- Science has already proved that masks don’t work.
- Many large Randomised Control Trials (RCT) and meta-analyses over the past decade show masks offer no reduction in risk from respiratory viruses.
- We understand the mechanism of transmission of respiratory disease and the science is clear that masks can’t work.
- It can’t help others when you’re breathing out and it can’t help you when you’re breathing in.
- The mechanism of transmission is through very small aerosol particles.
- Any opening in the mask will allow enough of the minimal dose to infect you.
- One of the effects shown in studies with healthcare workers is that they had an increase in headaches.
- Many articles in support of masks are not relevant e.g. masks stop droplets but transmission is not via droplets.
- Diseases are seasonal because droplets are carried for a long time when the air is dry like in the winter.
Face Masks
There is no strong medical consensus on whether face masks help outside of health care settings. However, there does seem to be evidence that they can have negative health effects for the wearer.
According to Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, children could spread COVID-19 more if they wear masks.
HM Government guidance for restaurants, pubs, bars and takeaway services, 24 June 2020:
“The evidence suggests that wearing a face covering does not protect you…evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak.”
Browse the articles related to this topic below.
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We noticed that speaking through some masks (particularly the neck gaiter) seemed to disperse the largest droplets into a multitude of smaller droplets (see fig. S5), which explains the apparent increase in droplet count relative to no mask in that case. Considering that smaller particles are airborne longer than large droplets (larger droplets sink faster), the use of such a mask might be counterproductive. Furthermore, the performance of the valved N95 mask is likely affected by the exhalation valve, which opens for strong outwards airflow. While the valve does not compromise the protection of the wearer, it can decrease the protection of persons surrounding the wearer. In comparison, the performance of the fitted, non-valved N95 mask was far superior.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200902201232/https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/36/eabd3083
The evidence on face coverings ‘is not very strong in either direction’, England’s deputy chief medical officer has said, leaving Britons confused once again over experts’ changing attitudes to masks.
According to professor Russell Viner, President of Royal College of Paediatrics and SAGE member:
- There’s very little evidence for the use of masks in schools.
- Children could potentially spread the virus more if they wear masks
National and international public health guidance is based on low certainty direct evidence of clinical effectiveness and indirect evidence that supports the plausibility of effectiveness of face masks.
https://www.hiqa.ie/sites/default/files/2020-08/Evidence-summary-face-masks-in-the-community.pdf
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Prof. Carl Heneghan On Masks
- Masks and gloves have been shown in studies to help in the medical setting but not in the home setting.
- Cloth masks are worse and may increase infection.
- Masks in the UK were supposed to reduce infections by 40% but in fact, infections went up.
- Study in Norway: 200,000 people would have to wear a mask in order to prevent one infection. Public health impact of mask wearing is negligible.
- This advocating mask-wearing have cherry-picked low-quality observational evidence to suit the evidence.
Carl Heneghan is a clinical epidemiologist with expertise in evidence-based medicine, research methods, and evidence synthesis.
He is Director of the NIHR SPCR Evidence Synthesis Working Group a collaboration of nine primary care departments across UK universities. He set up and directs the Oxford COVID Evidence Service, has over 400 peer-reviewed publications (current H Index 67); published 95 systematic reviews. He is Editor in Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, and Editor of the Catalogue of Bias.
Director of CEBM & Programs in EBHC
Editor in Chief, BMJ EBM
NHS Urgent Care GP
NIHR Senior Investigator
The epidemiologist in charge of Sweden’s coronavirus response has dismissed the scientific evidence for mask-wearing as “astonishingly weak” and suggested that making face coverings mandatory could backfire.
Anders Tegnell, the face of his country’s distinctive light-touch approach to Covid-19, said it was “very dangerous” to believe that facemasks on their own could control the spread of the disease.
He also conceded that Sweden had failed to protect its old people’s homes against the virus but said the number of new infections in the care sector had dwindled away to a negligible level since the height of the outbreak four months ago.
Dr Tegnell has steered a markedly different course from those plotted by most other European countries, leaving bars, restaurants and most schools open throughout
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The Lockdown Lobotomy – The Critic
While naysayers may pick holes in specific studies, the quantity and consistency of evidence is overwhelming: lockdown is stressful, it harms cognitive function, and it makes you susceptible to disease. Ultimately, the toll is high. A meta-analytic review (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015) found that social isolation increases the likelihood of mortality by 29%. In short, lockdown is murder.
- The government is purporting to engage with ‘The Science’, but it is also engaging in psychological operations.
