For a while it has been known that, contrary to what politicians and their friends in the health-industrial complex would have you believe, face masks do harm. In a piece published in May 2022, former clinical psychologist Dr. Gary Sidley laid out the multiple areas where masks cause trouble. These include: impairing communication; increasing risks of falls for the elderly and frail; aggravating respiratory problems; exposing the wearer to micro-plastics and other contaminants; and retraumatising those who have suffered abuse in the past.
In a wide-ranging and large list of potential pitfalls, perhaps the most worrying area for harm is that of exacerbating mental health conditions. As Dr. Sidley explains, “Many people already tormented by recurrent panic attacks, involving catastrophic thoughts of imminent death and feelings of breathlessness, will find masks very difficult to tolerate.” Mask-wearing could increase anxiety and amplify fears about the prospect of contamination, and, for those on the autistic spectrum, create an expectation and sense of pressure to conform to wearing a face covering.
With these concerns in mind, it is extraordinary to hear that an NHS mental health trust is reiterating its demands to staff, and requesting patients and visitors, to wear a piece of cloth over their mouth and nose.
Lest we forget, the national, top-down NHS directives were changed in June 2022 to remove any mandate for masks. Yet here we are, eight months later, and, as we’ve seen before – for example here and here – local masking policies continue to be made on a whim. This time it’s a provider of mental health and learning disability services – Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust (SPFT) – which remains committed to forcing mask wearing, reminding its staff of the requirements that, “In all clinical areas (including inpatient wards and in the community) all staff are to wear masks, and mask wearing for patients and visitors is to be encouraged.”
Strangely, the use of masks as prevention for the spread of COVID-19 does not appear in SPFT’s Policies for Infection Prevention & Control. The only mention in the official documentation being for “pandemic influenza and sputum-positive pulmonary TB during the first two weeks of treatment”.
Equally perplexing is the lack of any information sharing with the public about masks: the link for ‘Infection Prevention & Control for Patients’ being either broken or the page itself missing.
Framing these requirements within the context of ‘safety’ and conformance with ‘high standards’ of infection control, the SPFT’s Chief Nurse, Teresa Barker, seems to be unaware of the vast body of evidence that supports the statement that masks don’t work and have the potential to harm. Indeed, in the past few days we have seen the publication of the latest – and fifth version – of the Cochrane Review, ‘Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’. First published in 2007, the current rendition looked at 78 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and cluster-RCTs, with over 610,000 participants, and which, in the words of its lead author, Tom Jefferson, concluded that, “There is just no evidence that they [masks] make any difference. Full stop.”
Surprising as it is that a healthcare professional, tasked with being accountable for infection control and prevention, should be so out of step with significant and up-to-date evidence in her area of expertise, even more of a head-scratcher is the practical situation as it exists ‘on the ground’. As of February 1st, SPFT were “caring for two coronavirus patients in hospital”, down from four the previous week and nine a month earlier. No new Covid patients had been admitted in the week to January 30th. This downward trend in SPFT mirrors the national picture with COVID-19 patients hospitalised nationally decreasing 35% in the past four weeks.
So, there we have it:
• Clear evidence that, especially for those dealing with mental health challenges, masks can harm;
• Clear and compelling evidence that they do nothing positive to stem the transmission of COVID-19;
• No top-down, NHS-wide directive for masking to shelter under;
• No documented public policy within the specific Trust for masking;
• No communication with the public of a need to mask;
• Decreasing numbers of patients in hospital with the virus, both nationally and locally.
Really, support for enforcing mask-wearing seems pretty weak, doesn’t it? Instead, we are left with the sense that instructions for SPFT staff to continue wearing face masks is, as Tom Jefferson observes, about satisfying the urge to “appear to do something”, a complete subversion of the ‘precautionary principle’ that “you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that benefits outweigh the harms”.
Paul Stevens is a member of Smile Free, which campaigns for the end of mask mandates and masking.
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The inference of this article is obvious, the elephant in the room.
Does that mean the excess cardiovascular deaths were not caused by climate change???!!!
