Tag: face masks

Five Years On, Let’s Not Forget the Victims of Mask Mania

On June 4th 2020, Grant Shapps (then Transport Secretary) announced that the wearing of face coverings would soon become compulsory when travelling on public transport. The next day, this mandate was extended to healthcare – for staff, patients and visitors – and, the following month, masks became mandatory in all shops, on pain of £100 fines for the non-compliant. At this time, hiding one’s face behind strips of cloth or plastic was portrayed as an act of virtue, and the masked compliers were perceived as occupying the moral high ground. To impose a public health restriction in the absence of robust evidence for its effectiveness was bad enough. But, even more shameful, was the total disregard of the harms of community masking.

So, on this five-year anniversary of forced mask wearing, let us pause and spare a thought for the multiple victims of mask mania.

Let’s not forget the swathes of babies and toddlers who failed to bond with their faceless care givers, thereby stunting their longer term cognitive and emotional development.

  • Children had “limited vocabulary” while some babies had “struggled to respond to basic facial expressions”, partly due to interacting with people wearing face masks. (Amanda Spielman, Oftsed Inspector)
  • “We were really really concerned about that [harms from masks] and we fought really hard to have that taken out of the guidance. … We know now how many additional support needs there are for children as a result of mask wearing. Speech and language issues have exponentially increased because the children were not seeing the visual cues from their caregivers.” (Lorna Kettles – policy manager at Early Years Scotland, Scottish Covid Inquiry)

Let’s not forget the many victims of historical physical and sexual abuse who were further traumatised by the mask requirements.

  • “Mandated mask-wearing has caused me numerous problems. I was sexually abused for years as a child where I was smothered and muffled, anything to stop me crying out. … So mask wearing has been a trigger for me both wearing and seeing people in masks – particularly children.” (Anonymous female)
  • “I suffer from PTSD as a result of childhood abuse. I have been working on my mental health for years… but I didn’t even consider that wearing a mask would be a problem. At first I was finding myself very anxious not being able to see people’s faces properly… I would feel dizzy and short of breath when wearing a mask. It gradually got worse until I started having flashbacks, very sudden images of my abuser covering my mouth.” (Charli MacVicar)

Let’s not forget the 18 million UK adults with hearing difficulties who – because masks muffled voices and made it impossible to lipread – were plunged into a communication vacuum.

  • “The evidence demonstrated that the use of masks caused distress, confusion and considerable difficulties with communication. Residents couldn’t see smiles, had difficulty recognising relatives and those with hearing difficulties couldn’t lip-read or read facial expressions or visual clues.” (Care Home Relatives Scotland, closing statement to the Scottish Covid Inquiry)
  • “Garden visits were described as being ‘horrendous’ with no privacy. They were impractical in the Scottish climate and visitors had to shout to be heard while wearing masks and sitting two metres apart.” (Central Scotland Care Homes – evidence to the Scottish Covid Inquiry)

Let’s not forget the patients with existing respiratory problems whose breathing difficulties were exacerbated, those who were put at greater risk of contracting pneumonia and other bacterial infections, and those who were exposed to the inhalation of micro-plastics.

  • “I am a 59 years old male, suffered from severe asthma in my 30s but have not used medication for 20 years thanks to a breathing method. … Wearing a mask causes me severe difficulty because it pushes me below the acceptable level in terms of intake of air. After a few minutes I feel that I am being asphyxiated, which is extremely stressful.” (Anonymous male)
  • “I have chronic bronchitis and use asthma inhaler on a daily basis. … Only time I wore a mask out I collapsed in the supermarket. … I use an oximeter daily on GP advice. If I put a mask on my oxygen levels go down quite rapidly – to around 86% and become very lightheaded. …. I was advised to call an ambulance if it went below 90%. Truly ridiculous.” (Anonymous male)

Let’s not forget the millions of distressed and frightened NHS service users and care home residents who, as a consequence of the often stymied relationships resulting from masked protagonists, experienced sub-optimal care.

  • “She hated masks… she never saw a member of staff without a mask on for two years. … Towards the end of July 2020, I was permitted to have garden visits, but these were difficult for both of us. I had to wear full PPE and sit at least two metres from her. She used to get upset and distressed… that we had to keep a distance from each other. She hated me wearing a mask as she couldn’t even see my face properly.” (Verona Gibson, mother of a 39 year-old daughter with learning difficulties/mental health problems who resides in a care home – evidence to the Scottish Covid Inquiry)
  • “If you are surrounded by a group of people 24-7 wearing masks, and you don’t see people smile for up to two years, what kind of effect is that going to have on your mental health and wellbeing?” (Alison Walker, former BBC sports presenter, whose parents mentally and physically deteriorated in a care home in 2020 – evidence to Scottish Covid Inquiry).

