There is no solid proof masks ever slowed the spread of Covid and they may have made things worse, England’s former Deputy Chief Medical Officer said on Wednesday. The Mail has more.
Professor Dame Jenny Harries, who now heads up the U.K. Health Security Agency, said the evidence that coverings reduced transmission is “uncertain” because it is difficult to separate their effect from other Covid curbs.
She also told the U.K.’s Covid Inquiry that Government advice on how to make a mask using two pieces of cloth was “ineffective”.
Studies showed at least three were needed for even a small effect on the spread of viruses, Dame Jenny said.
Meanwhile, she warned advice for the public to wear masks during the pandemic may even have given people a “false sense of security” that they could reduce their risk of becoming infected if they wore one while mixing with others.
Dame Jenny wrote in her witness statement that the evidence base for using face masks in the community “was, and still is to some degree, uncertain”.
She noted that the evidence for mask wearing varied depending on what materials it was made from. For example, a “one or two layer cloth covering” is “not particularly effective”, she said.
And if someone doesn’t wear it properly – fully covering the mouth and nose – “it won’t work”, Dame Jenny added.
Wait for it – she’ll be referring to the results from the actual randomised controlled trials next.
So will Tom Jefferson, Carl Heneghan and everyone else who has been pilloried for pointing this out all along now get an apology?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Watch Dame Jenny Harries admit that the masking policy was not evidence-based, that masks were “ineffective” as a prophylactic against infection and may have made people more vulnerable to infection by giving them a false sense of security.
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These nonladies and ungentleman have learnt the lessons of the pandemic well: Someone who’s in control of the megaphones can tell an unlimited amount of plain lies unchallenged. There was no summer in 2021, it just kept raining until autumn. Then, preciously few warm and somewhat dry weeks followed before it started getting cold again. With the exception of April, winter 2021/ 2022 basically lasted until the first week of July. There was plenty of rain and more often than not, it was so uncomfortably cold that I had to turn the heating on. I’ve never done that in June before. Come July, sort-of sommer came. Often overcast and rather cool but with longer pauses between the downpours. In the middle of this exactly three warm (not hot) days occurred. This doesn’t make an extreme heatwave and BBC employees who keep claiming the contrary and who know very well that they’re lying shouldn’t wonder why annoyed people keep calling them out on that.
Was it at least a safe and effective heatwave?
We’ve had some average July days this year, two really hot days thanks to a particular weather system, that was followed by a week of below average temperature and above average rainfall. Now it’s back to July norms. Overall I’d guess this July’s average temperature was middle to slightly low compared to the multi-year average.
There’s a technically interesting article in the Udraigna on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/uk-farmers-count-cost-as-heatwave-kills-fruit-and-vegetable-crops
The first interesting thing to note here is that the top heading and the sub heading already differ in meaning, the top heading claiming a catastrophe (of sorts) occurred while the sub heading states that a catastrophe might occur if more extreme heat caused by clima crisis materializes. Chances are that the point of the sub headline is mostly to put extreme heat and clima crisis in one sentence, thereby implying a factually wrong cause-and-effect relation.
Half of the article is composed of quotes from a guy running a green wholesale business for fruit and vegetables in London. This is basically just a lot of handwaiving as no London business man has any first-hand experience of growing stuff in the fields somewhere out of London. The most amusing one is his assertion that he had faced a day long shortage of berries because they had all been cooked out in the open. As the cooking temperature of water is 100C and not 40C (at Heathrow), this certainly didn’t happen. As the next sentence reveals, this was really because fewer berries were picked for a couple of days, followed by the assertion that there could be real trouble of more hot spells occurred.
It then switches to farmers being concerned about the possible effects of the recent dry spell, implying that a few weeks without rain (we haven’t seen yet) would be somehow uncommon and dangerous during the summer months. Farmers – obviously – doesn’t refer to farmers but to another pencil pusher, namely, the deputy secretary of the union of farmers. Again, nothing has happened so far, but if different stuff would happen in future, there could well be difficulties in future.
— I really wish I was better at describing this, IMHO, the article is a textbook example of lying by implication while accurately reporting that nothing happened —
I was reading today that British winegrowers don’t want any rain because they are going to have the best wine year ever if the dry weather continues. My own observations show bumper crops of fruit coming on the trees and the wheat still standing, waiting to be harvested, has ripened perfectly (as opposed to some recent years where it has gone black on the stalk due to the wet). Even some blackberries are ready to pick.
According to the Met office, the definition of a heatwave is FIVE consecutive days of very high temperatures…not the one and a half we had the other week – Monday was Costa del Sol hot, Tuesday started that way, but by the afternoon it was raining. Call that a heatwave? No, Met office, you can’t because it b****y wasn’t you dorks.
