The Mad Perceptions Driving our Covid Policies
Will we live with illogical fear and behaviors for years? Or will we use facts to take back the lives we value?
Will we live with illogical fear and behaviors for years? Or will we use facts to take back the lives we value?
As we demarcate our own comfort zones, we could all use an extra dose of compassion for those who make different calibrations. Whichever strategy claims our allegiance—persisting with strict compliance or loosening the reins—it pays to remember that people on the other side want the pandemic to end as much as we do: they simply disagree on how it will happen.
. The goal of this article is to enumerate some of the myriad harms and emotional abuses inflicted by forced masking, specifically those that are difficult to articulate or identify the connection to masking.
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.
More than 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms Read More
Scientists have lost any consistent standards for evidence appraisal. Non randomized data with dirty measures of exposure and unrealistic effect sizes should set off warning bells. Or, if you want to just believe in things, then go ahead, just believe in them, but don’t pretend you are following a consistent framework for evaluating evidence.
Do masks reduce risk of COVID19 by 53%? How about 80%? Read More
It is time to stop mask mandates for healthy people. It is no longer possible to justify a behavioral experiment with such far-reaching harmful consequences. Many scientific studies and analysis all arrive at the same conclusion: the wearing of masks by healthy people cannot stop the spread of a virus.
While there are clear specificities between the suffering of Africans under the system of chattel slavery and the deprivation of civil liberties endured by most citizens around the world during the current pandemic panic, Anastácia reminds us of certain transhistorical constants in the process of dehumanization and subjugation of populations through the gagging and muzzling of their bodies to quell their protestations.
The Mask of Your Enslavement: The Image, History, and Meaning of Escrava Anastácia Read More
If we are people in a society with an authoritarian structure, where our ability to participate and do the things we wish to do every day are conditional on the approval of government, then our way of relating with power structures is no longer one of “We are all in partnership together” but one of “behavioural correction.” In such a system the mask becomes a tool for enacting that behavioural correction.
If one actually takes the time to consider the preponderance of evidence regarding universal masking, it becomes extremely difficult to conclude that it has had, or was ever expected to have, a significant effect on the course of the pandemic. The evidence certainly doesn’t come even close to matching the quasi-religious fervor exhibited by the popular media, mask-mandating helicopter politicians, or your judgy virtue-signaling neighbor.
Somehow this whole mess sums up everything about Covid policy. What started as a symbol that everyone knew was largely ineffective ends up as a bullying revenue racket.
The CDC seems more easily led by op-eds in political newspapers than actual scientific papers on the topic, of which there are many thousands now. The agency wants digestible, clear instructions on what they should be doing. This piece in the Washington Post provided exactly that. Thus did the CDC reverse itself yet again.
We don’t really need JAMA to tell us that plugging up a child’s ability to breathe freely is a bad idea. You only need good sense and a slight capacity for empathetic compassion, a trait in short supply among policy makers these days.