It is not unreasonable to conclude that surgical and cloth masks, used as they currently are being used (without other forms of PPE protection), have no impact on controlling the transmission of Covid-19 virus. Current evidence implies that face masks can be actually harmful. The body of evidence indicates that face masks are largely ineffective.
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.
What follows is the current totality of the body of evidence (available comparative studies and high-level pieces of evidence, reporting, and discussion) on COVID-19 lockdowns, masks, school closures, and mask mandates. There is no conclusive evidence supporting claims that any of these restrictive measures worked to reduce viral transmission or deaths. Lockdowns were ineffective, school closures were ineffective, mask mandates were ineffective, and masks themselves were and are ineffective and harmful.
It is imperative that the public educate themselves on how much misinformation is being disseminated by activist researchers, designed to appeal to the goals and ideologies of partisan political actors. Many children could be permanently affected by an atrocious “study” meant to promote a meaningless, destructive policy.
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.
As we finally move past this massive psychological experiment, we should address the secondary effects that masks have had on our society, especially our children, and one day actually insist that our government and public health leaders commit to risk/benefit analysis instead of blindly following the urge to “do something.”
Whether you agree with that designation or not, there are few people in the United States who would argue for including Philadelphia or Los Angeles on the list of “finest” locations in the country. But their fanatical dedication to COVID policy has taken cities that already struggle with crime, homelessness, poor quality of life or high cost of living and made them even more uninhabitable.
A child needs to experience compassion, mercy, kindness, love and caring in order to relate to himself and to the world as fundamentally good. A child bereft of this grows up experiencing deep emotional trauma and scarring. Parents passively allowing their children to be tormented by the mask regime (and other isolation measures) create a profound break in their children’s sense of stability generally, and sense of trust and stability in/of their parents’ love and commitment to them.
