I informed you thusly: Part 1
I hate to say 'I told you so' but I #$%^ING TOLD YOU SO!
Back in the days when we still owned a television, my family and I used to enjoy watching The Big Bang Theory. This miniseries of important tidbits from current events in Clown World is named in honour of Sheldon Cooper’s immortal line from ‘The 21-Second Excitation’:
(Just as an aside, there’s a fascinating rabbit-hole you could go down regarding Zangen Pharmaceuticals, the drug company that The Big Bang Theory's Bernadette and Penny work for. For starters, there’s the name, which is shared with an Iron Cross-decorated Nazi general. And then there’s Bernadette’s disarmingly ingenuous revelations of Zangen’s involvement in mutating viruses to cross the species barrier, crossing Ebola with a common cold virus, and conducting unethical human experimentation. Is this merely dark humour, is it a confession, or is it predictive programming?)
But enough about The Big Bang Theory. Let’s run through ‘This Week in I Told You So’.
‘I Informed You Thusly’#1: Masks Don’t Work
I told you that there is no reliable scientific evidence that face masks stop or even reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses, on multiple occasions. Ian Miller produced so many charts showing that neither cloth masks, nor N95s reduce case or death rates, no matter how high the compliance rates, that eventually he literally wrote the book on it. Paul Alexander compiled over 170 studies and articles demonstrating the ineffectiveness of masks for preventing respiratory virus transmission and illness, as well as the harms of masking.
And now, the latest Cochrane Review on Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses has confirmed what every previous Cochrane Review on the subject had found: masks don’t work when worn in the community. ‘In the community’ means outside of a healthcare setting – that is, people conducting their ordinary business, with no access to fit testing, and neither training in proper donning and doffing procedures nor the capacity to follow them. It’s also very likely that N95/P2 respirators don’t work, even when worn by properly-trained health care workers in settings that support correct use.
(For those not familiar with Cochrane, it is the pre-eminent organisation for assessing the evidence base for medical and public health practice. Cochrane’s integrity and independence has been compromised in the last few years by its acceptance of donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which ultimately led to the expulsion of one of its prominent members, Peter Gøtzsche.
Hence, Cochrane reviews are not as reliable as they used to be. It’s important to check the authorship of each review. The lead author of the mask review is Tom Jefferson, a stalwart defender of scientific integrity. Investigative journalists Maryanne Demasi and Paul Thacker have recently conducted interviews with Tom Jefferson, which are well worth reading as companion pieces to this post. Jefferson makes a particularly interesting revelation in the Demasi interview: the Cochrane organisation held up the publication of the previous update to this ongoing review, which was due to be published in early 2020, for seven months, in which time mask mandates had been imposed all over the world despite a total lack of evidence for their efficacy.)
Here are the chief findings of the Cochrane review:
1. Masks don’t work to reduce symptoms of respiratory illness:
“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 (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence.”
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses
(Note that while the risk ratio of 0.95 suggests that mask wearing may reduce symptoms of respiratory illness by 5 per cent, the confidence interval includes 0, meaning that there is a good chance that there is is no difference between wearing and not wearing a mask.)
2. Masks don’t work to reduce lab-confirmed flu or COVID:
“Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence).”
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses
(Once again, the confidence interval includes zero.)
3. N95/P2 respirators don’t appear to work any better than cloth or surgical masks when it comes to preventing illness symptoms. There’s a slight signal of benefit, but the studies are too poorly-designed and reported to have confidence in them, and their results were all over the map:
“We are very uncertain on the effects of N95/P2 respirators compared with medical/surgical masks on the outcome of clinical respiratory illness (RR 0.70, 95% CI 0.45 to 1.10; 3 trials, 7779 participants; very low‐certainty evidence). N95/P2 respirators compared with medical/surgical masks may be effective for ILI (RR 0.82, 95% CI 0.66 to 1.03; 5 trials, 8407 participants; low‐certainty evidence). Evidence is limited by imprecision and heterogeneity for these subjective outcomes.”
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses
4. N95/P2 respirators don’t work any better than cloth masks when it comes to preventing influenza, whether in the general public or healthcare workers:
“The use of a N95/P2 respirators compared to medical/surgical masks probably makes little or no difference for the objective and more precise outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza infection (RR 1.10, 95% CI 0.90 to 1.34; 5 trials, 8407 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Restricting pooling to healthcare workers made no difference to the overall findings.”
Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses
In short, masks don’t work. And I told you so.
Sneak preview of Part 2 of this miniseries: Teflon Tony Fauci admits that COVID and flu vaccines don’t work, and he knew along why they don’t. Stay tuned :).
Masks DO WORK. They are very effective. They effectively work as a pandemic symbol and cause so much harm! By working as a pandemic symbol, they help to keep the anxiety and stress levels in the population up! Anxiety and stress suppress the immune system and thus lead to severe harm. And of course, they also have negative cardiovascular effects and may even increase cancer, according to another review that I had read.
I wore a mask twice in 2020 and thereafter NEVER again. I never went to places anymore where masks were "required". One of these two times that I wore a mask was when I visited a book store.
I will never forget this traumatic moment in my life. I did not want to wear the mask, it was difficult to breathe through it and I felt it as an attack against my body and also as a humiliation. So I was not wearing the mask "correctly" in the store, it was not covering my nose. While I was looking at a book, within a very short time, an employee of this store approached me and said I HAVE TO cover my nose with the mask! She was standing in front of me, watching me. So this "forced me" to grab my face with the hands. I had touched things like books (which may be contaminated with pathogens) but I had no possibility to wash my hands before touching my face! Maybe this sounds like a banal story. But I am trembling on the inside as I am writing this because this memory is truly traumatic for me.
It is the severe attack against my bodily autonomy and the humiliation that is so hurtful for me. Like I am dirty or dangerous, like I am carrying a deadly virus and I am threat to other people.... Like I have no value as a human any more. I am just a potential danger.
And I am not allowed to breathe fresh air. I have to inhale my own exhalations.... I feel this as bodily harm.
You are just no longer any valuable human. If you do not prevent yourself from breathing correctly, by wearing a pandemic symbol, then people will only feel hate for you. They will feel you are a threat to them.... Due to the extreme propaganda that the elites initiated in the media.
I WISH I had left and told this lady that she can just F herself and that I will never buy in this store any more. Instead of this, I followed this "command". I am aware that the employees of these stores only follow their orders. However, this is no excuse. You are responsible for your behaviour and just because your boss tells you to do harm to other people, this still does not mean you have the right to do that.
Also, the videos showing that the police put masks into the faces of some people who did not want to wear them are just traumatic. This is bodily harm. They do not know what they are doing. This behaviour causes severe emotional stress and trauma and sickness.
May God forgive all these people who just have no idea how extremely harmful their behaviour was.
They all say that not wearing a mask is dangerous for other people around you. HOWEVER, I think by wearing a mask you literally hurt other people and make them sick. This is because the mask is a powerful negative symbol. It permanently reminds everyone who will see you with this mask that there is a deadly pandemic. This causes stress in people and stress leads to immune suppression, inflammatory processes, an increased intestinal permeability, magnesium loss etc. etc. etc. All this makes SICK. So by wearing a mask, you are literally doing harm to people. You make them sick. And now that we see there is no evidence that they reduce any risks, this means they only do harm. So...... I just don´t know what to say. This topic is too much for me.
I see that that hotbed of Covid hysterics, The Conversation, have been out of the blocks faster than Usain Bolt and have, sounding all academic and objective and the like, panned the Cochrane Review for being methodologically flawed (https://theconversation.com/yes-masks-reduce-the-risk-of-spreading-covid-despite-a-review-saying-they-dont-198992).
I didn’t read all their poor apologetics for the mask after checking the disclosure statements of the lead author, Professor(!) C Raina MacIntyre, who “receives funding from mask manufacturer Detmold” and who “is on an advisory board for mask manufacturer Ascend” (the other authors, mask and vaxx fanatics all, are also on the Covid gray train).
I did check out their conclusion, however, which is as awful as can be expected: “there is strong and consistent evidence for the effectiveness of masks and (even more so) respirators in protecting against respiratory infections. Masks are an important protection against serious infections”.
Masks are even more necessary, they add, because “current COVID vaccines protect against death and hospitalisation [factually wrong, by the way – see NSW hospital data by vaxx status, a data series which has ben suspended for obvious reasons], but do not prevent infection due to waning vaccine immunity and substantial immune escape from new variants”.
Thanks, academic experts! We now have a useless injectable whose very uselessness (not to mention danger) requires a useless (and harmful) mask to counter its very uselessness. Who put these clowns in charge?
I feel a Substack article coming on!