Tag: face masks

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy Refuses To Acknowledge the Government’s Misrepresentation of Mask Research

In a recent interview with The New York Times, former White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci conceded that face masks had, at best, a modest overall impact on coronavirus transmission during the pandemic. “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins—maybe 10 percent,” he said. “But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”

This week CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about Fauci’s gloss, which she said might be perceived as “an extremely significant statement,” because “we were told it didn’t matter what kind of mask [we wore].” She also noted that children were required to wear masks in schools and day care centers, adding that “none of them wore them the right way.” The contrast between that frequently mandatory advice and what Fauci is saying now, Burnett suggested, is “upsetting to a lot of people.”

Murthy’s response illustrates the persistent difficulty that public health officials have in speaking honestly about this subject. He conceded that shifting government health advice “can be disconcerting” but said “sometimes guidance does evolve over time as you learn more.” He also allowed that the pandemic “has been incredibly hard for a lot of people, especially kids and parents.” And he mentioned “greater loneliness and isolation” as one consequence of the pandemic, saying the Biden administration is working on “a national strategy to address loneliness.”

The one thing Murthy did not address was the substance of Burnett’s question. Fauci’s current summary of the evidence, she noted, contradicts what public health officials told us during the pandemic. “Do you understand,” Burnett asked, why people might view that contradiction as “extremely significant” and “upsetting”? Murthy evidently does not understand that, even though it goes to the heart of the government’s credibility when it purports to tell us what science says about the effectiveness of disease control measures.

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UK Study Finds “No Evidence” Face Masks Protect Vulnerable Against COVID

A report published by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) found that “no evidence could be presented” to prove medical-grade face masks protected vulnerable people from COVID.

The study investigated whether so-called high quality masks such as N95, KN95 and FFP2 coverings helped protect vulnerable people in the community from catching the virus.

“The review did not identify any studies for inclusion, and so could provide no evidence to answer the research question,” the authors concluded.

“No studies matching the inclusion criteria were found, so no evidence could be presented.”

Well, there goes the narrative.

Prof Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at the University of Oxford, noted that it was a “significant failing” that there were virtually no high quality trials showing that face masks were effective at preventing infection.

“I do not understand why there’s been a lack of will to do high-quality trials in this area,” he told the Telegraph. “We have completely failed to address this issue and I actually consider that to be an issue that the [Covid] inquiry needs to look at.”

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NYPD Wants Businesses to Require Customers Remove Masks

The New York Police Police Department is advising businesses to ask patrons to take off their masks before entry in light of the high number of thefts and robberies across the city.

Removing face masks should be made a “condition of entry,” NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said at a press conference last week, noting that criminals have been taking advantage of masks to avoid detection on surveillance cameras.

“People are coming up to our businesses, sometimes with masks, sometimes masks, hoods and latex gloves, and they’re being buzzed in, they’re being allowed to enter into the store and then we have a robbery or some kind of property being stolen,” Maddrey said.

“We are asking the businesses to make this a condition of entry: That people, when they come in, they show their face, they should identify themselves,” he continued. “And if they feel like they want to put their mask on after they identify themselves for their safety, by all means, they should do so.”

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most businesses in the city would block customers from entering the premises with masks on, according to the police chief. But taking in masked customers is now “a way of life.”

“Since the pandemic, this is a way of life for us, where people wear masks regularly,” he said. “But we’re seeing this being used too much as a ruse to enter into businesses and to victimize our businesses.”

“We need our businesses to be proactive and do their due diligence. We need to make sure people are identifying themselves,” Maddrey said.

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BLM Rioters Get $6M Because Cops Didn’t Wear Face Masks

The Black Lives Matter race riots in New York City were among the worst in the country. Racist mobs injured hundreds of police officers, started fires, looted stores and vandalized parks and statues. At least 450 businesses, many of them small and family owned, were damaged or looted by the rioters who claimed to be angry over the drug overdose death of George Floyd: a vicious career criminal who had previously robbed a woman by putting a gun to her stomach.

While Black Lives Matter was swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars, funneled to it by radical nonprofits, major corporations and Hollywood celebrities, family businesses in New York City looted by those rioters were offered a maximum of $10,000 to rebuild their shattered lives.

