Social Media Toolkit CDC. (Photo: cdc.gov)
Be Strong and Take Heart California’s Frightened Mask Wearers
‘Standard cloth and surgical masks offer next to no protection against virus-sized particles or small aerosols’
By Katy Grimes, February 28, 2021 2:15 am
On my daily hike through a large regional park with my dog, I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon of late: more people are wearing masks while exercising outside in the fresh air.
As I hiked Saturday, I was heartened to see an informal soccer game played by 7-8 year old girls. But then I noticed their coach had a mask on. And when I looked more closely at the children playing, all of them were also wearing masks. Outside… Playing a vigorous game of soccer…
Teenagers playing volleyball were also masked-up.
Walkers, runners, bicyclists, and families out for a stroll were wearing masks.
So many of the daily mask wearers I witness appear fearful, usually walking past me in a wide arc afraid that I may be a walking contagion. Other mask wearers clearly believe wearing a mask is a symbol of social responsibility.
This reminded me of what I read recently in journalist Alex Berenson’s Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Death Counts, Lockdowns, and Masks…
Importantly, Berenson concludes “…the worst reason of all is that mask mandates appear to be an effort by governments to find out what restrictions on their civil liberties people will accept on the thinnest possible evidence.”
He lays out how masks became mandatory, despite a great deal of medical evidence showing they do not prevent wearers from catching respiratory infections.
“’Overnight, masks have become a symbol of social responsibility,’ The New York Times wrote on April 10,” Berenson reported in Part 3: Masks. “’If you still need convincing, here’s why you now should be wearing a mask in public spaces.’ Two months later, the Times cheerily offered ‘Tips for Making Your Mask Work.’”
Berenson wrote the three-part booklet series largely dispelling much of the disinformation foisted on the public by “public health experts” and control-driven politicians. “Unreported Truths Part 1 focused on the way we count deaths from COVID-19. Part 2 explained lockdowns. Part 3 covers a topic even more central to our lives every day – the evidence that masks do or do not work to reduce the spread of the coronavirus,”he explained.
Berenson says “for months, public health experts have proclaimed, ‘My mask protects you, while yours protects me.’ Governments all over the world now make people wear face coverings in public. But the proof that masks do any good is far weaker than almost anyone understands.”
Berenson digs into many studies and trials with interesting results.
…“even trained medical staff dislike wearing them for more than a few hours. As two doctors wrote in a commentary in August, “when worn properly, N95 masks are suffocating, uncomfortable, and difficult to tolerate for long durations.” (https:// jamanetwork.com/ journals/ jamainternalmedicine/ fullarticle/ 2769441) As a practical matter, if civilians are going to wear face coverings, they will be standard cloth or surgical masks.”
Berenson noted that in several studies, the health experts “didn’t explicitly say so in their conclusion, maybe because they were aware that any criticism of masks is off-limits in the coronavirus era. Instead, they pointed out that their work offered ‘quantitative results… [for] evidence-based decisions.’ In other words, we’re not going to tell you surgical masks don’t work–you can read. (https:// jamanetwork.com/ article.aspx? doi = 10.1001/ jamainternmed. 2020.4221)
“What’s true for surgical masks appears to be doubly true for homemade cloth masks, which generally filter even fewer small particles and are even less effective. The overall evidence is clear: Standard cloth and surgical masks offer next to no protection against virus-sized particles or small aerosols.”
Berenson concludes:
“The theoretical evidence that cloth and surgical masks do not protect their wearers is overwhelming. But we have even stronger evidence. It comes from real-world clinical trials of people wearing masks. Medical proof comes in many different forms. The weakest evidence comes from anecdotes based on one person’s experience. Just because I didn’t have an accident after driving drunk doesn’t mean doing so is safe. On the other hand, the gold standard of evidence comes from what scientists and physicians call randomized controlled trials.”
“Clinical trials consistently find that masks don’t protect people from respiratory viruses.”
Berenson found a recent trial:
“If only we had a large randomized controlled trial that specifically examined whether masks protected their wearers from the coronavirus. Now we do. In a paper published on Nov. 18, Danish researchers reported on a trial that covered almost 5,000 people in Denmark in the spring. The trial was carefully designed and executed, with half the participants told to wear high-quality surgical masks and provided 50 for free. The other half were not asked to wear masks. Participants were followed for a month to see if they had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. Within the month, 53 people in the maskless group had been infected, compared to 42 who wore masks. The difference was indistinguishable from chance, and suggested masks might really cause anywhere from a 46 percent decrease to a 23 percent increase in infections among their wearers. The reason for the failure was not that people in the masked group didn’t follow the rules, either. When they looked at only at participants who always wore masks, the researchers found an even smaller difference. Mask wearing “did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of Sars-Cov-2 infection,” the authors wrote in their discussion.”
