Smile Free has often highlighted the utter nonsense espoused by the U.K. Government’s public health experts and plethora of advisers on the issue of community masking. Who can forget the flip-flops of Dr. Jenny Harries and Professors Whitty and Van-Tam in June 2020, transitioning from urging healthy people not to wear face coverings into strident pro-mask advocates? Or the absurd claim of Professor Trish Greenhalgh that science is the “enemy of good policy“? But, not to be outdone, the Scottish leg of the U.K. COVID-19 Inquiry has confirmed that the gobbledegook around masks was not confined to England but also infected the ‘experts’ operating north of the border.
After the extended ramblings of Nicola Sturgeon – trying, in vain, to justify the convenient deletion of all her Covid-related WhatsApp messages – we were treated to the appearances of Professor Jason Leitch (National Clinical Director), Humza Yousaf (Scotland’s First Minister), Colin Poolman (Royal College of Nursing Scotland Director) and Devi Sridhar (Professor of Global Public Health). Chunks of their testimonies constitute a mix of ignorance, a detachment from reality and Monty Pythonesque comedy.
Did anyone understand the mask rules?
Clearly, Humza Yousaf (the then Scottish Health Secretary, no less) didn’t. During Leitch’s appearance at the inquiry it was revealed that, in November 2021, Yousaf asked Leitch whether he needed to wear a mask when stood talking at a social event. Leitch responded:
Officially yes. But literally no one does. Have a drink in your hands at all times. Then you’re exempt. So if someone comes over and you stand, lift your drink… That’s fun. You’ll go down a treat.
When challenged by the Lead Counsel as to whether this was an example of a “work-around” to “get out of complying with the rules”, Leitch’s denial was less than concise:
There was an ambiguity here that I faced as well, as we re-opened in this period, of the country, and that ambiguity was that we were allowing social occasions… And there was an ambiguity around mask-wearing when you were seated, eating, drinking, because these events are – often involve a dinner. And there was some difficulty with the interpretation of mask-wearing inside those rooms when you were eating, drinking or moving around… but there were occasions, particularly when the country was opening up again, where there was of course nuance around the guidance and the rules, and this I think was one of those occasions: when you were at a dinner, eating and drinking, and somebody approached you… I think this was a tricky area that I found tricky as well.
Well, that clears things up!
And – as observed by the KC during his questioning of Yousaf – “When you, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, feel the need to clarify the rules about face masks, what chance do others have in understanding the rules?” When this absurdity was put to Leitch, the Clinical Director’s response was, inadvertently, illustrative of the mask nonsense:
I understood the rules and I understood what we were trying to do, but the reality of life and the environment in which we were trying to do these things perhaps suggests this guidance was nuanced rather than entirely right.
If only our leaders had paid a smidgeon more attention to the “reality of life” we wouldn’t all have had to endure the imposition of masks (or, indeed, many of the other counterproductive Covid restrictions).
If only the masks had been a tad smaller
Colin Poolman, representing the Scottish RCN, lamented that the face masks provided were often too large for the NHS workforce. “Nursing is a predominantly female profession and many of the masks were not designed in smaller sizes so we had huge issues at times,” he told the inquiry, implying that a better-fitting strip of plastic would have provided an effective shield against the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. Given that the use of surgical masks to block respiratory viruses is akin to using a tennis net to hold back grains of sand, it’s hard to see how a bit less of a gap around the edges would have made any significant difference to the level of protection afforded.
Neglect of inconvenient evidence
The wealth of pesky evidence demonstrating that face coverings constitute an ineffectual viral barrier has always been a problematic truth to the pro-mask brigade: their guiding rule seems to be, “If the science doesn’t support our ideological preferences, dismiss it.” In Scotland, the doppelganger to England’s Trish Greenhalgh, appears to be Professor Devi Sridhar.
