed peer-review makes it double crap. Not to worry. The HART team have done a stellar job of extensively taking it apart and highlighting its shortcomings;

”The usual covid high priests who have been wheeled out repeatedly in front of the television cameras to fear-monger about covid without any debate, are at it again. Several members of Independent SAGE and others have written a paper assessing the impact of covid on children over the course of the last three years. It is not the paper they wanted to write.
Imagine you were them and had got hold of the data ready to write your paper. What might you want to show? I would suggest their priorities would have been to show:

  1. Covid caused immense harm to children
  2. Vaccinated children did not get sick with covid
  3. Vaccinated children did not go on to get the post-covid immune syndrome PIMS
  4. Vaccinated children did not die with / of covid

They were unable to demonstrate any of those points using the actual data, as we shall see.
The paper was published in the BMJ but it seems the peer reviewers did not actually do much reviewing. Campaigners who have repeatedly demanded children be vaccinated and who even now are demanding boosters for vaccines (see figure 1) might not be in the best place to provide a dispassionate assessment of the evidence, and indeed they did not.”

https://www.hartgroup.org/yet-more-fear-mongering-over-covid-in-children/

7
0
zebedee
zebedee
1 year ago

My brother got a new dog during lockdown. It didn’t socialise properly as a puppy and is quite aggressive with other dogs.

9
0
JohnnyDollar
JohnnyDollar
1 year ago

The Conspiracy Against The Children , Was NOT a Theory. Do NOT be Fooled that They didn’t know, enough scientists spoke up ALL of whom were accused of being ignorant or censored . THEY KNEW Lockdowns were devastating. The EVIL thing about it is that they are getting away with it at the expense of your children

2
0

NEWSLETTER

View today’s newsletter

To receive our latest news in the form of a daily email, enter your details here:

DONATE

PODCAST

In Episode 35 of the Sceptic: Andrew Doyle on Labour’s Grooming Gang Shame, Andrew Orlowski on the India-UK Trade Deal and Canada’s Ignored Covid Vaccine Injuries

by Richard Eldred
9 May 2025
1

LISTED ARTICLES

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

9 May 2025

News Round-Up

9 May 2025

Electric Car Bursts into Flames on Driveway and Engulfs £550,000 Family Home

9 May 2025

Sun-Dimming Quango has £800 Million of Taxpayer Money to Blow – and a CEO on £450k

8 May 2025

What Does David Lammy Mean by a State?

9 May 2025

News Round-Up

27

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

17

Electric Car Bursts into Flames on Driveway and Engulfs £550,000 Family Home

17

The Sugar Tax Sums Up Our Descent into Technocratic Dystopia

26

What Does David Lammy Mean by a State?

13

BBC Quietly Edits Question Time After Wrongly ‘Correcting’ Richard Tice on Key Net Zero Claim

9 May 2025

Electric Car Bursts into Flames on Driveway and Engulfs £550,000 Family Home

9 May 2025

“I Was a Super Fit Cyclist Until I Had the Moderna Covid Vaccine. What Happened Next Left Me Wishing I Was Dead”

9 May 2025

Nature Paper Claims to Pin Liability for ‘Climate Damages’ on Oil Companies

9 May 2025

What Does David Lammy Mean by a State?

9 May 2025

POSTS BY DATE

May 2022
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Apr   Jun »

SOCIAL LINKS

Free Speech Union
  • Home
  • About us
  • Donate
  • Privacy Policy

Facebook

  • X

Instagram

RSS

Subscribe to our newsletter

© Skeptics Ltd.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
wpDiscuz
No Result
View All Result
  • Articles
  • About
  • Archive
    • ARCHIVE
    • NEWS ROUND-UPS
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Premium
  • Donate
  • Log In

© Skeptics Ltd.

You are going to send email to

Move Comment
Perfecty
Do you wish to receive notifications of new articles?
Notifications preferences