Let’s not forget the rational minority who, because they opted not to wear a mask, were harassed and abused by others. On one occasion such an assault led to the death of a young woman.

  • “I got a lanyard, but it was still a nightmare. I was followed round shops, had nasty comments, challenged regularly – and these things also led to massive anxiety. We live in a rural area where compliance is high and also I look pretty meek and anxious when I’m out so people aren’t scared to have a go, and they do. … There was a period where I felt so much hate towards me… that I just couldn’t even face going to shops for food. (Anonymous autistic female)
  • “For her [12 year-old daughter] the mask mandate has been catastrophic and has curtailed her life and caused deep trauma. When she puts a mask on she hyperventilates – it immediately makes her panic and feel anxious. … When the mask mandate started in schools we did manage to get her an exemption. … But with the exemption comes discrimination – from the children who call her ‘selfish’ and a ‘granny killer’ or ‘antivax’ – to some of the teachers who have described her as ‘one of those’.” (Anonymous mother)

Blanket masking requirements achieved little if any benefits yet caused multiple – often profound – harms. Five years on from the imposition of the first UK mask mandates, have our public health decisionmakers learnt the errors of their ways, and is there now general recognition that state-sanctioned cover-your-face orders must never happen within our communities?

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AOC, Sanders tell supporters to mask up for West Coast town halls

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., are taking the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies out West next week – and advising supporters to mask up to participate. 

Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic, Fox News Digital can confirm that the RSVP for the events in Denver and Las Vegas includes guidance that “masks are advised for all attendees of this event.”

A post shared by conservative podcaster Stephen L. Miller on Friday about the Denver event had many wondering why masks would be advised for an outdoor event in 2025. 

Sanders did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s inquiry about the mask guidance. 

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Five Years Later, We Remember How Politicians Unleashed COVID Tyranny

Five years ago, politicians and bureaucrats went berserk and pointlessly ravaged Americans’ freedom. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the pretext to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses, padlock churches, close down schools, and effectively place hundreds of millions of Americans under house arrest. Despite all the forced sacrifices, most Americans contracted covid and more than a million were listed as dying from the virus.

“Pandemic Security Theater Is Self-Destructive, And Won’t Make Us Safer” was the headline of my first salvo against the pandemic hysteria, published on March 24, 2020 in the Daily Caller. I scoffed at President Trump’s proclamations about being a “wartime president at war with an invisible enemy.” Wartime presidents too easily pretend they’re on a mission from God to scourge all resistance. I warned: “The pandemic threatens to open authoritarian Pandora’s Boxes. Permitting governments to seize almost unlimited power based on shaky extrapolations of infection rates will doom our republic.”

From the start of the pandemic, the Mises Institute was in the forefront of condemning policies that eradicated prosperity in the name of public health. In a May 19, 2020 Mises piece headlined, “Hacksawing the Economy,” I noted, “The political response to COVID-19 is eerily similar to Civil War surgeons’ rationales for hacking off arms and legs…. As long as politicians claim that things would be worse if they had not amputated much of the economy, they can pirouette as saviors.”

Living in the Washington area, I had a front row seat for many of Covid-19’s biggest absurdities. After federal officials whipped up panic, “I Believe in Science” lawn signs popped up like mushrooms, soon accompanied by “Thank You, Dr. Fauci” placards. Those signs looked to me like frightful decorations of a Halloween that never ended.

Thoreau provided my lodestar for the pandemic: “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” I knew that isolation would make me too ornery for my own good. I had survived the flu plenty of times in prior decades and I didn’t reckon covid would deliver my coffin nails. I was a co-leader of a Meetup hiking group which continued hiking almost every weekend throughout the pandemic.

But politicians made such jaunts more difficult. In February 2021, President Biden decreed that face masks must be worn in national parks. Probably 95 percent of the National Park Service’s 800+ million acres is uncrowded 95 percent of the time. The only “evidence” to justify the mandate was that many Biden supporters were frightened or enraged whenever they saw anyone not wearing a mask. The new mandate quickly became an entitlement program for junior Stasi members.

