[Steve]

150 studies show covid masks are useless and dangerous -


More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms

By Paul Elias Alexander
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. 

My focus is on COVID face masks and the prevailing science that we have had for nearly 20 months. Yet I wish to address this mask topic at a 50,000-foot level on the lockdown restrictive policies in general. I build on the backs of the fine work done by Gupta, Kulldorff, and Bhattacharya on the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) and similar impetus by Dr. Scott Atlas (advisor to POTUS Trump) who, like myself, was a strong proponent for a focused type of protection that was based on an age-risk stratified approach.

Because we saw very early on that the lockdowns were the single greatest mistake in public health history. We knew the history and knew they would not work. We also knew very early of COVID’s risk stratification. Sadly, our children will bear the catastrophic consequences and not just educationally, of the deeply flawed school closure policy for decades to come (particularly our minority children who were least able to afford this). Many are still pressured to wear masks and punished for not doing so.

I present the masking ‘body of evidence’ below (n=167 studies and pieces of evidence), comprised of comparative effectiveness research as well as related evidence and high-level reporting. To date, the evidence has been stable and clear that masks do not work to control the virus and they can be harmful and especially to children. 


Table 1: The evidence on COVID-19 face masks and mask mandates and harms…



https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/health...dangerous/

https://brownstone.org/articles/more-tha...and-harms/

[awakened53]

Can I Ever Forgive Them For Forcing My Teenage Son With a Stammer to Wear a Mask?

