Over 2,500 doctors, scientists and healthcare professionals are among over 10,000 people supporting an open letter calling on NHS bosses to end the mask mandates that are still in force in many U.K. hospitals.
According to campaign group Smile Free, which is behind the letter, up to a fifth of U.K. hospitals are still insisting on masks. The letter calls on NHS Chief Executives to issue new guidance explicitly discouraging the practice. Here it is in full.
You are a leader within an organisation, the NHS, whose overarching purpose is to optimise the health and wellbeing of the population it serves. So why are you condoning the persistence – in some of your hospitals – of a practice that is both ineffectual and harmful, namely the requirement for staff, patients and visitors to wear a face mask?
It has long been recognised that masks offer no appreciable protection against viral infections (see here for a review), even when worn by healthcare professionals in surgical settings (see here and here). A recent Cochrane review – the gold standard of scientific evaluation – reached the same conclusion and new research has found that masks made “no discernible difference” to Covid transmission rates in hospitals.
Wasting precious NHS resources on an ineffectual practice is troubling enough, but of even more concern is the damage you are inflicting upon your staff and service users. Routine masking, particularly for long periods of time, is increasingly recognised to be associated with a wide range of physical, psychological and social harms (see here for an overview). Furthermore, a recent research study highlighted the potential risks of elevated carbon dioxide levels associated with long-term mask wear, particularly for children, adolescents and pregnant mothers.
While the scientific evidence is important, it is the human costs of routine masking in healthcare settings that forcefully bring home the dire consequences of this irrational practice: the exclusion of the hard-of-hearing; the re-traumatising of the historically abused; the increased risk of falls in the elderly; the exacerbation of confusion in the already confused; the aggravation of the autistic, anxious and panic-prone; the marginalisation of already-stigmatised groups; and the impediment to the goal of soothing the frightened child or suicidal teenager. Faceless interactions impede the development of healing relationships. Humane healthcare, delivered with demonstrable warmth and compassion, will always be more effective than the robotic version emitted by a faceless professional hidden behind a veneer of sterility.
Given that many hospitals have already returned to normality, some of your healthcare venues are now outliers in persisting with the unscientific and pervasively damaging mass-masking phenomenon. The vague guidance issued by NHS England and NHS Improvement on June 1st 2022, for example, effectively left this decision to local policymakers. You are presiding over a postcode lottery, with masking decisions made by individuals for arbitrary reasons. Consequently, many – often vulnerable – service users continue to endure a suboptimal service.
We are almost one year on from the previous guidance issued by NHS England and in that time all that has happened is that the case for masking – already flimsy, at best – has been discredited even further. We are at the point now where the officially sanctioned continuation of what amounts to magical thinking in some of our hospitals discredits the NHS.
It is time to move on from masks, once and for all.
We therefore urge you, as the Chief Executive of the NHS in your country, to do the right thing and show leadership by immediately issuing clear new guidance explicitly discouraging any routine requirement for staff, patients or visitors to cover their faces in healthcare settings.
You can read and sign the open letter here.
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I’m surprised it was so little. Were the flags and whatnot hung up and taken down by volunteers free of charge? Was there no formal risk management effort expended? There may not be a line item for it but I’ll bet the lost opportunity costs were far higher than half a million quid.
100%. I would bet it was several orders of magnitude greater than £500k across the entire public sector.
And added to the ‘P’ tax payer bill is all the money spent in schools ( mine included) on numerous flags small and impressive huge hanging ones! Party food teachers time, wigs hats and so on. The flags remained hanging like the third reich headquarters outside until the last day of term, July!!!! Not just June, Why we know! We all staff and students and visitors had to walk past them to enter or leave the building as the colours caught our every gaze, setting the scene for educational setting!!
As students left on their last day at school EVER they were clapped as they paraded past these flags and proud parents took videos and photos, just to add to the visual brainwashing as these pics will adorn family albums with cult rainbows in the background of smiling young faces as they leave their school, to brainwash the next family generations into the ‘new world not for old souls’ that now presides.
When Labour get in their ideologue canvass has been helpfully primed by the cowardly government so if you don’t wear the flag by then you will be marked out? Cancel gulags for me then.
I think the taxpayer should not be funding anything that is not core to a specific public service .
The list includes brainwashing events like this, BLM,Climate Alarmists , all charities that get any cash from any public organisation .
Also the whole Arts and Culture bandwagon .I really do not think we should be funding experimental , Lesbian Art Exhibitions from Upper Volta or similar .
Lets not forget overseas aid while we are at it beyond short term disaster relief.
Just off to complete my application for support for a 2month Christian, St George and the Hetrosexual Festival .I am sure old Khan has a pot of money put aside for such causes.
I will not be holding my breathe though ..
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Sadiq Khan you are a clown, use the funding to but some Ronald McDonald big red boots so we can hear you flop around London, I really find it amazing,. that anyone could’ve been a bigger clown than Boris, but you are winning that crown by a mile,.resign now please, so we don’t have to listen to any more of your stupidity!!