Politics of The Mask
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Not Masking Is Now Racist Because (Fill in the Blank)
These days, we can’t go a day without learning that something new is “racist.”
Math is racist. Voter ID is racist. Signature requirements are racist. Even recessions are racist.
And now you’re racist if you aren’t wearing a mask in public because of COVID-19.
Mara Gay, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday and declared that wearing a mask is still “an act of solidarity and respect, not only for people with certain health vulnerabilities, but also for racial minorities.”
How did she get there? Don’t ask.
“Yeah, you know, I think it is an important moment to recognize, everybody is weary, but the impact has not been equal across the American population or the world and so I just want to say, you know, a virus does not a pandemic make,” she explained.
So, what makes this a pandemic, according to Gay? That “a thousand Americans are still dying from this virus. It is not the flu and also, many, many more, unfortunately, are coming down with symptoms of long COVID, which has become endemic and anybody is susceptible to.”
"CDC no longer recommends universal masking in health facilities"
CDC no longer recommends universal masking in health facilities
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends universal masking in health care settings, unless the facilities are in areas of high COVID-19 transmission.
The agency quietly issued the updates as part of an overhaul to its infection control guidance for health workers published late Friday afternoon. It marks a major departure from the agency’s previous recommendation for universal masking.”
SOURCE:
https://brownstone.org/articles/mor...d-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
TPD
the poor dad
And how long before our doctors and hospitals allow us to remove the face diaper?
Experts Say ‘Flawed’ Study Used to Justify Mask Mandate, $3 Million in Fines Levied at Church
In a deposition in August, Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s public health officer, was asked about studies she relied on regarding COVID-19 policies.
“I can remember a particular study around masking evidence that was a large study in Bangladesh that had cases—it was a large retrospective cohort study that demonstrated the efficacy of community-wide masking. I can’t remember exactly where it was published. It was not published by the CDC [the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” she said.
Dr. Robert Malone, an internationally recognized scientist and physician who has conducted key research on mRNA vaccines, told the Epoch Times that while Cody is highly credentialed, “she is citing as justification for action a very flawed study that actually proves if anything, that the masks don’t work, when you actually look at the data.”
Norman Fenton, a mathematician and risk information management professor at Queen Mary University of London, also said the Bangladesh study doesn’t hold up to rigorous analysis and doesn’t prove masks work.
“There was no discernible effect of the mask intervention on covid infection,” he concluded.
In his paper from May, Fenton states the news media grossly exaggerated the authors’ conclusions in the Bangladesh study, and that skeptical researchers have identified weaknesses in various aspects of the trial and statistical analysis, thus casting doubt on the significance of the results.
A more recent re-analysis published on Sept. 15 provides additional “damning critique” of the Bangladesh study, Fenton said in an email to The Epoch Times. The re-analysis, led by University of California–Berkeley professor Benjamin Recht, found masks had a “modest or no direct effect on COVID-related outcomes.”
Mask Mandates Continue 'Indefinitely' Even After CDC Starts to Admit Defeat
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon, where mask mandates within the school have proven completely useless at prevent the spread of COVID. Which, of course, means that they must continue.
An open letter written by the college’s president, Beverly Daniel Tatum perfectly summarized the remarkable lack of logic required to continue masking:
“I am sorry to say that because of the relatively high confirmed COVID-19 case counts on campus (approximately 50 per week since the start of the semester) we will need to continue our indoor mask mandate until further notice.”
How remarkable is that?
The president explains that their current mask mandate has been unable to stop a “relatively high” amount of “confirmed COVID-19 case counts” on campus, and so they’ll need to continue doing it.
The less it works, the more we need it.
It’s a wonderful distillation of the inherent absurdities among pro-masking groups, exemplified by the cowardice, incompetence and lack of critical thinking now inherent amongst college administrators.
Masks aren’t working to stop the rapid spread of the virus, so we need to continue masking. How can these policies ever end with nonsensical thinking like this?
Supposedly COVID cases on campus have, according to the letter, “taxed our campus health care system and residential services to the limit.”
How can this be happening?
We know that college students are at incredibly low risk of serious complications from COVID, not to mention that Mt. Holyoke College, as committed members of the anti-science wing of the left, mandated COVID vaccines for everyone at the school last year.
It’s confusing that COVID cases have “taxed” their campus health care system to the limit, when everyone that works at the college is vaccinated and everyone who attends the college is vaccinated.
Oh, and they’re boosted too.
'Ontario’s top doctor (Kieran Moore) urges mask wearing, warns mandate could return'
Of course the vaccine uptake is low, the people have figured out the fraud you idiot! They know of people re-infected and severely harmed post vax and dying.
Who cares if its is not acceptable to you Kieran, ‘up yours’.
Who stole, is it the Premier Ford who stole the COVID money in Ontario, is it the MPPs? Or the insiders in the legislature? Is it the lobbyists? Is it the CEOs of hospitals in Ontario or the crooked inept medical doctors themselves who denied early treatment and caused thousands of their patients to die? Someone stole the PPE COVID relief money for now this dimwit knucklehead moron Moore is saying ‘the approach of winter could further jeopardize the province’s struggling health-care system’; I need to ask nutball Moore, where is the money, for you got billions to gear up the hospitals so they are geared up, so it is either you are lying about ‘struggling strained’ system, or you could tell us the tax payers who took the money and bought houses and stashed it away.
Boston School Masking Study is an Embarrassment to Science
There are numerous, granular level details that the researchers got wrong, but we can see another clearly identifiable manipulation of the data.