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Great take from “Doorway to Freedom” – the ongoing whitewashing of C19 by ALL Senators at Bobby Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearings and the plight of small farmers – amongst many other topics

From here:

Goal for the 1st quater of 2025 – improve conditions for small farmers and ranchers | DOOR TO FREEDOM

This caught my eye:

“What was truly remarkable was that no one talked about COVID or COVID vaccines, masks or lockdowns. No member of either party. It was as if all had tacitly agreed to memory-hole this very significant part of our recent history.”

Never a truer word(s).

Politicians globally are content to see out their terms of office ad be replaced, rather than investigate the butchery and maiming resulting from the roll-out of EXPERIMENTAL gene-altering injections that FAILED abysmally.

The crimes against humanity committed by health regulators, enforced by politicians and their cheer leaders in the MSM news cartels are being swept under the carpet – as the C19 psy-op winds down – and the next psy-op is lined up.

Also surprising was the absence of questions about “Disease X” and plans for pandemic preparedness that Biden and his cronies were desperate to sign via the WHO treaties and international health regulations.

The headline of the Door to Freedom article referred to the plight of US farmers,

Compare and contrast that to the attitude of EU and UK “anti-human” politicians that want to decimate farmland in the name of “net zero”,

The UK government plans to replace 10 per cent of prime UK farmland with solar panels and wind turbines in a move to reduce food security and increase energy prices that are already the most expensive in Europe. Other EU countries are on the same path to ruin,

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Please Do Not Comply With the New Face Mask Orders in These Six States (Both Red and Blue)

My first media appearance of the year was yesterday.

In it, I pointed out that both California and Wisconsin continue to have policies in place allowing local officials to force mandatory face masks on the most vulnerable.

Yes, five years into this stupidity, I am still talking about how not to wear a face mask. I was sure that when I started writing about the health mandates in February 2020 that they would never come — they were just too ludicrous to fathom. After all, how could anyone be so demented as to shut down a relatively free and functioning society, one of the crown jewels of human achievement? When the lockdowns came in March 2020, I was sure they would last days, certainly not two weeks and certainly not nationally. I was wrong, perhaps even naive. When they kept continuing, I was sure they would be done in months, not years.

I have stopped making predictions on the topic, or any topic really. I have recognized that there is much farther we can fall. That it is up to lions like you and me to stop the fall around us.

As the lockdowns and other mandates stretched on, I wrote Face Masks in One Lesson, the guide on how to live life unmasked and still be treated like a VIP.

More was needed, and the pages of LewRockwell.com became a place where I was able to publish on the topic at length and several times a week. But more was needed.

Therefore, I got a team together and made videos of those LewRockwell.com posts, in an effort to reach those who like to watch, rather than read. That was successful, but more was needed.

I went out into the mainstream and alternative media with hundreds of radio, television, print, and podcast interviews year after year.

When people refused to believe my claims that face masks are neither safe nor effective, I wrote Face Masks Hurt Kids, to say more about that point. In the book, I give nearly one thousand examples of how unsafe a face mask is to wear.

Yes, a face mask is UNSAFE for you to wear.

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America Won’t Fall For Multi-State ‘Quad-demic’ Mask-Mandates

Some states reinstated mask mandates as so-called health “experts” claim holiday social gatherings have caused an increase in four different types of viral infections, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday.

The “quad-demic” consists of a surge in infections caused by the flu, COVID-19, the respiratory illness RSV and norovirus, commonly called the stomach flu, according to the outlet.

Headlines about the quadruple threat emerged just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, fresh after talk about the risk of bird flu fell flat.

Aurora Health Care, a hospital in Wisconsin, announced that starting on Jan. 6, visitors will be required to mask up “when in contact with patients or in congregate areas, including patient rooms and others areas designated by signage,” WLUK reported.

Several counties in California, including Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, along with the City of Berkeley, enacted mask mandates first effective in November until March 31, 2025.

In some counties, the order only applies to medical workers—but stricter counties extent their mandate to visitors or residents, CBS News reported.

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Congressional Committee Condemns (Nearly) Every Feature of the Covid Response

Are there words in the English language that fully describe what happened during the Covid years that are not already overused? Calamity comes to mind. Disaster. Cataclysm. Ruin, devastation, catastrophe, unprecedented debacle, fiasco, and utter wreckage – all fine words and phrases but nothing quite captures it. 

Given that, there is probably no report on the thing that can properly characterize the whole of it. On the other hand, it’s worth trying. 

Meanwhile, the results of Covid commissions of governments around the world have become unbearably predictable. So far they have mostly said their government failed because they didn’t act fast enough, did not enforce lockdowns hard enough, did not communicate and coordinate well enough, and so on. 