There is little asymptomatic spread:
“Forcing everyone to wear masks will matter very little unless asymptomatic people spread the coronavirus in large numbers. Everyone agrees people who are symptomatic with a fever or cough should stay home or wear a mask if they must go out. If only sick people are wearing masks, face coverings may function as a public signal: I don’t feel well, stay away. But the point of universal mask mandates is to force people who do not feel sick to wear masks anyway, on the theory that people without symptoms can also spread the virus. Like practically every other part of the “my mask protects you” theory, this aspect is unproven. Worse–like the advice around general lockdowns, which were never recommended before March–it has become highly politicized.”
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci explained that asymptomatic transmission was not a threat.
Maria Van Kerkhove, a World Health Organization scientist said at a press conference last June that asymptomatic people almost never transmit the coronavirus. Berenson addressed the fallout of her statement:
But the media and other public health experts immediately pushed back on Van Kerkhove’s accidental honesty in the June 8 press conference. Why? Because the threat of asymptomatic transmission is critical to the argument for universal mask mandates. If people without symptoms are very unlikely to transmit Sars-Cov-2 to others, why make them wear masks at all?”
The evidence is overwhelming that surgical or cloth masks don’t protect their wearers, so whom exactly are the masks protecting?”experts the hospitals had offered agreed that “there is limited evidence on the significant point of the utility of masks in reducing transmission risk.” In addition, wearing masks for long periods came with downsides, the nurses’ experts told Hayes. Masks were uncomfortable, became moist, and could cause skin irritation. (One referred to a “grunge factor.”)
The Globe reported months ago on “mask mouth,” a new syndrome Dentists report seeing caused by the moisture trapped in face masks, which 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. Long-term mask wearing also is causing persistent coughing, as well as dermatitis on the skin around the mouth.
“Of course, encouraging people to take actions that are (supposedly) symbolically valuable is different than forcing them,” Berenson said. “I may want to wear a pink pin to show I care about beating breast cancer, but Governor Cuomo can’t make me. At least I don’t think he can, though I’m not so sure anymore.”
“The not-so-good reason is that making people wear masks frightens them. Frightens us. Masks are warnings none of us can escape. This virus is different. This virus is dangerous. This virus is not the flu. We had better hunker down until a vaccine is ready to save us all. But the worst reason of all is that mask mandates appear to be an effort by governments to find out what restrictions on their civil liberties people will accept on the thinnest possible evidence. They are the not-so-thin edge of the wedge. Today, we must wear masks. Tomorrow we’ll need negative Covid tests to travel between countries. Or vaccines to go to work. I wish masks worked. I wish we didn’t have to fight about them. But they don’t. And we do.”
— Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 3: Masks by Alex Berenson
I highly recommend reading Alex Berenson’s three part booklet series – they are short, well-written and full of very important information, facts, studies and research readers can use immediately to put the fear to rest.
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The research that masks don’t work has been out for months. Californians just refuse to follow the research or do any research on their own; they’d rather believe their TVs and their lawless governor who doesn’t give a frank about healthy citizens. Thank you, Katy Grimes, for putting the truth right in front of them.
It would make as much sense to wear a chain-link fence over your nose and mouth as it would to wear a mask over your nose and mouth! Can you stop a mosquito with a chain-link fence? Maybe you should try it!
The one thing that masks protect is the pocketbooks of crooked politicians and their aligned medical companies. As Californians are still in lockdown, many states are completely open with mask mandates discontinued or a plan to discontinue by end of March such as Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, South Dakota…..Our country is so divided in more ways than one!
Well done. It will probably be immediately banished from twitter and facebook, I’ll try to share anyway…
I see this constantly. People hiking, running, driving. Not in groups but alone. No one near them. I think this is less about protection from a virus and more about trying to become anonymous, by hiding behind a mask while still functioning. It is sad. This lockdown masking has given these souls a way to avoid interaction with other people. I’m seeing all sorts of “fashion accessories” being sold to make mask wearing more accepted.
If people want to wear masks because they have conditions that they believe make them more susceptible to illness, then they should wear them. Just don’t tell the rest of us that we have to wear a mask to protect them. We aren’t the problem.