Sridhar is saturated with globalist credentials. She is Professor of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University and has worked closely with the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the Wellcome Trust and the World Bank. During her testimony at the COVID-19 Inquiry, Sridhar demonstrated a conveniently flexible attitude to empirical research. For instance, while bemoaning that “we spent too long debating whether masks work”, Sridar asserts that “in clinical settings they work, surgeons use them, on construction sites, the mask itself works”. This esteemed academic seems blissfully unaware that surgeons primarily don face coverings to avoid potential exchange of bodily fluids (such as saliva and blood) rather than to reduce the transmission of viruses. And as for construction sites, keeping dust and fragments of concrete and masonry at bay is a somewhat different challenge to avoiding inhalation of microscopic pathogens.
Like many of her pro-mask public health colleagues, Sridhar appears to struggle to grasp what happens in the real world. Thus, she rightly acknowledges that “masks at a population level are often not used correctly, people wear them over their mouth not their nose, they take them off to eat and drink”, but then asserts that “if it is used appropriately it is probably one of the best interventions you can use to protect yourself”. So, apparently, in Sridhar’s surreal ecosphere, if people wore masks perfectly all of the time, never tugged and fiddled with them and – uh – stopped eating and drinking, they would provide some benefit. If only we all lived in a parallel universe.
Sridhar clearly has an emotional attachment to mass masking in the community, perhaps because it chimes with her ideological beliefs about collectivism, the sense that we’re all in it together and must behave in socially responsible ways. Empirical evidence be damned if it does not support one’s political proclivities. This phenomenon is illustrated in Sridhar’s inquiry interview; when the KC states that the science had concluded that public use of face coverings achieved a “near non-existent” degree of benefit, and then asks her, “Is this the sort of debate and discussion that you think we should have bypassed?” Sridhar replies, “Exactly”. It is reasonable to propose that double standards are on display here; if robust studies had found in favour of masks, Sridhar and her ilk would have been screaming it from the Davos rooftops.
Ignorance around mask harms
Throughout the Covid event, there has been one common factor inherent to all the narratives beseeching us to cover our faces with strips of cloth and plastic: a failure to acknowledge the wide-ranging harms of masking healthy people. This omission – due either to ignorance or wilful avoidance – is evident once again in Sridhar’s Covid Inquiry testimony. For instance, in her attempt to defend her partisan championing of community masking, she asserts that “the cost is slight… so, for me, recommending masks seems a low-cost measure of something easy, like hand-washing, you can tell people to do”.
I sometimes imagine engaging in a prolonged attempt to impress upon Sridhar (or, for that matter, any other pro-mask zealot) the raft of negative consequences (physical, social and psychological) associated with routine masking. And, in this thought experiment, I then envision asking her the question, “What possible harms could there be from masking children and adults in healthcare, education and other community settings?” I suspect her response might be something like:
There are no appreciable harms to masking [awkward silence]. Okay, well apart from dermatitis, headaches, perpetuating fear, stunting infants’ cognitive and emotional development; excluding the hard-of-hearing, evoking fatigue, reducing lung efficiency, tormenting the autistic, increasing falls in the elderly, re-traumatising the historically traumatised, the inhalation of micro fibres, concentration impairment, reducing the quality of healthcare, discouraging patients from attending hospital, impeding school learning, the aggravation of existing anxiety problems, encouraging harassment of the mask exempt, enabling criminals to escape conviction, and polluting our towns and waterways .. [deep breath] what possible harms could there be?
I’m sure the Monty Python team would have approved.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign opposed to mask mandates.
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I hope they get the traction they deserve for sticking their necks out. They’re doing it for all of us.
Well said Stewart.
Heroes.
Amen!
The dam will break, folks, we just have to have patience.
In the meantime, we all of us, however insignificant we feel in the grand scheme of things, must use every interaction to be the still, small voice of calm. It’s what I have found the hardest, in the face of such crimes, but it’s the only way to turn the tide against the crooks and their functionaries.
