Tag: face masks

They’re keeping their masks on. Their reasons extend beyond their health.

When federal health officials recently announced that fully vaccinated people no longer have to wear masks in most situations, Jaz Johnson was among those who kept hers on.

Johnson, 46, of Kansas City, Missouri, has received both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, but she has no desire to go maskless. For the past year, Johnson has avoided the colds and flu she normally gets. So has her 95-year-old grandmother, who lives with her.

In addition to helping keep her and her family healthy, masks have offered Johnson something else: the chance to hide emotions, such as contempt when someone is standing too close to her in a checkout line, or boredom when a relative tells the same story for the tenth time.

“I am one of those people that cannot lie or get away with anything,” Johnson, who works in information technology, said. “It’s been pretty fun now that no one really knows, necessarily, what I’m thinking.”

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“I Do Not Recommend That You Wear a Mask” – Fauci Tells Woman Face Masks Do Not Protect Against Covid #FauciEmails

Fauci told The Post that he was getting about 1,000 emails a day from strangers, politicians and medical workers.

In an email dated February of 2020, Dr. Fauci is advising a woman not to wear a face mask because they don’t protect against the virus.

“Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you,” Fauci wrote. “I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location. Your instincts are correct, money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines.”

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Masks Didn’t Slow COVID Spread: New Study

New findings reported Tuesday in a University of Louisville study challenge what has been the prevailing belief that mask mandates are necessary to slow the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. The study notes that “80% of US states mandated masks during the COVID-19 pandemic” and while “mandates induced greater mask compliance, [they] did not predict lower growth rates when community spread was low (minima) or high (maxima).” Among other things, the study—conducted using data from the CDC covering multiple seasons—reports that “mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among US states.”

“Our findings do not support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates decrease with greater public mask use,” notes the U of L report. Researchers stated that “masks may promote social cohesion as rallying symbols during a pandemic, but risk compensation can also occur” before listing some observed risks that accompany mask wearing:

Prolonged mask use (>4 hours per day) promotes facial alkalinization and inadvertently encourages dehydration, which in turn can enhance barrier breakdown and bacterial infection risk. British clinicians have reported masks to increase headaches and sweating and decrease cognitive precision. Survey bias notwithstanding, these sequelae are associated with medical errors. By obscuring nonverbal communication, masks interfere with social learning in children. Likewise, masks can distort verbal speech and remove visual cues to the detriment of individuals with hearing loss; clear face-shields improve visual integration, but there is a corresponding loss of sound quality.

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The graveyard of meaningless terms has gained another resident: “Science”

Back in 2014, HuffPost ran an article that discussed 12 words that have been so overused and misused that “they really don’t mean anything anymore.” Words like “literally,” “awesome,” “honestly,” and “unbelievable” all rightly made the list.

I’d like to submit a 2021 revision, suggesting that we add the word “science” to the archive. Whatever it once meant, over the course of this last year mankind has watched it be sautéed, filleted, and utterly obliterated on the altar of Covid, face masks, and vaccines to the point it has become void of any objective definition.

Just in recent days the butchery of science has become epic.

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How Facebook uses ‘fact-checking’ to suppress scientific truth

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high-school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events.

But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social-media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the Trump White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social-media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

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