Tag: pandemic

A scientific look at the mask fallacy – and why we’re told to wear them

Until recently, the overwhelming percentage of doctors recommended against masks for anyone who wasn’t sick or caring for someone who was.

Consider that on May 21 of this year, the highly respected New England Journal of Medicine stated, “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.”

Consider the report by trauma & emergency physician Dr. Kelly Victory, who said, “[T]here’s no scientific justification for normal healthy people to be wearing masks.”

Okay, those are statements. What about studies?

As I dug for scientific articles both in favor of and against the wearing of masks (I really do strive to understand both sides of an issue), I came across a thorough meta-analysis of extant studies on mask efficacy. The work was conducted by Denis G. Rancourt, Ph.D, and by reading his paper, “Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy,” you will save yourself hours of boring library research.

In an interview Rancourt did with Del Bigtree on The Highwire YouTube channel, Rancourt gave an overview of his research, saying:

“If you use only proper studies – randomized, controlled trials with verified outcomes – they all unambiguously say that there is no statistical evidence of a benefit in terms of reducing risk of getting a viral respiratory disease. They all say it.”

Rancourt also says the current narrative about wearing masks to prevent spreading Covid is simply “a river of talk, it’s a river of posturing, it’s a river of policy statements.” He says you can’t just ask people in a study if they had the sniffles last week. You have to determine if people really got sick.

“[I]f you look at those [studies],” Rancourt says, “and there have been many of them over the last decade, none of them show a statistically significant advantage to wearing a mask compared to not wearing a mask.”

For those who want to dig deeper, Rancourt’s article contains links to each randomized, controlled trial on mask efficacy, and it’s a recommended read.

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The COVID-19 Panic Shows Us Why Science Needs Skeptics

The dumpster fire of COVID predictions has shown exactly why it’s important to sustain and nurture skeptics, lest we blunder into scientific monoculture and groupthink. And yet the explosion of “cancel culture” intolerance of any opinion that doesn’t fit a shrinking “3 x 5 card” of right-think risks destroying the very tolerance and science that sustains our civilization.

Since World War II, America has suffered two respiratory pandemics comparable to COVID-19: the 1958 “Asian flu,” then the 1969 “Hong Kong flu.” In neither case did we shut down the economy—people were simply more careful. Not all that careful, of course—Jimi Hendrix was playing at Woodstock in the middle of the 1969 pandemic, and social distancing wasn’t really a thing in the “Summer of Love.”

And yet COVID-19 was very different thanks to a single “buggy mess” of a computer prediction from one Neil Ferguson, a British epidemiologist given to hysterical overestimates of deaths, from mad cow to bird flu to H1N1.

For COVID-19, Ferguson predicted 3 million deaths in America unless we basically shut down the economy. Panicked policymakers took his prediction as gospel, dressed as it was in the cloak of science.

Now, long after governments plunged half the world into a Great Depression, those panicked revisions are being quietly revised down by an order of magnitude, now suggesting a final tally comparable to 1958 and 1969.

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What Is The Real Purpose Of The Lockdowns?

If given the choice between maintaining a toxic world of fear, pollution and violence controlled by the State or a society of prosperity and compassion based on freedom and individual rights, there is little doubt that the majority of Americans would want the old paradigm of synthetic events to take a hike; except that choice has been distorted under the guise of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has mislabeled the most deadly virus in history.

The coronavirus crisis arrived in a flash with little time to analyze exactly WTF was going on. Americans struggled to process what is real, trustworthy and authentic as the unraveling of deep political decay revealed a behind-the-scenes subterranean power struggle that has surfaced with the intent on disintegration of American Society.

While the country is fast approaching an existential crisis on steroids, millions experienced an inner knowing that some indefinable thing was not right with recognition that the early explanations were hogwash while others, addicted to mainstream/social media who still believed in the illusion of democracy, were on board with the litany of spin from the medical and political establishment.

While the Lockdown could have been a wake up call for humanity to change its consciousness with a paradigm shift – whether it be a spiritual awakening, a political realignment or re-evaluating one’s own personal health choices, since, after all, humanity was locked in a major health crisis. And most importantly, it was an opportunity to acknowledge that the planet itself is ailing from abuse and neglect with CV as a metaphor urging a personal reconnection with Nature.

In early 2020, Neil Ferguson of the UK’s Imperial College used a scare tactic to predict that 80% of Americans would be infected and that there would be 2.2 million American deaths – neither of which materialized. Yet Ferguson’s extremism accomplished its intended purpose in establishing the basis for draconian Lockdown requirements. Ferguson later retracted his earlier prediction down to 20,000 fatalities.

With current infection fatality rate at 0.20%, Lockdowns have been devoid of science and are based on arbitrary, contradictory and inconsistent requirements.

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