Tag: face masks

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.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

State Power and Covid Crimes

The three major controversies over pandemic management for the past three years have been lockdown measures, universal masking recommendations and mandates, and Covid vaccines. 

The last was a pharmaceutical intervention using revolutionary new technology. The first two were radical departures from the existing scientific and policy consensus as encapsulated in official documents from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and in several national pandemic preparedness plans. They established the willingness of the state to dictate every aspect of people’s lives, down to the most ridiculous and absurd details. 

For example, people were told when they could shop, the hours during which they could shop, what they could purchase, how close they could get to others and which direction they could move in by following arrows on the floor. Governments also stepped into nations’ bedrooms at home to dictate with whom people could and could not be intimate: a ukase that notoriously turned Professor Neil ‘Lockdown’ Ferguson himself into Professor Pantsdown.

Lockdowns thus proved the extent to which people would comply with state directives without deploying independent critical thinking and, like frogs in boiling water, their almost total lack of concern about the gradually increasing degree of infringements of civil liberties and personal freedoms. 

Compliance with often idiotic rules was ratcheted up to another level still with mask recommendations-cum-mandates, with one additional notable feature. Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. 

In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.

Keep reading

New Yorker publishes insane ‘case for wearing masks forever’

An activist group calling themselves the “People’s CDC” are calling on all levels of government to reenact mask mandates, claiming that “the vaccine-only strategy promoted by the CDC is insufficient,” according to a profile by the New Yorker.

The group has made it their mission to distribute widely what they claim to be “real” information about the pandemic, often going against CDC recommendations. The article, titled “The Case for Wearing Masks Forever, written by Emma Green and published Wednesday, describes the People’s CDC as a “ragtag coalition of public-health activists” who “believe that America’s pandemic restrictions are too lax.”

The group sends out a weekly “Weather Report,” as they call it, which gives a summary of the data they want to publish to support their case. These reports often include a call to action for readers to petition governments to reinstate mask mandates and to fight for free tests and treatments.

They have recently argued that all events should be held outdoors with high-grade masking rules in place. 

With nearly 20,000 Instagram followers, the group prides itself as a resource for people who want to petition their governments for more Covid restriction.

The organizer of the group’s media team, Lucky Tran, recently argued on Twitter that “a lot of anti-mask sentiment is deeply embedded in white supremacy,” the kind of accusation that is quite commonly seen coming from far-left activist groups.

Keep reading

White House COVID Czar: No Study Shows That Masks Are Effective Against the Virus

In a stunning announcement, the White House confirmed that the world is round, bears go to the bathroom in the woods, and masks don’t work against the coronavirus. Ok, I made that up. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha did, however, make the stunning admission during a recent online discussion that masks aren’t the magic safety net that we’ve been told:

“There is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.”

There, that’s it. That’s the end of my article.

No no, I’ll continue. What a shocker. Despite widespread masking being required in most of the country for months and sometimes years during the height of the COVID pandemic, most people with a lick of common sense quickly realized that they would do very little to stop transmission. First of all, all you had to do is watch a mask-wearer for a few minutes to see that most people kept fiddling with them to get the fit right, or they wore them with the sides open. Dudes with big beards looked comical with their masks pushed off their faces by their facial hair, allowing air to flow in and out with impunity.

Have you ever been talking to a mask fanatic and they pull it aside to say something to you? As if they feel they have that one moment of safety; “the virus won’t attack me because you’re my friend and I have something important to say!”

Keep reading

‘Absolutely’ keep wearing masks ‘everywhere,’ urges New York Times

A new report from the New York Times urges travelers to continue, or return to, mask-wearing, “everywhere” and “in between” on their upcoming holiday travels, including on planes, trains, buses, ferries, and even at their travel destinations.

Calling the current global health status a triple pandemic or “tripledemic,” the outlet advised readers recently on how to “fly more safely” for the holidays, simply stating “Hint: Wear a Mask.”

The “tripledemic” refers to those who are in fear of contracting COVID-19, the flu, or the latest respiratory syncytial virus.

The piece worries that “even though cases of the coronavirus have been ticking up, there is no suggestion that mandates will be reinstated.”

The article asks a series of self-prophesizing questions citing doctors, the Centers for Disease Control, Transportation Security Administration, and other unnamed “experts.”

The CDC reference possibly stems from a May 2022 mask and travel advisory in which the CDC recommends “passengers and workers – properly wear a well-fitting mask or respirator over the nose and mouth in indoor areas of public transportation (such as airplanes, trains, etc.) and transportation hubs (such as airports, stations, etc.).” The guidance is recommended for anyone over the age of two.

Keep reading