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Masks are also extremely effective in exposing dissidents. Who dares to stand up against the state? There’s one, right over there. Shame on them. Shun them. Arrest them. That’s how masks really “work”, and that’s why the Public HealthTM types love them.

“Forcing people to wear masks has been a failure of public health. The reason we are still having the mask debate is because authorities relied on trash studies to justify their use, and wanted to appear as if they were doing something. In a crisis, it is always more difficult to do nothing,” Gøtzsche said.

The behavioural scientists deliberately exploited the human desire to conform and literally said out loud that the public would ‘do the heavy lifting’ and enforce masks using social pressure. This was the case: if you refused to wear a mask, people stared or even shouted. Twitter shouted #WearADamnMask. Venues denied entry. GPs refused medical appointments to the unmasked.

Tufekci and Howard played a decisive role in affecting this vast shift in scientific guidance that so intimately affected the lives of every American, which the Cochrane review has now shown to have afforded no benefit at the population level, for dubious reasons such as “shaping new societal norms.” Throughout COVID, Tufekci pushed false information and harmful policies that were far afield of her expertise based on information from China, despite knowing such information was unreliable, without ever admitting or apologizing for the errors once the harms became manifest.

Even before the pandemic, the best available evidence – randomized controlled trials – already showed that masks are ineffective in containing respiratory viral transmission. Additional RCTs conducted during the pandemic support this conclusion. Therefore, the best available evidence does not support even the recommendation of wearing masks, let alone making them compulsory.

People no longer have an emotional connection while speaking when wearing masks. And we can no longer understand each other’s speech. A venue full of masked people is a place lacking in humanity. It is an artificial world based on virtue-signaling and the elevation of appearance over reality, rather than actual human connection.

Those who were responsible for incalculable damage will continue to skate scot free, while the cycle of unnecessary panic, inaccurate predictions, and the call for more masking rears its ugly head every few months as new variants emerge. Although it’s frustratingly predictable and infuriatingly obvious, best to prepare for a whole lot more of it.

Mask requirements for healthcare facilities continue to be sustained in the face of an unrelenting flurry of fatal knockout blows struck by study after study finding that, as a purely scientific matter, masks of any kind are wholly inutile amulets bereft of any discernible impact on the transmission or epidemiology of respiratory viruses.

There’s no evidence that they do work. It’s possible they could work in some settings….we’d know if we’d done trials. All you needed was for Tedros [from WHO] to declare it’s a pandemic and they could have randomised half of the United Kingdom, or half of Italy, to masks and the other half to no masks. But they didn’t. Instead, they ran around like headless chickens.

Jefferson explains that the entire point of the Cochrane review was to systematically sift through all the available randomised data on physical interventions such as masks and determine what was useful and what was not. “It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,” said Jefferson. “Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence.”

Unfortunately, many of these examples are not becoming outdated. Mask mandates have returned in some places, including schools, despite no high-quality supporting evidence. Same for COVID vaccine booster recommendations for healthy people under 65. Many European countries, including Denmark, have altered their recommendations based on careful risk/benefit analyses. Once again, although it would seem obvious that U.S. leaders should have followed suit, that didn’t happen.

It’s not difficult to discern what we might call the Biden Doctrine of administrative rule-making. It means that the agencies can order whatever they want, whether or not there is any plausible basis in law or whether or not there is any rational basis for it at all. It is a doctrine of bureaucratic supremacy.