One small business owner in the Bronx complained that it would hardly even begin to cover the $200,000 in damages to her store after rioters “smashed glass display cases and medical equipment”. But participants in an extremist group’s Bronx protest are getting a much better deal. New York City will be paying $21,500 to each of the “protesters” in the Bronx for a total of as much as $6 million. And none of that money will be going to the looted businesses.

This has been described as the largest payout for mass arrests in American history.

The BLM riot era class action lawsuit claimed, among other things that the, “police officers responding to protests frequently failed to wear masks or to assist detained protesters in covering their noses and mouths, and on occasion even forcibly removed protesters’ masks, exposing protesters to a heightened risk of contracting COVID-19.”

Family businesses lost everything and cops and civilians were badly wounded during the BLM riots, but the police officers didn’t always wear masks when trying to control those riots.

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Gaslighting: “Conspiracy Theories” Already Proven True in 2023

Preppers get called conspiracy theorists a lot.  It’s supposed to be demeaning, but considering how many conspiracy theories have been proven correct lately, I no longer consider it an insult.  The more time goes by, the more “conspiracy theorists” just seem ahead of the game.

Quite a few “conspiracy theories” have recently come to light as actual facts in 2023 already. And it’s only the beginning of March.

Let’s look at a recent batch of “conspiracy theories” that aren’t really theories any more.

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CDC Director Suggests It Will NEVER Change Child Masking Policy

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky suggested during congressional testimony Tuesday that the organisation will never change its policy on masking for children, despite multiple studies showing that the face coverings do nothing to stop the spread of COVID.

During a hearing in the House on the government’s response to the pandemic, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers asked Walensky if the CDC is going to consider revising its guidance on masking in schools (which is still happening in many areas of the country) in the wake of perhaps the most extensive study yet confirming that masks are not effective.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, is the strongest science to date refuting the basis for mask mandates worldwide.

The CDC still recommends masking in areas with “high” rates of transmission (fewer than 4% of US counties, as Just the News notes), along with indoor masking in areas with “medium” rates of transmission (27%).

Walensky effectively dismissed the Cochrane review, claiming the study “only includes randomised clinical trials,” and that those trials were “for other respiratory viruses, not COVID 19.”

She continued, “Our guidance for school-based masking is related to our COVID-19 community levels. Unfortunately, we’re in a place now in this country where most of our country is in green or yellow. Has low to moderate transmission communicable levels. And in those communities we don’t recommend masking. We recommend it for high level communities.”

Then came the kicker, as the CDC head stated “our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time. It changes with the disease.”

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Evidence-based medicine publisher held up mask meta-study because it lacked ‘right answer’: author

November 2020 was a busy month for published scientific research that could have undermined developing COVID-19 policies, if released a few months sooner.

That’s when the CDC divulged that Red Cross blood samples from the previous winter revealed that 2% of donors from the West Coast had COVID antibodies in mid-December 2019, raising the question of how “15 days to slow the spread” could work in March 2020.

The researchers behind a Danish randomized controlled trial (RCT) of mask-wearers that ended in June 2020 finally reported their findings — no effect on infection rates — five months later after struggling to find a major publisher.

The first update of mask meta-research in nine years, covering studies through January 2020, also finally came out 10 months later, likewise showing no effect on respiratory infections. 

That review’s findings were reaffirmed in an update last week by the same group of specialists in charge of “acute respiratory infections” for Cochrane, an international research collaborative often deemed the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine.

An ARI group member had harsh words for Cochrane in an interview Sunday with medical scientist-turned-journalist Maryanne Demasi, accusing the U.K.-based medical charity of stifling and undermining his group’s 2020 review to minimize its impact on developing COVID policies.

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Massive Peer-Reviewed Mask Study Shows ‘Little To No Difference’ In Preventing COVID, Flu Infection

A massive international research collaboration that analyzed several dozen rigorous studies focusing on “physical interventions” against COVID-19 and influenza found that they provide little to no protection against infection or illness rates.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, is the strongest science to date refuting the basis for mask mandates worldwide.

And of course, the CDC still recommends masking in areas with “high” rates of transmission (fewer than 4% of US counties, as Just the News notes), along with indoor masking in areas with “medium” rates of transmission (27%).

Masks are still required in educational institutions in Democratic strongholds such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington and California, according to the Daily Mail. Boston Public Schools denied its “temporary masking protocol” in early January was a “mandate,” following a public letter against the policy by student Enrique Abud Evereteze.