My stepson, Arthur, had just turned 15 when the pandemic seemed to be approaching the U.K. in early 2020, and was wryly amused by discussions of it around our dinner table: “Just carry on… they’re blowing it out of proportion… if it looks like they’re closing schools, we’ll book a holiday until it blows over.” He might have been a little perplexed when, in March, I pressed ahead with my intention to keep things as normal as possible for our children, still inviting grandparents over and positively insisting on get-togethers with friends – and, of course, the Girlfriend. As with most things in his life, Arthur quietly and readily acquiesced.
In October, he might have been baffled when, as a second national shut-down seemed imminent, we extended our holiday in Devon to eke out a few more days of freedom. In January 2021, he merely raised an eyebrow when the announcement came that he wouldn’t be sitting GCSE exams, shrugging it off as an ideal outcome for him, hoping that his teachers, suddenly determining his grades, would look upon him favourably.
You see, he’s a very easy-going teenage boy. He’s blond with blue eyes, very handsome, thoughtful, funny and kind. And he has struggled, since the age of three, with a stammer, which varies from relatively minor difficulties with certain sounds on one day, to being utterly unable to produce words on another.
So he might have been concerned when, in summer 2020, we returned from a holiday abroad to find the whole country suddenly covering its collective face everywhere it went, the first mandate of its kind having been introduced here. I was very well-prepared: I swotted up on the Government website as to how exemptions worked, and immediately (and not without legitimacy) exempted myself, with my wife quickly following suit. Many countries simply didn’t allow for exemptions, and in some sort of Covid perversion of Stockholm syndrome, I felt a degree of gratitude to the U.K. for its history of caring for the vulnerable, of tolerance, and of respect for others. U.K. law, I later discovered, regards a stammer as a disability, in regard to the somewhat serious matter of discrimination in the provision of goods and services, in the Equality Act of 2010.
In practice, of course, this exemption thing was much harder than it sounded, and the black and white, plain, hard fact of legally backed exemption contrasted wildly to our new reality: my wife and I faced dirty looks, hostile and aggressive challenges, and a creeping, pervasive sense of wrongdoing everywhere we went. Friendly, local supermarkets employed not-too-friendly bouncers, high street boutiques suddenly became quite choosy about their customers, councils took on Covid marshals who pulled us to one side, the Government told us we were granny-killers. Previously sane, sensible people – friends, academics, scientists for God’s sake! – paraded around the place, just like that, with their faces covered, seemingly without question or pause.
For Arthur, understandably lacking the hardened scepticism and insouciance of his stepfather, it might have been some sort of living hell. This boy, this adolescent, teenage boy, struggles to speak sometimes, and now it seemed like the whole country wanted him to put a cloth over his mouth, and, what’s more, would treat him like dirt if he didn’t.
Then, next up, face coverings were ‘recommended’ in schools by the DfE, with a terminology and a force that made even this pedant doubt his own understanding of the word. And so, as I wrote at the time, clamouring and failing to be heard:
Binding children’s faces for five or more hours per day, and surrounding them with a sea of bound faces, surely only adds to the overwhelming sense of hazard and danger already caused in schools by cancelled exams, prolonged closures, ‘bubbles’, hand sanitising stations, dramatically altered timetables, one way systems and barriers, a total collapse of routine and predictability, and much more besides. To foist face coverings upon children when transmission in schools is apparently not disproportionate, when young people are frankly unthreatened by the virus, when there is no evidence that face coverings reduce transmission, and when the DfE simply “recommend” it, is heinous. I see little difference between that and making them tie their germ-spreading hands behind their backs. I am sickened by it, and it is beyond my understanding that parents, teachers, politicians and wider society seem so unperturbed by it all.
One doesn’t have to be an expert in the complexities and precious fragilities of oral communication to figure out that strapping an obstacle over the mouth will not be conducive to the physical and mental effort it can take a stammerer to form clear and fluent sounds. Arthur understood Covid as well as anyone, he understood his own difficulties, and he chose to exempt himself, which we squarely supported. There were times when, to avoid conflict, he did cover his face, and we supported him in that too. He was, remember, a schoolboy, only 15 years old. He came to understand, unlike so many others, and in stark contradistinction to his new, everyday experiences, that the law was in fact on his side, and perhaps to take a little comfort or strength from that.
At other times, though, he was intimidated by a bus driver who, well after the mandate had been lifted, exploded in fury at him, pulling the bus over to leave the driver’s booth and yell at him in front of his college peers and other members of the public. He was refused entry to McDonalds – in town, with his mates – by a staff member who was simply applying her own rules (or those of the company?) by just not allowing him access to the restaurant; he unintentionally hesitated when attempting to explain his exemption to her, and she interrupted, flatly refuting it. His Sixth Form college pressed on and on and on with its rules that he hourly prove his exemption by wearing a lanyard, in flagrant contradiction of Government guidance, until, finally, my wife felt driven to threaten them with future legal action for stigmatising him and damaging his mental health. The head backed down – but only for our son, not on the policy itself. How could it be that so many employees in so many organisations still acted as though they had no clue about the details of exemptions, which I had found out for myself online in minutes?
Ours is not the kind of family that discloses and dissects every single feeling. But I know that my stepson’s stammer can cause him frustration, upset, embarrassment and distress. I know that there are circumstances he sometimes avoids putting himself in, or has found ways to work around. I can well believe that, in a world of ubiquitous face coverings, he experienced heightened nerves and anxiety of some situations, that there were times over a two and a half year period when he decided not to go to that event, or see those people, or do that thing. Well – thanks everybody; very well done.

Read More: Can I Ever Forgive Them For Forcing My Teenage Son With a Stammer to Wear a Mask?

[awakened53]

The Mask of Your Enslavement: The Image, History, and Meaning of Escrava Anastácia

The image of Escrava Anastácia has been making many appearances in several recent anti-lockdown protests around the world. The way in which the likeness of this muzzled female Brazilian slave has been used to illustrate the various forms of pandemic population restrictions, particularly the mandatory wearing of face masks, has been criticized by various media outlets for its perceived cultural appropriation and irreverence to the historical suffering of black people.
This article represents an opportunity to address this claim of cooptation and to explain the merits of illuminating the current health-driven limitations as indeed a form of enslavement.

Anastásia speaks in the silence after prayers, as if telepathically. I think I can make out of the sound of certain words… Anastácia’s silence says: “Speak for me!”