- But a side-effect of compelling people to wear masks is that some may decide it is all too stupid, and they are not going to go to the shops until this idiocy is over.
- But a side-effect of compelling people to wear masks is that some may decide it is all too stupid, and they are not going to go to the shops until this idiocy is over.
- The science on masks is very weak. The claim is that you might spread Covid-19 without knowing, if you have it asymptomatically.
- Firstly, asymptomatic Covid-19 spreading around is good because it reduces the virulence of the virus.
- Secondly, the idea that masks stop the spread is not only totally unproven, but also facile. It is a failure of imagination.
- When a droplet hits a mask, it will dry out within seconds or, at most, minutes. If there is any substance to the droplet other than water, it will turn into a dust particle. Unless you superglue the mask to your face, there will be a constant rain of dust particles coming out from all directions around your mask as you breathe. They will be breathed in by others and the virus will do what it does.
- There seems to have been no assessment whatsoever of the effects of lockdown before we entered it. That violates a key principle of medicine: first, do no harm.
- There is a term in medicine for taking action without that knowledge: negligence. The government was negligent in putting us into lockdown with no assessment of what that would do.
- The most common symptoms of Covid-19 are not fever, cough, headache and respiratory symptoms – they are no symptoms at all, and around 99 per cent of those who catch this virus recover.
- The government painted itself into a corner very quickly. It doesn’t know how to get out of that corner apart from by acting out the scenario that it came up with in the first place, which is why, months after we could have abolished all these restrictions and got back to normal, we are going through more months of public virtue-signalling and ritualistic behaviour.
- The WHO is not fit for purpose and whose performance has been lamentable
- The WHO said there were no asymptomatic cases of Covid-19. Now, it is reckoned probably about 90 per cent of people who get Covid-19 are asymptomatic. That is a big change in viewpoint.
- Broadcasters have done a woeful job of presenting balance on this, and have not allowed views contrary to the mainstream narrative to reach the public.
- I also fear too many people are compliant, and complacent in thinking the government knows what it’s doing.
- This episode is showing us that personal freedom must not be taken for granted.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/07/our-government-should-not-be-copying-totalitarian-states/
California Globe has seen reports of lung infections from long-term mask wearing, persistent coughing, as well as dermatitis on the skin around the mouth.
Providing one more reason healthy people should not wear face masks, Dentists report they are seeing a new syndrome brought about by mask-wearing which the doctors have dubbed “mask mouth,” Fox News reports.
The moisture trapped in face masks creates a petri dish of breeding ground for bacteria, as it is in place directly over your mouth.
Constant mask-wearing “is leading to all kinds of dental disasters like decaying teeth, receding gum lines and seriously sour breath.
“We’re seeing inflammation in people’s gums that have been healthy forever, and cavities in people who have never had them before,” says Dr. Rob Ramondi, a dentist and co-founder of One Manhattan Dental. “About 50% of our patients are being impacted by this, [so] we decided to name it ‘mask mouth’ — after ‘meth mouth.’ ”
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Live NHS Special – Unlocked
We get to grips with the unintended consequences of lockdown on the NHS & the health of the nation.
Martin Daubney interviews Ex-director of the WHO Cancer Programme Professor Karol Sikora.
Consultant Neurologist and MS specialist Dr Waqar Rashid
Dr Ellie Cannon NHS GP and Mail on Sunday Columnist
Dr Tom Jefferson Clinical Epidomilogist- University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine
Dr John Lee Former Clinical Professor of Pathology at Hull York Medical School and Consultant Histopathologist at Rotherham General Hospital & Director of Cancer Services at Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust.
A young man fell to the ground due to a collapsed lung after running two-and-a-half miles while wearing a face mask.
Doctors say his condition was caused by the high pressure on the man’s organ, due to his intense breathing while wearing the face covering…
Doctors say Mr Zhang had a spontaneous pneumothorax, which are more likely to occur with people who have asthma, cystic fibrosis or pneumonia.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/man-26-suffers-collapsed-lung-22018788
Categories
Face masks make you stupid – The Critic
Face masks make you suggestible; they make you more likely to follow someone else’s direction and do things you wouldn’t otherwise do
In Joost Meerloo’s analysis of false confessions and totalitarian regimes, The Rape of the Mind, he coins a phrase for the ‘dumbing down’ of critical resistance – menticide. “In the totalitarian regime,” he wrote, “the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to memorise, to salivate when the bell rings.”
