Masks

Now, for our own good, we are supposed to relive the covid fiasco, perhaps to gauge how submissive the population remains. Considering the fact that neither the overlords nor the rank-and-file Covidians were ever held accountable—not at the local level, not at the state/provincial level, not at the national level—there is a basis for their optimism. 

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. 

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.”

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. 

It seems like the era of universal masking in healthcare settings might be coming to an end. But I can’t help but feel a little skeptical about this sudden change of heart. Maybe it’s just me, but I think we deserve some straight talk about what really happened behind the scenes during this pandemic roller coaster ride. After all, hindsight is 20/20, and it’s high time we got some honest answers.

Can masks be responsible for a misinterpreted long-COVID-19-syndrome after an effectively treated COVID-19 infection? Nearly 40% of main long-COVID-19 symptoms overlap with mask related complaints and symptoms described by Kisielinski et al. as MIES like fatigue, dyspnea, confusion, anxiety, depression, tachycardia, dizziness, and headache, which we also detected in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of face mask effects in our systematic review. It is possible that some symptoms attributed to long-COVID-19 are predominantly mask-related.

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.

We do not know what spooked the Editor in Chief, but given the speed and highly unprofessional nature of the reaction, could it be one of their big funders?  How the decision was made to undermine the review so quickly and so well – was it a prepared strategy? Finally, the relationship between all this and the NYT opinion piece published on 10 October is unclear.  Nor have the Editors of Cochrane had the decency to explain what happened and what the haste was for. Therefore, why were folk working on the review since 2006 not consulted?

Consider all of the people you’ve seen donning masks or respirators over these past three years, assured in the merit of their virtue. How many still got sick? Did you ever once see someone donning goggles? Are we ever going to get around to discussing exhaustion of the hierarchy of controls, or are actual mitigating measures too taboo, too fringe?