Escrava Anastácia is a folk saint venerated in Brazil, with a large number of devotees among Umbanda practitioners. She is also venerated by many black Brazilian Catholics, having an important shrine in the prominent church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black People in Salvador da Bahia, even though she has never been acknowledged or canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.
Read more: The Mask of Your Enslavement: The Image, History, and Meaning of Escrava Anastácia

[Steve]

Distressing Dependence on the Covid Face Mask: A Tool of Social Confinement. Dr. Nicole Delépine

Why don’t they get rid of the muzzle?

While the health law specifies that a generalized obligation is no longer conceivable without prior discussion by the deputies, the minister manages to continue to impose it on us while the epidemic is over, the early treatments recognized and the ineffectiveness of the mask on the population obvious![1][2] HIS OWN ROLE IS UNMASKED.

Constantly reactivated, the obligation to wear a mask causes a return of the trauma. This mask is not only a false protection, but a continuation of the destruction of our Humanity, towards transhumanism.

Even more serious than in the first analysis ……



https://www.globalresearch.ca/distressin...ne/5788813

[awakened53]

Bring back face masks on public transport this winter, says Tony Blair Institute

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has called for face masks to be made compulsory on public transport again to prevent a winter Covid wave that could put added pressure on the stretched NHS.
Face coverings have not been in force since July last year, but the institute said “the strategic implementation of mask mandates should be considered for this autumn and winter” on public transport.
It also suggested masks should be brought back for indoor events if a new Covid variant emerges that causes a surge in hospitalisations.
A paper published by the think tank headed by Mr Blair has also called for the Covid booster vaccination campaign to be expanded to include all adults.
Current guidance from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) says that over-50s, the clinically vulnerable and front line health and social care workers can get a booster, with all expected to get an upgraded, omicron-specific jab.
‘Winter will bring a perfect storm’
But the institute said this should be enhanced to cover all over-18s to alleviate pressure on the NHS, with experts predicting a bad year for all respiratory viruses, including flu and Covid.
“This winter will bring a perfect storm, resulting in unprecedented demand and reduced capacity, which will combine to create the worst winter crisis in the NHS’s history,” the report warns.
It also claims that if demand for health services grows because of increasing flu and Covid infections this winter “lives will be lost”.
Health officials have sounded the alarm for several weeks, warning that a viral triple threat – monkeypox, flu and Covid – could prove testing for the health service.
“The Government must do whatever it takes to support the NHS through this period and act immediately to avert an unmitigated disaster,” the report says.
“Failure to do so will result in the breakdown of the NHS as we know it, with a collapse in vital services and a rise in adverse outcomes for patients.”
Australia and other Southern Hemisphere nations in which it is currently winter are battling an unusually bad flu season, with forecasts showing it could be a similar story over the northern winter.
The Government has widened its flu jab rollout to all over-50s and will be starting it earlier than normal. It will run parallel to the Covid booster rollout.


Read more: Bring back face masks on public transport this winter, says Tony Blair Institute

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Birds, Other Wildlife Sacrificed for Useless Mask Pollution

