On Sunday, after sending out the wrong email saying that un-vaccinated visitors must mask up and maintain 6’ from everyone else, the White House reluctantly issued new masking guidance which states that "masks are not required" for state events. They walked it back, in other words.
The email comes as hospitals and other health care facilities increasingly discard their masking rules as COVID becomes something in the rearview mirror for most Americans.
Experts have been calling into question the efficacy of face masks for a couple years, including several trials in Germany and Denmark.
A recent study published by Cochrane Library, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, dug into the findings of 78 randomized controlled trials to determine whether "physical interventions" – including face masks and hand-washing – lessened the spread of respiratory viruses.
The conclusion about masks undercuts the scientific basis for masking, according to the study's lead author, Tom Jefferson.
“There is just no evidence that they” (masks) “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
When asked specifically about fitted N95 masks in health care settings, Jefferson said, "It makes no difference, none of it."
The study was lauded by Dr. Jeanne Noble, director of COVID Response at the University of California, San Francisco’s Parnassus Emergency Department, and an advocate for more robust vaccine mandates in California.
“The bottom line,” she said, “is that lifting the hospital mask mandate did not lead to a measurable increase in hospital-acquired COVID infections. This study’s findings are consistent with the recent Cochrane metanalysis, summarizing the best available data to date on the impact of masks in allowing the transmission of respiratory viruses including COVID-19.”
Masking “truthers” will doubtless pick this latest study apart in order to save face. After years spent treating skeptics as subhuman neanderthals, it’s their only remaining recourse. But as a public health policy, mandated masking is now deader than a can of corned beef. Only those who refuse to “follow the science" would see it as a preferred solution to stop the spread of a respiratory virus.
Conclusions
Mask mandates didn’t help, but they were—for some—a wearable alternative to the MAGA hat.
COVID masks are like a priest’s frock collar. It’s a vestment worn by acolytes of the Branch Covidian order. For them, no mandate is considered intrusive when virtue signalling points are up for grabs. “Why do you hate science?” they puffed, upon seeing your face in Home Depot, and your nose in the Apple Store. But in reality, it was these wokemask proponents who were anti-science.
In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common (read blue), Covid spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.
Not to toot our own horn, but we were writing against mask mandates when it was still considered verboten to do so. We were called anti-science for pointing out uncomfortable truths. Some individuals on Twitter even said they hoped that our children would die of Covid for speaking such things. I feel sorry for them. They probably miss having flight attendants protect them by making sure they pull their mask up between bites of peanuts. Special thanks to the people still driving with masks. They are the real heros.
Forever maskers want a permanent hypochondriarchy (my word) — a bizarre and terrible police state that would promote public health by beating people in the streets for showing their faces in public.
The real lesson from the pandemic isn’t that masking doesn’t work. It is that the worst of all despotism is the heartless tyranny of lockstep and her twin sisters, mindless compliance, and snitching on your non-compliant neighbors.
After three years of bullying and hectoring the public into going along with mask and vaccine mandates, it’s obvious these Branch Covidians were intoxicated on its power. They enjoyed the authority that Covid restrictions granted them, and they’re not willing to let it go.
And most of them (even in the church) who ridiculed and mocked the non-compliant did it because because they were embarrassed by their own lack of courage and principles.
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“And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).
