Tag: face masks

New Study Finds Mask Mandate Failed to Reduce COVID Deaths, Hospitalizations, or Cases

A new study published in the The Southern Medical Journal (SMJ) found that a county-wide mask order in Bexar County, Texas, did not lead to a reduction in COVID-19 hospitalization rates or deaths.

The study, which was peer reviewed, analyzed data before and after mandates were imposed at both the state level (July 3, 2020) and in Bexar County (July 5, 2020), Texas’s fourth largest county.

“We defined the control period as June 2 to July 2 and the postmask order period as July 8, 2020–August 12, 2020, with a 5-day gap to account for the median incubation period for cases; longer periods of 7 and 10 days were used for hospitalization and ICU admission/death, respectively,” the study authors wrote. “Data were reported on a per-100,000 population basis using respective US Census Bureau–reported populations.”

Authors of the study, which was reviewed by the US Army Institute of Surgical Research, analyzed the daily average number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, ICU visits, patients on ventilators, and deaths, and concluded the policy did not reduce any of these metrics.

“All of the measured outcomes were higher on average in the postmask period as were covariables included in the adjusted model,” the researchers said. “There was no reduction in per-population daily mortality, hospital bed, ICU bed, or ventilator occupancy of COVID-19-positive patients attributable to the implementation of a mask-wearing mandate.”

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Forbes deletes article alleging psychological trauma in mask-wearing for kids

Forbes removed an article that alleges psychological damage of mask-wearing in kids after it was shared on Twitter and started to get traction. The ideas shared in the article contradict the public health bodies and government advisories on the importance of mask-wearing.

The article discouraging mask-wearing in kids went viral after it was shared by Twitter user NYC Angry Mom. They encouraged people to read the article, adding: “I’m just speechless that someone finally understands that masks on children are not benign.”

The tweet had been shared at least 400 times.

The deleted article (archive) was written by Zak Ringelstein, a PhD holder in Education at Columbia university and founder of Zigadoo, an educational and developmental app for kids.

Ringelstein begins the article by describing how he has spent his career advocating for the removal of standardized testing because of “the havoc it has wreaked on the mental health and well-being of American schoolchildren, especially kids from low-income families.”

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Biden Keeps Pushing Dubious Arguments for CDC Supremacy

The Supreme Court last week rejected the idea that Congress gave the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the power to stop landlords from evicting tenants who fail to pay their rent. Unfazed by that setback, the Biden administration this week suggested that the CDC has the power to demand that every public school in the country force students to wear face masks.

Both incidents show how readily President Joe Biden deploys dubious legal arguments to defend unprecedented power grabs in the name of fighting COVID-19. If successful, those arguments would undermine federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.

The CDC argued that evictions could promote COVID-19 transmission by forcing people to move into “congregate or shared living setting[s].” It said its moratorium therefore was authorized by a 1944 law that allows regulations deemed “necessary” to prevent the interstate spread of “communicable diseases.”

Like most of the federal judges who have addressed the issue, the Supreme Court did not buy that argument. “It is hard to see what measures this interpretation would place outside the CDC’s reach,” it noted, “and the Government has identified no limit…beyond the requirement that the CDC deem a measure ‘necessary.'”

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Dr. Scott Atlas: Science Killed Itself Over COVID-19

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.

Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.

Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.

Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.

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Elizabeth Warren Parties Maskless With Deb Haaland And Real American Indians

Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared to join real American Indians Saturday when she partied maskless in defiance of New Mexico’s mask mandate at Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s wedding.

Photos obtained and published by the Washington Free Beacon show Warren with the first American Indian cabinet secretary at a tribal resort in a state where Democrat Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has reimposed indoor mask requirements regardless of vaccination status.

“The re-implemented mask requirement applies to all individuals aged 2 and older in all indoor public settings — except when eating or drinking,” Grisham’s office wrote in an Aug. 17 press release with the policy expiration date set for Sept. 15.

A spokesman for the Interior Department wrote in an emailed statement to The Federalist “guests were required to be vaccinated and wear masks,” to be “consistent with CDC guidance and New Mexico’s public health orders.”

But Saturday’s maskless celebrations, illustrated by photos from the Free Beacon, mark the latest episode of Democrats skirting restrictive COVID protocols imposed by their own statist politicians within liberal enclaves of the country.

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CDC study: School mask mandates don’t work

Amid the intense battle over mask mandates, New York magazine noted a large-scale study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found no statistically significant difference in schools that required students to wear masks compared to schools where masks were optional.

The study analyzed some 90,000 elementary students in 169 Georgia schools from Nov. 16 to Dec. 11.

“The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional,” the CDC said.

“This finding might be attributed to higher effectiveness of masks among adults, who are at higher risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection but might also result from differences in mask-wearing behavior among students in schools with optional requirements.”

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The ACLU Is Suing To Give The Government More Power To Mask Your Kids

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing South Carolina over a ban on mask mandates in schools.

Earlier this summer, the South Carolina state legislature passed a budget bill with conditions prohibiting school districts from using government funds to “require that its students and/or employees wear a face mask at any of its education facilities.” Scientific studies are clear that COVID-19 transmission among children is much lower than among adults but that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration, the CDC, teachers’ unions, and now the ACLU from pushing for students and vaccinated teachers to mask up this fall.

The leftist activist group, which represents several parents of children with disabilities and other groups, is targeting Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, his administration, and certain school districts for prohibiting face-covering requirements because they say the rule “effectively exclude[s] these students with disabilities from participation in the public education system, in violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act].”

“School districts with students who have disabilities, including underlying medical conditions, that make them more likely to contract and/or become severely ill from a COVID-19 infection have a legal obligation to ensure that those children can attend school with the knowledge that the school district has followed recommended protocols to ensure their safety,” the lawsuit states, citing the CDC’s anti-science universal masking protocols for children as young as two years old.

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65 Studies Reveals Face Masks DO Cause Physical Harm

Newly published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a team of German researchers acknowledge that theirs is the first comprehensive investigation into the adverse health effects that masks can cause — a surprising fact considering that many countries around the world introduced universal mask wearing in public spaces for containing SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 as a mandatory health policy without investigating nor communicating to their citizens the true risks of masks, hence violating informed consent.

According to the German research team, their work is designed to “provide a first, rapid, scientific presentation of the risks of general mandatory mask use by focusing on the possible adverse medical effects of masks, especially in certain diagnostic, patient and user groups.”

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CDC Buries Study Finding That Student Masking Has ‘No Statistically Significant Benefit’

Less than three months ago, the Centers for Disease Control published a mostly-ignored, large-scale study of Covid-19 transmission in US schools which concluded that while masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation was associated with lower levels of virus transmission in schools – social distancing, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and forcing students to wear masks did not result in a statistically significant benefit.

A few major news outlets covered its release by briefly reiterating the study’s summary: that masking then-unvaccinated teachers and improving ventilation with more fresh air were associated with a lower incidence of the virus in schools. Those are common-sense measures, and the fact that they seem to work is reassuring but not surprising. Other findings of equal importance in the study, however, were absent from the summary and not widely reported. These findings cast doubt on the impact of many of the most common mitigation measures in American schools. Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit. In other words, these measures could not be said to be effective. -NYMag

According to the report, scientists believe that the CDC’s decision to intentionally omit the findings on student masking from a summary of the study amounts to “file drawering” the findings – the practice of burying studies that don’t have statistically significant results.

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