Worldwide reports, including from Sri Lanka, the U.K, Australia, Japan and North America were gathered to demonstrate how masks have created environmental pollution that is injuring and killing wildlife
Mindless mask mandates increase your risk of death, weaken the immune system, encourage dehydration, increase headaches, decrease cognitive precision and promote facial alkalinization
Wearing surgical masks increases your daily inhalation of microplastics, while studies have demonstrated that mask wearing does not lower your risk of contracting viral illnesses, including flu and COVID-19
Yet another way in which masks have created problems is the environmental pollution that is injuring and killing wildlife.[sup]1,[/sup][sup]2,[/sup][sup]3[/sup] Experts have estimated that 129 billion face masks and 65 billion gloves were used and discarded each month during the pandemic. In 2020, research also suggested that 1.6 billion disposable masks from mindless mask mandates ended up in the ocean.[sup]4[/sup]
But it’s not just the whole masks and gloves that have created a significant environmental problem. Although the bottled water crisis is a leading source of environmental plastic pollution, the new mask crisis is slated to outpace it. The scientists in one paper[sup]5[/sup] published in Frontiers of Environmental Science and Engineering wrote:
“… there is no official guidance on mask recycling, making it more likely to be disposed of as solid waste. With increasing reports on inappropriate disposal of masks, it is urgent to recognize this potential environmental threat.”
Masks are not being recycled. Yet, their material makes it likely they persist and accumulate in the environment. Most disposable surgical masks contain three layers — polyester outer layer, a polypropylene or polystyrene middle layer and an inner layer made of absorbent materials such as cotton.
Polypropylene is one of the most problematic plastics, as it’s widely produced, responsible for a large accumulation of waste in the environment, and is a known asthma trigger.[sup]6[/sup] The researchers noted[sup]7[/sup] that once masks are subjected to solar radiation, the degradation of polypropylene slows dramatically and leads to persistence and accumulation.
But, before the masks even break down in the environment, they are causing significant damage to wildlife, especially the bird population. You don’t have to be a bird enthusiast to understand that birds are uniquely important to the balance of the environment.
They are pollinators, they disperse seeds and they recycle nutrients.[sup]8[/sup] They are predators, scavengers and ecosystem engineers. Injuries and falling populations will have a unique and significant impact on an ecosystem on which we rely for our survival.

Read More – Birds, Other Wildlife Sacrificed for Useless Mask Pollution

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Hospital Still Spending £138,000 Paying Two People to Stand at Door and Hand Out Masks and Sanitiser

A hospital is still spending £138,000 employing two people to stand at the door and hand out face masks and hand sanitiser, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.
Frustrated by the continuing presence of mask ‘requirements’ at his local hospital, Mr. David Davies submitted a Freedom of Information request (FOI) to George Eliot NHS Hospital in Nuneaton. As part of this FOI he asked the hospital the amount spent on staff tasked with monitoring visitors for face-covering compliance and handing out masks and hand sanitiser at the entrance. The answer he received surprised him.
Every month at George Eliot NHS Hospital, two members of staff are assigned to COVID-19 door duty. According to the FOI response shared with campaign organisation Smile Free, the hospital is spending £11,500 per month on this, an annualised expense of £138,000, equivalent to £69,000 per person per year. This sum would cover the wages of four nurses.
Were this repeated at all U.K. hospitals, rough calculations suggest something in the region of £167m across the entire estate, enough to pay for around 5,000 nurses.
How much do the masks themselves cost the hospital, Mr. Davies also asked. He was refused an answer on the grounds that “retrieval of the information would require manual review of invoices from all suppliers during the period”.
Worryingly, given the known harms of masking, especially in healthcare settings, George Eliot hospital revealed it has not conducted any risk assessments for compulsory masking, instead citing “national guidance”. But as Mr. Davies points out in a follow-up letter, the very “national guidance” cited states clearly that “the exact interpretation will depend on your local risk assessments”.

Read More: Hospital Still Spending £138,000 Paying Two People to Stand at Door and Hand Out Masks and Sanitiser

[awakened53]

NHS England Admits its Hospital Mask Mandate is Based on Modelling That Simply Assumes They Work

Earlier this year, the Smile Free campaign wrote an open letter to the NHS Chief Executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland calling for the lifting of the face mask requirement for all staff, patients and visitors in healthcare settings. Signed by over 2,000 medical and healthcare professionals, the letter cited gold-standard RCT scientific evidence that highlighted both the ineffectiveness of masks as a viral barrier and the potential physical, social and psychological harms associated with their use. The attempts of Scotland and Wales to justify their hospital mask requirements were criticised in an earlier article in the Critic. Now NHS England has spoken, defending its endorsement of mass masking primarily on the basis of computer modelling. Dr. Gary Sidley takes the organisation to task in the Critic.
In a letter dated October 4th 2022, Dame Ruth May (Chief Nursing Officer and national lead for infection control), responding on behalf of Amanda Pritchard (NHS England Chief Executive), asserted that there was “strong” evidence that widespread use of face coverings achieved a “significant impact” on the prevention of COVID-19 transmission. To support this premise she cited a computational modelling study, posted in October 2021. This pre-print paper reported that, based on its model, “universal masking” would achieve a 46% reduction in infections among healthcare workers. Given the substantial amount of robust scientific evidence available, aggregating around the conclusion that – in the real world – masks constitute an ineffective viral barrier, it is astonishing that NHS England is relying on a modelling study to justify its blanket policies.
There appears to be little recognition of the inauspicious legacy of the epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson. In collaboration with his colleagues at Imperial College London, Ferguson deployed computer modelling to predict the doomsday scenarios of Covid killing 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 people in the U.K. Such inaccurate prophecies were largely responsible for spooking Western governments into lockdowns, an unprecedented public health policy that has led to extensive collateral harms. Now healthcare chiefs are citing a similar modelling study as a key reason for persisting with mask recommendations in our hospitals, health centres and GP practices.