Everyone in the corporate world knows that when a committee reduces all problems to “communication and coordination” you are being fed a load of bull. 

So far, it’s been almost entirely bureaucratic blather, and that helps account for the global loss of confidence in political systems. They cannot even be honest about the most catastrophic policies in our lifetimes or several. 

The amount of corruption, waste, and destruction from this period of our lives, lasting from 2020 until 2023 but with remnants of bad policies all around us, is so unspeakable that not one report has yet been fully honest about what happened, why it happened, who really won and lost, and what this period implies for how vast swaths of the public see the world. 

Among other astonishing revelations to come from this period was a full presentation of just how many institutions have been corrupted. It was not just governments and certainly not just the elected leaders and career bureaucrats. The problems are very deep and reach more deeply to intelligence agencies, military-based bioweapons systems, and preparedness agencies that guard their activities under the cloak of what is called classified. 

This is a major reason why so many questions are being left unasked and unanswered. Then we have the ancillary failures in a whole series of additional sectors. The media went along with the nonsense as if they are wholly owned and controlled by government and industry. Industry mostly went along too, at least the highest reaches of it, even as small business was crushed. 

The tech companies cooperated in a massive censorship operation. The retail end of the pharmaceutical companies enforced the government’s edicts, denying people basic medicines, as did the whole of the medical systems, which heavily enforced mandates on an experimental and failed product mistakenly called a vaccine. Academics were largely silent and public intellectuals fell in line. Most mainline religions cooperated in locking worshippers out. Banks were in on it too. And advertisers. 

In fact, it’s hard to think of any institution in society that leaves this period untarnished. It’s probably not possible for a government report on the subject to be fully honest. Maybe it is too soon, plus the hooks that created the whole problem are still embedded too deeply. 

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Bombshell US House investigative report confirms that almost everything the alternative media said about COVID origins, lockdowns, masks, vaccines and government overreach was TRUE

So four years after the COVID pandemic nightmare was unleashed upon America by a cabal of junk science tyrants and power-hungry vax-o-crats, the US House has just released a damning, detailed investigative report that reveals the independent media was right all along.

COVID was engineered in a lab.

Mask demands and vaccine mandates were based on junk science.

Lockdowns were completely made up by self-appointed scientism authoritarians.

The government covered up the truth and pushed disinformation propaganda on purpose.

Dr. Fauci and others were guilty as hell.

So all the censorship by Big Tech turns out to be truly malicious and even harmful to the public. And the entire corporate media was nothing but an organized cabal of liars and profiteers… brought to you by Pfizer.

This investigative report reveals that COVID was a crime scene, and the government conspired with Big Tech and mainstream media to commit numerous crimes of cognitive assault (psyops), medial violence (vaccines) and hospital homicide against the American people.

So when do the mass arrests begin? (Don’t hold your breath.)

Unfortunately, no one can bring back the estimated 1.2 million Americans who were killed by the jabs because they “believed the science.”

Fortunately for you and I, we never believed the plandemic hype in the first place, and we most certainly didn’t follow the herd into getting jabbed, masked and locked down.

It turns out that was a tremendously valuable choice of actions on our part.

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San Francisco Bay Area Reinstates Mask Mandates as Flu Season Approaches

As COVID-19 cases increase, mask mandates are being reinstated in several counties around California.

Residents in the San Francisco Bay Area will be required to wear masks in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and other healthcare facilities as flu and cold season begin, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The mandate will take effect from Nov. 1 to either Mar. 31 or April 30, 2025, the outlet reports.

Health officials are implementing the mandate as an attempt to decrease the risk of spreading COVID, the flu and other respiratory viruses during the winter and early spring in medical settings.

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Another PRO-MASK Study Debunked

You may recall some years ago the New England Journal of Medicine went bonkers crazy trying to push masks on kids based on a single study that was put out there. They put out multiple editorials and tried to justify the massive mandates that were foisted on kids as young as two years old.

A recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine by Dr. Ambarish Chandra, Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, and colleagues critically examines the effectiveness of school mask mandates in reducing COVID-19 transmission among students and staff. The research addresses the challenges of using observational data and difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis to estimate the impact of public health interventions, particularly in rapidly changing situations like a pandemic.

The difference-in-differences (DiD) methodology is a statistical technique commonly used in social sciences to estimate the causal effect of a policy intervention or treatment when randomization is not possible. It compares the changes in outcomes over time between a group that is exposed to a treatment (intervention group) and a group that is not (control group).

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