There are the wolves who have eyes only for the sheep. There are the sheep who have eyes only for themselves. Then there are the sheep dogs who must have eyes for both. Pick your role.
There may come a time when it will be necessary to heed Gandhi’s words, but I don’t think it’s just yet…
It is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts, than to wear the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.
Or,
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Thank you, you Indian doctors (and President of the Bar?) for having the chutzpah to call for a halt to this evil exercise. (Didn’t one state go down the ivermectin route and do quite well for peanuts? Uttar Pradesh?). Another small group of professionals micturating into the wind? Is it the sound of one hand clotting? Or crawling towards the tipping point?
Why aren’t the heart surgeons and circulatory specialists (in the UK especially), the consultants and leaders of cardio-vascular professional organisations being doorstepped by journalists and quizzed about what’s happening on the ground? Why aren’t these professionals themselves blowing the whistle on these alarming excess deaths? Because a) there are no journalists anymore, (with very few honourable exceptions) but simply advertorial hacks for big pharma. And b) the heart specialists now have full trolleys even unto the crack of doom. Can it really be that simple?
They have all been bought. There’s money for everyone. Every level has benefitted. Isn’t the Heart Foundation normalising the young dropping down dead on sports fields: it’s always happened, they opine, don’t you remember?
Meanwhile, we merely shuffle about the shambles awaiting our turn. ‘It could be you!’
Buddy, can you spare a D-dimer? But answer came there none.
Would a freedom of information request ever give us the data on how many Cardio consultants and indeed top medics generally had themselves jabbed? When were they given the heads up that the job mandate was only an empty threat to get the weak minded to roll up their sleeves?
I’m assuming a minority of alert GPs (20%?) didn’t take it and nor did their families, but dished it out with gay abandon. Ker-ching, hypocrisy and wilful blindness – there’s a Germanic hybrid word lurking in their somewhere waiting to be coined.
O Mores! Tempura Mores! (Our battered way of life!)
It will take a while for those who have been conned into taking a risk to admit it, as well. If, or when that happens, there could be a severe of loss of reputation for some, which could cause it’s own problems for us all.
Yes, I believe that quite a few higher-ups in health authority/regulatory bodies realise that something isn’t right. The Dutch parliament passed a motion some time back for the excess deaths to be investigated (this was following the excess deaths last autumn, I suspect the elevated/excess and sustained mortality since March 2022 is worse). The public health authority, the RIVM, and the regional health services that were primarily in charge of stabbing people, the GGD, are refusing to provide the data necessary for the investigation, citing privacy reasons. Utter nonsense of course, a 2-second glance at the GDPR shows that public authorities can have access to such data. Plus they had no such qualms announcing x number of people died of corona every day, but now we can’t have a mortality cause?
As far as I’m concerned their refusal to cooperate in something that obviously needs investigating is prima facie evidence they know full well that the vaxx is implicated in some way. If the excess is due to corona, as some are trying to claim, it means the vaxx failed big time, so why continue pushing it? If it is not due to corona nor lockdown health care issues, it must be the vaxx. The only good thing is, discussion is finally starting in the MSM regarding the elevated/excess mortality. People are not stupid, the refusal to find out what is causing it will have more people questioning what is going on.
And so the pendulum swings. Gathering momentum along the way.
I’ve long thought that 3 and 4 in the list above are necessary, and the least that can be done for the stabbed.
Heaven knows how much it might cost, but on what we know right now this is a genuine medical emergency.
A windfall tax on Prizer maybe? Say some $270 billion? (Current market capitalisation.) That should go a long way.
Trouble is, enacting measure 3 and 4 would require an implicit admission on the part of governments, health authorities, and health professionals, that something may be wrong with the stabs.
So expect delay as long as possible, in cynical disregard for the unfortunates they’ve duped.
Yet, as Alex Berenson says, I don’t think that delay can go on much longer.