Read More: NHS England Admits its Hospital Mask Mandate is Based on Modelling That Simply Assumes They Work

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Why Are Some Hospitals and Clinics Mask Free, While Others are Aggressively Insisting on Face Nappies?

NHS England guidance promoting universal masking in healthcare settings was quietly dropped on June 1st as part of the government’s ‘Living with Covid’ plans. So how is it that some hospitals and clinics seem to be making their own policies, with some mask-free and others aggressively insisting on masking both staff and public?
The reason is that the new guidance made masking policies a matter for local discretion. As a result, national COVID-19 guidance can be trumped by so-called ‘local COVID-19 prevalence’. But how consistent are local responses? By what set of rules are decisions to reintroduce masks made? And, most importantly, who is responsible for determining the rules and making decisions?
A return to masking?
Early in October, mainstream news outlets were reporting on the ‘return of the mask’. Between the Mail and the Sun’s accounts, eight different NHS Trusts were reintroducing a range of Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), prominent among which were mask mandates for patients and visitors.
In all cases, these measures were apparently being introduced as a result of ‘Covid’s resurgence’ with “surveillance data suggesting Covid is on the rise in England”.
Just a month on from these heavily publicised reintroductions of mask ‘requirements’, the picture had changed somewhat. Table 1 shows the current status of mask requirements for the public. In some cases, the trusts who saw the need for restrictions have relaxed them, but they remain in full force for others.

Read More – Why Are Some Hospitals and Clinics Mask Free, While Others are Aggressively Insisting on Face Nappies?

[awakened53]

The Shadowy Group That Brought Mask Mandates to the U.K.

In our supposedly liberal and transparent democratic country, it seems that it was a group of remote and unnamed scientists, outside of the formal SAGE infrastructure, who effectively imposed masks on British citizens. Were they well-meaning academics offering their expertise, or conflicted ideologues engaged in a global endeavour to control the masses? You decide.
The volte-face on mask recommendations and regulations by the U.K. Government and its public health experts in 2020 is one of the many unfathomable policy decisions we witnessed during the Covid era. Within little more than a month, our ministers, senior scientists and medical leaders flipped from a stance of repeatedly imploring us all not to wear a face covering in community settings to a totalitarian one of imposing mask mandates. Who was primarily responsible for this remarkable U-turn?
Based on the recent revelations from former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, it seems that the political whims of Dominic Cummings (former Government advisor) and Nicola Sturgeon (First Minister of Scotland) may have been influential. Nonetheless, the quirks of political figures are unlikely to have been sufficient to achieve a mask U-turn, and support from expert scientific advisors would have been necessary. Which academics performed this role of mask enforcers? Astonishingly, a thorough exploration of SAGE minutes – and the compilation of a decision-making timeline – during the prelude to this policy reversal implicates an obscure multi-disciplinary group most of us will never have heard of: DELVE, which stands for Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics.
What the experts believed prior to March and early April 2020
In the early spring of 2020, the public health experts spoke with one tongue. Here are a few reminders of their collective wisdom:

In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer (March 4th 2020).

“For the average member of the public” masks “are really not a good idea… people can put themselves at more risk than less… you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in.

Read More: The Shadowy Group That Brought Mask Mandates to the U.K.