The study attempted to determine if removing mask mandate policies in school districts in Massachusetts resulted in different outcomes.
In essence, they took the school districts that lifted mandates and compared them to those that kept mandates in place. They then claimed their results showed that masking led to decreased rates of COVID spread.
Except they ignored one extremely important policy difference.
There were significantly different testing requirements between the two cohorts.
Not only did they ignore this difference, they lied about it.
Here is the text, directly from the Massachusetts Department of Education memo for “health protocols:”
Public Health is Trying to Force People Back Into Masks
Just when you thought it was over, masks are back.
Well, to be fair, it’ll never be over for many far-left areas of the country like Los Angeles.
Despite the fact that masks do not work to prevent the spread of COVID, LA wants to bring them back.
ABC 7 in Los Angeles posted that the county is changing their recommendations due to ”sharply rising” infection rates.
While falling short of a mandate, this severe overreaction is an indication that the county will inevitably return to mandates shortly.
This ”strong” recommendation also comes despite the fact that Los Angeles data repeatedly proves that masks don’t work.
In December 2021, public health officials conducted spot mask compliance checks across the county. They found that over 95% of businesses and customers were complying with the mandate.
Cases immediately skyrocketed to record-breaking heights regardless.
New Study Disproves Expert Messaging on 'High Quality' Masks
The Annals of Internal Medicine just published a randomized controlled trial comparing the ability of medical masks to prevent COVID infection to fit-tested N95’s.
Importantly, this trial was conducted on healthcare workers who would be most likely to use masks appropriately.
That trial design was also important as it was meant to determine whether or not N95 respirators were superior to “regular” surgical masks.
They examined 29 different health care facilities on multiple continents, from North America to Asia and Africa.
The percentage of healthcare workers testing positive for COVID in each group was tracked to determine how effective or ineffective higher quality masking was in preventing infection.
Unsurprisingly, the results confirmed that there is essentially zero difference between surgical or N95 respirators when it comes to tests results.
Rigorous international study of N95 masks upends federal COVID narrative
Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM) this week and led by researchers at Canada's McMaster University, the study found no statistically significant difference in protection between the two kinds of masks in healthcare facilities in Canada, Israel, Pakistan and Egypt.
Funders included the Canadian government and World Health Organization, which unlike the U.S. opposes masking young children and also found "no evidence" face coverings made a difference against influenza in a 2019 study.
Previous RCTs in the COVID era have found mediocre protection from face coverings at best. A Danish study of 6,000 that had trouble getting published — and eventually landed in AIM — found no statistically significant difference between surgical and no-mask wearers.
A much larger Bangladeshi study led by Yale researchers found that villages that got surgical masks reduced symptomatic infection by 11%, but the confidence interval hit zero and statistical significance disappeared for every age group under 50. Cloth masks had an "imprecise zero" effect.
Uh-oh; earth paging Fauci, Biden, Walensky & the moronic imbeciles at CDC, NIH, FDA et al. and their mask lunacy, as ANNALS RCT show i)masks (surgical) & N95s do NOT stop infection ii)no difference
No statistically significant difference in protection was found between the two kinds of masks (surgical vs N95) in healthcare facilities (multi-center). So when you are told that it is now time to use the N95 respirator, the fact is that the N95 is no better than the blue surgical mask. They all do not work with these respiratory viruses, both allow infection in, and we knew that day one! Like lockdowns, the masking was also a farse. Like all of the COVID lockdown lunacy.
Medical Masks Versus N95 Respirators for Preventing COVID-19 Among Health Care Workers
A Randomized Trial
Abstract
Background:
It is uncertain if medical masks offer similar protection against COVID-19 compared with N95 respirators.Objective:
To determine whether medical masks are noninferior to N95 respirators to prevent COVID-19 in health care workers providing routine care.Design:
Multicenter, randomized, noninferiority trial. (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT04296643).Setting:
29 health care facilities in Canada, Israel, Pakistan, and Egypt from 4 May 2020 to 29 March 2022.Participants:
1009 health care workers who provided direct care to patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19.Intervention:
Use of medical masks versus fit-tested N95 respirators for 10 weeks, plus universal masking, which was the policy implemented at each site.Measurements:
The primary outcome was confirmed COVID-19 on reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test.Results:
In the intention-to-treat analysis, RT-PCR–confirmed COVID-19 occurred in 52 of 497 (10.46%) participants in the medical mask group versus 47 of 507 (9.27%) in the N95 respirator group (hazard ratio, 1.14 [95% CI, 0.77 to 1.69]). An unplanned subgroup analysis by country found that in the medical mask group versus the N95 respirator group RT-PCR–confirmed COVID-19 occurred in 8 of 131 (6.11%) versus 3 of 135 (2.22%) in Canada (HR, 2.83 [CI, 0.75 to 10.72]), 6 of 17 (35.29%) versus 4 of 17 (23.53%) in Israel (HR, 1.54 [CI, 0.43 to 5.49]), 3 of 92 (3.26%) versus 2 of 94 (2.13%) in Pakistan (HR, 1.50 [CI, 0.25 to 8.98]), and 35 of 257 (13.62%) versus 38 of 261 (14.56%) in Egypt (HR, 0.95 [CI, 0.60 to 1.50]). There were 47 (10.8%) adverse events related to the intervention reported in the medical mask group and 59 (13.6%) in the N95 respirator group.
Look... a reporter actually doing investigative reporting.