Masks ⋆ Page 3 of 10 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

Long Covid Could be Mask Induced Exhaustion Syndrome (MIES)

Daniel Horowitz / April 14, 2023 / Masks / 6 minute read

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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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How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America

Michael Senger / March 27, 2023 / Masks / 21 minute read

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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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The Latest in the War on Science

Tom Jefferson,

Carl Heneghan / March 23, 2023 / Masks / 5 minute read

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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

Megan Mansell / March 20, 2023 / Masks / 10 minute read

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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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It’s Open Season on Scientists

Tom Jefferson,

Carl Heneghan / March 17, 2023 / Masks / 1 minute of reading

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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-Checked with Absurd Results

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson / March 13, 2023 / Masks / 14 minute read

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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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Cochrane Ends the Masking Rage

Beny Spira / March 9, 2023 / Masks / 8 minute read

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

Michael Senger / March 2, 2023 / Law, Masks, Policy / 8 minute read

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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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On the Mask Study: An Interview with the Author

Maryanne Demasi / February 28, 2023 / Masks / 8 minute read

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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 Did Not Do Nothing; They Wrought Havoc

Laura Dodsworth / February 24, 2023 / Masks / 2 minute read

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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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Mask Mandates in Healthcare Facilities are the Evilest of them All

Aaron Hertzberg / February 24, 2023 / Masks / 21 minute read

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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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The Freedom Not to Wear a Mask

John Tamny / February 23, 2023 / Masks / 5 minute read

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The simple truth is that the one-size-fits-all approach didn’t protect us from the virus as much as it blinded us to its reality; one that only could have been arrived at via freedom. We didn’t need medical studies, and the reality is that still we don’t need medical studies. What we needed and need is freedom. With the latter once again comes knowledge from different people doing different things, and all of us learning from their successes and failures.

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