From Bob Moran …
Lancet is blaming SADS on air pollution
(November 2022). https://bgr.com/science/study-claims-tiny-particles-in-the-air-can-cause-sudden-heart-attacks/
Clown world. Nothing to do with poison injections.
They think we are as idiotic as they are
Sceptic readers not but most of the population most definitely are unfortunately which is why they get away with the cr4p.
‘Nobody is blinder than the person who decides he does not want to see’
Dot to dot should be on the curriculum not enhanced maths
Bob Moran is a genius. He never fails to prove that a picture can say a thousand words.
That’s next week.
The guilty keep lying. One day, maybe soon maybe not so soon, they will run out of lies, or they will end up telling lies so big that even the sheeple will cotton on.
One can but live in hope!!!
“the Government could and should do better to get to the bottom of what is driving the excess in cardiovascular deaths. We’ll keep digging.”
Hilarious. Yes keep digging Carl, right underneath the giant Syringe shaped elephant. Maybe you’ll get to Australia and you can ask them what caused it.
Don’t look here……………………………………….look over here…
Carl,
You gaslight on plenty of TV and Radio shows. Regularly. Weekly in fact.
You know what is causing this just as much as I do – and I’m not a medical professional.
Why not compile the facts as you have them now and come out on TV and say there is strong indication/evidence that the excess deaths are caused by…….
…or will you keep the TV and Radio slots for as long as you can, not mention the unmentionable while the rest of us guess the correct answer and ask why all these super-experienced and super-educated medical professionals continue to be “baffled”.
There is real harm in the public being caused because of loss of confidence (more than now) in the medical profession because you/they will not call out the Emperors new clothes. We all see the nakedness.
Slowly slowly catchy monkey.
It’s a bit harsh to criticise a practitioner of ‘evidence based medicine’ for not resorting to speculation. CH and team are asking the government to provide the evidence required to form conclusions and then scrutinise that which is provided to test its reliability, that’s the difference between him and Dr Malhotra or Dr McCullough (neither of whom i’m criticising either, they just take a different approach).
I want to see these jabs exposed just as much as the next guy but it won’t be done by wild speculation.
I’d say we’re a bit past “speculation” at this point. It’s probably because he doesn’t want to risk jeopardising his job. Understandable but a shame because he, along with the likes of Malhotra, would have a heck of a lot of clout. No offence to Prof Heneghan but it does come off as cowardice. Don’t tell me he isn’t personally seeing evidence of vax harms first hand in his clinical practice. He’d also be in a position to establish the vax status of his patients.
I quite agree. We’re 2 years in. The time for speculation is long gone. Enough data the world over has been collected. The Prof has a duty of care both clinically and academically. It’s painfully obvious he’s dancing around the flaming obvious, all the while ignoring the Yellow Card system screaming the safety signal for anyone with zero letters behind their name to see. He’s failed in his duty to protect patients and inform the public and that’s a huge disappointment for someone so highly credentialed. He’d make one hell of an opponent for tptb and ally for others who’ve got the courage to speak up though. What a let down.
Swineflu Vaccine:- 1 adverse reaction in 100,000. Withdrawn
Rotashield Vaccine:- 20 adverse reactions in 100,000. Withdrawn
Covid mRNA Vaccine:- 125 adverse reactions in 100,000. Actively promoted.
(yet the AZ C19 Vaccine was quietly withdrawn with (less than??) 1/800 reaction rate)
Adverse reaction reporting is reputed to be only 1/10 of actual events?
That I would suggest is a very good starting point for any evidence based scientist and the medical profession to openly question the current “treatment” plan.
We all need to keep an open mind until there is clear evidence one way or another.
Those who claim the vaccines are causing many of the excess deaths need to explain why there haven’t been excess deaths in the highly vaccinated Nordic countries, at least up until July 2022:
“Between January 2020 and July 2022, Sweden’s age-standardised mortality rate was 4% lower than the five-year average. By contrast, Iceland’s was 3.9% lower, Denmark’s was 2.8% lower and Finland’s was 1.7% lower.”