…The fact that masks likely don’t even work brings us to the final reason that wearing one inculcates stupidity and compliance: through a bombardment of lies, contradictions, and confusion, the state overwhelms your ability to reason clearly…
…As Theodore Dalrymple wrote, “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.”
Abstract
Objectives: This study was undertaken to evaluate whether the surgeons’ oxygen saturation of hemoglobin was affected by the surgical mask or not during major operations.
Methods: Repeated measures, longitudinal and prospective observational study was performed on 53 surgeons using a pulse oximeter pre and postoperatively.
Results: Our study revealed a decrease in the oxygen saturation of arterial pulsations (SpO2) and a slight increase in pulse rates compared to preoperative values in all surgeon groups. The decrease was more prominent in the surgeons aged over 35.
Conclusions: Considering our findings, pulse rates of the surgeon’s increase and SpO2 decrease after the first hour. This early change in SpO2 may be either due to the facial mask or the operational stress. Since a very small decrease in saturation at this level, reflects a large decrease in PaO2, our findings may have a clinical value for the health workers and the surgeons.
Note: Coughing and large droplets are note the issue beause breathing exhales more virus in fine aerosols than coughing. Finer aerosols bypass masks and nose to the lungs. Since masks nebulise particles, the solution is ventilation, not face masks.
The global pandemic of COVID-19, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 [SARS-CoV-2]) has been associated with infections and deaths among health-care workers. There have been conflicting recommendations from health authorities on the use of masks or respirators to protect health-care workers. When I first reviewed personal respiratory protection against tuberculosis for health-care workers more than 20 years ago, there was very little information on infectious aerosols. Since then, colleagues in various disciplines have provided a wealth of data. The purpose of this Viewpoint is to review the scientific literature on the aerosols generated by individuals with respiratory infections, and to discuss how these data inform the optimal use of masks, respirators, and other infection-control measures to protect health-care workers from those aerosols. This is not a review of the literature on the use of surgical masks or respirators, as several have been done already.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30323-4/fulltext
This recent crop of trials added 9,112 participants to the total randomised denominator of 13,259 and showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.
The small number of trials and lateness in the pandemic cycle is unlikely to give us reasonably clear answers and guide decision-makers. This abandonment of the scientific modus operandi and lack of foresight has left the field wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/
2:55 – Masks
• Tom Jefferson: “Aside from people who are exposed on the frontlines, there is no evidence that masks make any difference, but what’s even more extraordinary is the uncertainty: we don’t know if these things make any difference…. We should have done randomised control trials in February, March and April but not anymore because viral circulation is low and we will need huge number of enrolees to show whether there was any difference”.
• Carl Heneghan: “By all means people can wear masks but they can’t say it’s an evidence-based decision… there is a real separation between an evidence-based decision and the opaque term that ‘we are being led by the science’, which isn’t the evidence”.
9:26 – Pandemic life cycle
• CH: “One of the keys of the infection is to look at who’s been infected, which shows a crucial difference when comparing the pandemic theory to seasonal theory. In a pandemic you’d expect to see young people disproportionately affected, but in the UK we’ve only had six child deaths, which is far less than we’d normally see in a pandemic. The high number of deaths with over-75s fits with the seasonal theory”.
14:00 – Covid seasonality
• CH: “The stability of the virus is far less when the temperature goes up but humidity seems to be particularly important. The lower the humidity, the more stable the virus is in the atmosphere and on surfaces… It’s now winter in the southern hemisphere, which is why places like Australia are suddenly having outbreaks.”
20:37 – Lockdown
• CH: “Many people said that we should have locked down earlier, but 50% of care homes developed outbreaks during the lockdown period so there are issues within the transmission of this virus that are not clear… Lockdown is a blunt tool and there needs to be intelligent conversations about what mitigation strategies can keep society functioning while we keep the most vulnerable shielded”.
25:20 – Nightingale hospitals
• CH: “They are the wrong structure. What you need is fever hospitals which were here until around the 1980s or 90s. They were on single floors and had isolation within isolation. Theere were no lift shafts and staff were trained, which meant that everyone was protected from each other… It looks like at leats 20% of people got the infection while they were in hospital”
27:30 – Suppression strategy
• CH: “The benefits of the current strategy are outweighed by the harms…When it comes to suppression, only the virus will have a determination in that. If you follow the New Zealand policy of suppressing it to zero and locking down the country forever, then you’re going to have a problem… This virus is so out there now, I cannot see a strategy that makes suppression the viable option. The strategy right now should be how we learn to live with this virus”
32:45 – Response to the virus
• TJ: “I am a survivor of four pandemics and for the other three, I didn’t even realise they were going on. People died but nothing changed and none of the fabric of society was eroded like this response… Do I see steps being taken at a European level about learning from our mistakes and changing policies? The answer is no…
39:30 – Politics of the virus
• CH: “We as individuals are part of the problem because sensationalism drives people to click and read the information. So it’s a big circle because we’ve created the problem — if we put the worst case scenario out there, we will go and have a look. If you want a solution, you’ve got to get people to stop clicking on this sensationalist stuff”.