Makes sense from a health & safety perspective. I wonder if the established medical groups in the DVLA and the CAA will take an interest. The DVLA have a long list of potential medical risks, to which another item could be added. Perhaps they are not allowed to yet, a cynic might say.
This is like a life dingy Vs a nuclear powered aircraft carrier unfortunately. Truth is irrelevant sadly.
I understand your pessimism, I genuinely do but as a rule the truth will out – it’s just a matter of time. A cliché I know but it’s generally accurate. Of course concerning vaccines we’ve this rather bizarre and arrogant impression that they’re the best thing since sliced bread – with little definitive evidence to back that up (even conventional vaccines we’ve had for decades, not these latest gene shot doppelgangers masquerading as such, which to anyone with eyes can see something is profoundly wrong).
I hate to bring politics into this but it’s clearly been a factor this time around. What’s at odds is this inversion of perception and scepticism where those who would’ve normally have sounded the alarm over big pharma and their insidious behaviour are the ones predominantly cheerleading this along – the typical left-leaning liberal who’s naturally suspicious of big business, perhaps rightly so, who’s traditionally and openly admit are out for profit (sometimes profit alone – but you have to sell a good product to succeed so at least we know where we stand). In this case though the left have this massive blindspot and it’s been those on the right who have ironically been the ones raising the flag. Why this is I’m yet to fully understand but I think it comes down to the left’s main ideological achilleas in that they’re proponents of everything government, so once they’re on board you can pretty much “sell” them anything if it’s sanctioned by authority – even if it comes from big business, those who they claim to distrust and require extensive regulation (that’s turned out well, the irony).
On a side note and not that I’m of any specific opinion, I’m not qualified, but even the existence of viruses and germ theory is contested, that’s why it’s called “theory”. Pharma is perhaps one of the largest if not the biggest lobbying business, becoming such a behemoth it’s almost beyond reproach, especially once it’s intertwined within government with no sign of abating so even basic questions like these are never even explored.
All being said, and I’m sure this has been proposed many times before, especially in regards to the pharmaceutical industry’s corruption but let’s hope their blatant overreach on this occasion will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back… at least eventually.
The narrative has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being jabbed.
The link below is to a Facebook page by Global News in Canada. The main report is by a 24 year old reporter, called Matthew Rodrigopulle, that seems to encourage parents of young children to receive a booster injection. Although, to be fair, the reporter does include an interview with a sceptical parent.
Just below the main report is a memorial for the reporter who has just died suddenly and unexpectedly of an unknown cause.
A word of warning: the top report contains distressing images of masked young children being injected.
https://ne-np.facebook.com/GlobalSaskatoon/videos/children-aged-5-to-11-eligible-for-covid-19-booster/5037172826387223/
I just looked again and the memorial for the reporter has disappeared.
Pretty well sums up everything I have been thinking and saying in my little corner of the medical world for the last year. Just added my signature.
I am extremely glad to see the term ‘so called vaccines’ being used.
Dr Shoemaker Double jabbed children in UK 5200-8200% more likely to die
https://rumble.com/v1hl9y3-dr-shoemaker-double-jabbed-children-in-uk-5200-8200-more-likely-to-die.html
This 4 minute video is a must watch.
Yellow Boards By The Road … for the love of humanity … and all the dead children
Monday 12th September 3pm to 4pm
Yellow Boards
Junction A332 Windsor Rd &
A329 London Road
Ascot SL5 8FE
Wednesday 14th September 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction A4 Bath Road &
Pound Lane Sonning
Wokingham RG4 6TB
Thursday 15th September 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction B3408 London Road &
Wokingham Road
Bracknell RG42 4FH
Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Bracknell
South Hill Park, Rear Lawn, RG12 7PA
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Unfortunately the timing of the release of this information is not ideal. From last Thursday until September 19th the attention of the world’s media is focused on the death of a 96 year old lady.
God Bless these brave doctors.