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/01/04/sweden-did-better-than-its-neighbours/
Cholesterol…statins …a whole other can of worms…..40 million Americans are taking statins!
‘Our review of the literature indicates that statin therapy for both primary and secondary prevention of CVD is not warranted for individuals on an LCD with elevated LDL-C who have achieved a low triglyceride/HDL ratio.’
‘….a person on an LCD with a nonatherogenic lipid profile (low TGs/high HDL-C) is more likely to experience the adverse effects of statins including an increased risk of new onset type 2 diabetes, an increase in fasting blood glucose in patients with and without diabetes, mitochondrial dysfunction, tendinopathy, myopathy, acute kidney injury/renal failure and cognitive deficits than benefits.
https://journals.lww.com/co-endocrinology/Fulltext/2022/10000/Statin_therapy_is_not_warranted_for_a_person_with.14.aspx
Cognitive deficits?
‘……the study predicts that the number of people with dementia will go up in every country in the world, resulting in a near tripling in the global rate of dementia.’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(21)00249-8/fulltext
Hmmm………
Great points Monro, and completely echoes what a long career in medicine has taught me.
A simple test of lipid subfractions (which splits LDL into 7 subtypes of which only some are atherogenic) as well as HDL and TG’s can stratify who may benefit from statins.
In my experience, few GP’s know of this test, such is the power of Big Pharma marketing.
The deleterious effects of the mRNA spike protein on the cardiovascular vascular system were theorised years ago – Sucharit Bhakdi – and on a biomolecular level this paper, particularly para. 10 :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
No doubt those to be tasked, lol, with looking at any causal relationship will be well aware of the above.
Maybe I’m stupid, but to my mind we have –
Excess deaths from CVE’s in highly vaxxed countries,
A temporal link with the mRNA vaccines,
Evidence of harmful effects on the immune system/CV system theorised in many papers written by independent experts in their appropriate fields and absence of any coherent rebuttal.
Instead all we do have is a deafening silence from the public face of the medical profession, government and the MSM.
Warning for the jabbed, CVE’s may just be the start of the problems. But no worries, those won’t be investigated either.
CVE’s may just be the start of the problems. But no worries, those won’t be investigated either.
Indeed. It makes me shudder, and I’m unstabbed.
Apologies, ref to above paper should have been to para 14 in as opposed to just para 10
Considering he’s Prof of Evidence Based Medicine, Dr Heneghan sure is reticent about mentioning the word “vaccine”. It’s always the same in his articles. Weird..
The usual suspects would like us to believe that it is. It would support the finances of the manufacturers. As one or two have mentioned Malhotra in their comments, it’s worth noting that he has his own point of view about the large scale use of statins.
Aseem Malhotra is not alone in his view of statins. The International Network of Statin Skeptics has thoroughly trashed the cholesterol/heart disease link but has faced the same stonewalling and denigration that coronavirus vaccine sceptics are now seeing. Statins do reduce cardiac risk, but only a tiny bit, and the effect is almost certainly because of an anti-inflammatory action and not anything to do with their cholesterol-lowering properties – look at the recent introductions which are even better at cholesterol-lowering but no better at reducing cardiac risk. So I think that blaming a (non-existent) reduction in statin prescriptions is ridiculous. As far as being over-cautious with blaming vaccines goes, I think this is wise, as the high vaccination levels run in parallel with the appearance of new virus variants such as Omicron, and it is far from clear yet whether the viral variants confer a differential cardiac risk. It’s also pointed out that the risk of inflammatory cardiac disease is still (probably) higher with infection than with vaccine. Nonetheless it makes more scientific sense to pause the vaccination programme while all of this is sorted than continue, at risk, until the evidence is totally clear-cut.
Dr John Campbell with an inmteresting video on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26zP0YhEdmg
All these heart attacks are due to anything and everything but the real cause – which we all know.
We need to start laughing at the professional liars in Public Health when they come out with such ridiculous statements.
Trying to argue with professional liars using facts doesn’t gain traction. Laughing at them will.
Not listing vaccines as a hypothetical cause to be investigated and quantified alongside e.g. ambulance delays, is in itself suspicious.