The climate changer dream summer was 2018 which it was really unpleasantly hot and dry for an unusually long time. Since then, they’ve been trying to rerun this based on media fantasies every summer (with the exception of 2020 and 2021, when these clowns of doom were too occupied with COVID to care for the weather). 2018 was also the last year when we had normal weather forecasts in summer instead of climate catastrophe nudging by swapping the informational map showing a green outline of the country with cloud, sun and rain symbols to indicate local weather conditions to one using a gradient of light red to dark red calibrated such that the highest temperatures expected on a certain day get the darkest red, regardless of what these temperatures actually are. Any other information which used to be on this map has been silently dropped.
I’d really like to ask this BBC meteorlogist of 25 years why the BBC has chosen to remove the cloudy/ rainy/ sunny/ windy symbols from the overview map in favour of focussing exclusively on temperatures indicated in colours commonly associated with mortal danger from fire. There’s certainly no science which has determined that clouds, rain and wind don’t occur over England anymore. Hence, the BBC is selectively withholding important meteorological information about the actual weather in England in its visualizations of the weather forecast. What’s the rationale behind this?
Great points but this stopped being about observable reality, demonstrable fact and science long ago.
Crybullies, as they are known, have been a long established tactic of the left. It’s pretty easy to do:
Step 1, stoke up anger with a series of unprovoked inflammatory and/or abusive social media posts.
Step 2, cry victim when you get the inevitable backlash. If you are an A-lister this involves a sympathetic appearance on the BBC or in The Guardian.
The best way to deal with a crybully is to give them something to cry about, lol.
For most climate alarmists it’s a fashionable bourgeoise religion and one that ties in nicely with their pathological snobbery and their desire to tell the ghastly stinky little people how to live their lives. But for the BBC – the Grand Muftis of the sect – it’s more serious. They have most of their pensions invested in carbon trading and so-called renewables. The pyramid is collapsing and the only way they think they can shore up its foundations is by calling in ever more frequent truck loads of tax payer funded junk science bullshit, otherwise it’s goodbye gold plated pensions.
Driest July since 1935 according to met office as reported by the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62382703
Not sure how wet July 1976 was or July 2003.
This is the same bullshit as with the global temperatures: They’re averaging different rainfall measurements to arrive at a fictional England-wide level of rain. Mathematically, averages are subject to distortions by outliers and regardless of that, averaging measurements of different quantities still makes no sense.
A sensible way to present this information would be something like the “We’re on fire!” temperature map, just using a neutral colour (eg, light grey to dark gray) which would show how much rain was measured where. One could also create a so-called histogram by adding measurements rounded to mm of the same value together and present the outcome as 2D-plot. One could get then an idea of weather trends by calculating the average number of entries in each category for a number of years.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, more basic working with numerical data. When the Met Office doesn’t do this, either the people working there are very unqualified or a serious presentation of rainfall data would not suit itself to the intended kind of headlines.
I came across a speech made by Hitler in Munich in 1937. He emphasises community, much like Twitter, Facebook and the New World Order gangs.
“…And that brings us to the problem of freedom! Freedom, yes! Insofar as the interest of the national community gives the individual freedom, it is given! Where the freedom affects or even impairs the interest of the national community, the freedom of the individual ceases! Then the freedom of the national community takes the place of the freedom of the individual.”
If you’re stupid enough to watch the BBC you get what you deserve. They’re a propagandist organisation; they pump out propaganda.
Turn it off.
On a positive note. Greta Thumberg has just won (for the 3rd consecutive year) the award for “International Truant of the Year”
The 4-year contract for broadband services costing £70 billion sounds like a modest Government programme to manipulate our lifestyles.
The £70bn contract went to a small company called Place Group Ltd, which in its last published accounts had 2 employees.
Correct. More about this surprising contract award here:
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/small-company-cornwall-awarded-giant-7407664
Most people promoting net zero and a climate change “emergency” are not scientistists and Marr is a typical example. I listem to the view of those scientists who have studied climate and what has efffected it over billions of years rather than people whose opinion is based on what happened in the last few weeks. Most real climate scientists tell us that CO2 generated by humankind has a very minor impact on climate compared to a whole list of other factors that mankind can neither impact or control. There is no current climate emergency apart from that generated by politicians and companies that benefit from the idea of it.
The climate crisis scam that is reaching a scope of almost 1 trillion per year worldwide. This is all funded by tax money from rich Western Countries treasuries using Non Profits NGOs, fake charities, billionaire class trust funds & charities, University grants & government funded agencies. Tens of thousands are making a living & rely on peddling this religion for their livelihood. Climate change only occurs in rich western countries for a reason. This climate crisis will not end until rich Western Countries stop allowing abuse of their tax systems.