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Masks

universal masking

Universal Masking In Health Care Settings Is Unnecessary

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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.


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mask induced exhaustion syndrome

Long Covid Could be Mask Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES)

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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.


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Tufekci and Howard

How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America

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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.


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war on science

The Latest in the War on Science

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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?


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Eye Protection Wasn’t Misdirection

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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? 


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scientists

It’s Open Season on Scientists

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We warned our readers a couple of weeks back that opinion pieces were taking on the role of editors of scientific journals. We stated, “The arguments put forward are virtually all the same: loud, strident and based on the poorest quality evidence available.“ Unfortunately, this was the case with the Cochrane Review on Physical Interventions to interrupt the spread of respiratory viruses.


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cochrane fact check

Cochrane Fact-Checked with Absurd Results

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Considering how this seriously flawed article is now apparently used to suppress the dissemination of an important scientific paper, to press the Cochrane editor-in-chief into making false claims about the objective of the paper and downplay its results, and to censor a review of the findings by an important mainstream newspaper, there is clearly an urgent need to act strongly against the so called “fact-checking” industry.


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masks ineffective

Cochrane Ends the Masking Rage 

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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. 


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Tomas Pueyo

Tomás Pueyo Returns: The MBA Who Shut Down Europe on Masks and the Cochrane Review

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To this day, it remains unclear where Pueyo got the ideas for virus containment for his 2020 articles. To some degree, Pueyo’s ideas mirrored those of major lockdown proponents like Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson—architect of the wildly-inaccurate COVID models that instigated lockdowns across the free world—who’d already endorsed global lockdown measures. Yet outside of a niche epidemiology community, these ideas were far from well-known. For the most part, it wasn’t until Pueyo’s articles that these ideas for strict virus containment measures reached the mainstream.


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mask study

On the Mask Study: An Interview with the Author

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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.


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Masks Damage

Masks Did Not Do Nothing; They Wrought Havoc

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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.


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masking mandates

Mask Mandates in Healthcare Facilities are the Evilest of them All

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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.


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