South Korea is still requiring masks on public transport and in medical facilities after dropping COVID mandates in most indoor settings, including gyms, Monday, Reuters reported. -Just the News

According to the Cochrane study, which included the work of researchers at institutions in the  U.K., Canada, Australia, Italy and Saudi Arabia, a total of 78 studies were analyzed. Most recent additions to the meta-analysis were 11 new randomized controlled trials.

As unlisted study author Carl Heneghan – who directs the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford noted on Twitter: “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.”

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Pro-Mask Crusader Trish Greenhalgh Plumbs New Depths of Distortion

Pro-mask crusader Professor Trish Greenhalgh recently plumbed new depths of distortion and misinformation in her relentless mission to force humankind to hide their faces behind strips of cloth or plastic. In a nine-minute interview with Rachel Burden on BBC Radio 5 Live on January 4th 2023, Greenhalgh (Professor of Primary Health Care Sciences at the University of Oxford) starkly revealed much that is awry with the official wear-a-mask narrative. Indeed, the untruths were so blatant that the official ‘fact checkers’ intervened.

To convey the flavour of Greenhalgh’s warped take on the science of masks in reducing viral transmission, here is a transcript of part of the interview:

Rachel Burden: What is the evidence that masks reduce spread, because this is a thing that a lot of our listeners have a real problem with?

Trish Greenhalgh: It’s got to reduce spread, hasn’t it… there’s absolutely no doubt that the virus can’t get through the holes in the mask.

RB: Can you point to scientific data to show this?

TG: Yes, absolutely… there are many studies that show if people are wearing a mask, if I’m wearing a mask and you’re wearing a mask, the chance of me passing on the virus to you goes down dramatically to about 2% of what it was if neither of us was wearing a mask. So the idea that masks don’t work is a sort of meme; it’s disinformation. … Over time, [mask wearing] is going to bring the virus under control very quickly.

If you go back to when we introduced mask mandates first – I think it was back in June/July 2020 – cases were going up very, very rapidly and then the mask mandate brought them under control, oh, within weeks, within a couple of weeks.

RB: Did it? Was it just the mask mandate? Was it not other factors at play?

TG: Of course it was other factors at play. This is a mathematical thing… you have to feed all that data into a computer… the science is really clear… [If you’re wearing a mask] you’re much less likely to catch the virus from the air.

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Outrageous but unsurprising: Canadian judge tosses case against guards who killed a woman for not wearing a mask

Toronto hospital security guards killed a woman in March of 2020. For not pulling up a mask while suffering from breathing difficulties.

They were originally charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence, but a judge has tossed the case because … reasons.

There isn’t much dispute about what happened, although one of the guards involved intentionally turned a security camera away from the scene of the crime as it was happening, and another lied to police about what happened. He later was forced to admit to deceiving investigators when he was shown security footage contradicting his statement.

That’s OK though. He apologized, saying “I would have never said the things I said in there if I knew there was a video.” All good, then. That’s some world-class remorse.

The case seems pretty cut and dried. Danielle Stephanie Warriner, who suffered from COPD came to the hospital due to, unsurprisingly, breathing problems. She was admitted to the hospital, and was sitting in a hallway wearing PPE. She had lowered her mask due to her breathing problems. Guards approached her to enforce a mask mandate. She didn’t comply, again presumably because she had trouble breathing.

The guards donned PPE, demanded she don the mask, and then threw her against the wall almost immediately. While claiming that she struck them first, the video shows that this wasn’t true.

Right after throwing her to a wall, a different guard redirects the camera away from the incident, hiding what was happening. He “panicked,” so turning the camera away clearly didn’t show any consciousness of guilt, right?

Witnesses report the guards threw her to the ground, held her there in exactly the same manner that George Floyd was restrained (knee to the back using body weight). Only she had taken no meth or fentanyl. She was a 125-pound woman with breathing difficulties, as she told them.

They handcuffed her while unconscious and kept her restrained using a knee to the back. She stopped breathing. The guards load her into a wheelchair and eventually notice this fact and call for doctors. She subsequently died from her injuries, having never returned to consciousness.

The guards killed her. A women in respiratory distress in a hospital hallway, there to be treated.

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