43:30 – IFR
• CH: “We will be down about where we were with the swine flu: around 0.1-0.3% which is much lower than what we think because at the moment we are seeing the case fatality”.
• TJ: “If you look at the whole narrative, it was distorted from the very beginning by the obsession with influenza which was just one or two agents and nothing else existed. We’re no different now”.
- Some experts argued that masks would help slow the infection rate.
- Others pointed out that improper use of face masks can amplify risks, for instance by acting as a reservoir for virus particles.
- It seems that today’s mantra of ‘listen to the science’ is not as straightforward as it seems.
- Claims to wear masks are untested and unchallenged, then elevated to the status of ‘the science’.
- The hasty assembling of research articles in support of a policy position is not science. This is as likely to be to be dangerously misleading as it is to yield even negligible benefits.
- Scientific controversy in the 21st century is settled by institutional weight and muscle, not by experiment.
- The president of the Royal Society wants to have his cake and eat it: he wants the government to defer to institutional science, but not for science to be accountable for this influence.
- The government, weakened by its capitulations to breakfast TV anchors, politically motivated scientists and scientific institutions, may find itself unable to roll back policies which turn out to do more harm than good.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/16/the-government-has-lost-control/
- There is no scientific evidence that masks are effective in reducing the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
- Sweeping mask recommendations will not reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission, as evidenced by the widespread practice of wearing such masks in Hubei province, China.
- Cloth masks will be ineffective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, whether worn as source control or as PPE.
- Surgical masks likely have some utility as source control from a symptomatic patient in a healthcare setting to stop the spread of large cough particles and limit the lateral dispersion of cough particles.
- Surgical masks may also have very limited utility as source control or PPE in households.
- Authors do not know whether respirators are an effective intervention as source control for the public.
- A non-fit-tested respirator may not offer any better protection than a surgical mask.
- Respirators work as PPE only when they are the right size and have been fit-tested to demonstrate they achieve an adequate protection factor.
- There is no evidence to support use of cloth masks by the public or healthcare workers to control the emission of particles from the wearer.
- Wearing surgical masks in households appears to have very little impact on transmission of respiratory disease.
- There is no evidence that surgical masks worn by healthcare workers are effective at limiting the emission of small particles or in preventing contamination of wounds during surgery.
- There is moderate evidence that surgical masks worn by patients in healthcare settings can lower the emission of large particles generated during coughing and limited evidence that small particle emission may also be reduced.
- Data from laboratory studies indicate masks offer very low filter collection efficiency for the smaller particles.
- The authors were unable to locate any well-performed studies of cloth mask leakage when worn on the face—either inward or outward leakage.
- Many references to coverings employ very crude, non-standardized methods or are not relevant to cloth face coverings because they evaluate respirators or surgical masks.
- The National Academies of Sciences Rapid Expert Consultation on the Effectiveness of Fabric Masks for the COVID-19 Pandemic: “The evidence from…laboratory filtration studies suggests that such fabric masks may reduce the transmission of larger respiratory droplets. There is little evidence regarding the transmission of small aerosolized particulates of the size potentially exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals with COVID-19.”
- Authors concerned that many people do not understand the very limited degree of protection a cloth mask or face covering likely offers as source control for people located nearby.
- Cloth masks and face coverings likely do not offer the same degree of protection as physical distancing, isolation, or limiting personal contact time.
- Transmission is not simply a function of short random interactions between individuals, but rather a function of particle concentration in the air and the time exposed to that concentration.
- A cloth mask or face covering does very little to prevent the emission or inhalation of small particles.
…Wales’ chief medical officer said “very little had changed” in the science, which pointed to them having little benefit.
Also speaking to Claire Summers on Tuesday, Wales’ chief medical officer Dr Frank Atherton said the evidence for making face coverings mandatory was “quite weak”, although there might be a “small benefit”.
Nevertheless, the BBC went with the headline, “Coronavirus: Face masks ‘should be compulsory in shops.'”