California is just ridiculous. The strictest longest lasting lockdown, radical ever changing rules controlling our behavior under the guise of stopping the spread. And we still have the worst results in the nation.
There’s your data. All you have to do is look at a state like Florida that had minimal restrictions and compare it to good old California and its draconian arbitrary soul crushing restrictions and you see that the government has caused the problem here, not this glorified flu virus that appears to be running its course like they always do, with or without anything we can do about it.
I know I am preaching to the choir but this has gone on too long. Californians need to crank up the referendum machine.
1. Define emergencies and put an automatic expiration date on any executive order and specify that there is no renewal. Must identify a new/different emergency before making any more orders.
2. Allow the legislature to call an emergency recess but require than they reconvene within a certain time or they are automatically out of office.
Please repeat what you said I have to ask, When your words are hidden behind that mask.
I can’t see the weather worn in your face, That speaks to me of your history’s place.
Are you happy or are you sad, its hard to tell, Keeping at a distance in an isolated cell.
Standing here in line apart by six feet, How can we as neighbors, share and meet?
I feel all alone without your expressive face, I miss the smile, the nod, that connective place.
This cover helps to suspend the fears, Makes us just feel safer amongst our peers.
These rules stifle the communicative man, Temporary, let us hope, this facial ban.
Bravo Tomorrow
We owe Katy Grimes a lot for her part in keeping us SANE out here through all of this.
We know the so-called Ruling Class has been working hard to drive us INSANE. Not for nothing is solitary confinement in prison regarded as cruel and inhumane. It’s meant to get the wayward souls on board to follow the rules by breaking or weakening the will when nothing else works.
The mask mandate is meant to isolate us in the same way. It creates and fuels fear and neuroses and OCD and anger and resentment. It signals fear, as was noted in the article, which is contagious. A lot of people have fallen victim to this and it’s no wonder —- with their peers doing it and the constant drumbeat of fear data on the airwaves, etc. I’m seeing it too, in my neighborhood and at the local park, outdoors and in the fresh air: 99% masked children and adults.
Maybe the best way to combat this now is to show your face as much as possible when you’re out there. When you see a stranger yanking off their mask as they exit the grocery store, chances are they’re a kindred spirit. Tell them it’s nice to see their face! (like an old friend.) They will probably relax and laugh, as happened to me the other day. Sounds corny perhaps but it keeps the necessary in-person communication going. Maybe the more the kindred spirits stick together and show their faces, when all around us are masked, the more we can break through the fear and get back to normal without being dismissed or shunned by the masked as conspiracy theorists.
Did you notice that the poster at the top of this article says masks are protection for respiratory diseases? That is a whole class of diseases including the common cold. Apparently they plan on making mask wearing slavery permanent.
No kidding, that wording isn’t accidental.
Great post. I would add that I think it is unhealthy and unnatural, to pause life until risk equals zero. Look around. The walls you see, the books on the shelf, the music you hear, the relationships that reward. All involve humans taking risks. The alternative is to gather as a herd of dogs and sheep. I don’t want to live in a world without risk.
Thank You to Katy Grimes for reminding us that the “science” has not been followed when it comes to the efficacy of masks.
If you want a history lesson go back to the CDC and read their recommendations back in 2009 for the H1N1 flu regarding masks? It was a deadly flu, especially amongst children.
Many doctors and scientists report the truth, sadly they are suppressed by the powerful unions and mainstream media.
https://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/masks.htm
@Donaldw
You are exactly right, we cannot wait for risk to become zero. This virus will mutate and continue to survive as long as there is a host on this planet!
I saw a comedian, Jeff Allen, very funny, he was told if you can smell a fart, your mask is worthless. Does your mask pass the smell test???? Now that is real science.????
Comrades
You’re cleverly worked…..like in Mussolini days in Italy….fear, despair, some foolish idolization, misinformed, follow the science, now love to stand in lines…..dissent is always from “cancelled” enemies. What happened to us?
Ive resisted the face mask madness from the beginning. Refuse to wear one anywhere outdoors, including public places with other people around. The only time I will don one is the very infrequent times I enter a store…and then it is a mesh one. I really believe that eventually we will begin to learn of their devastating consequences, some of which are mentioned above. But it wouldn’t surprise me if clinicians link mask use to other, more serious conditions like heart disease or bacterial infections. Its shocking to see how ignorant people are, how so easily they are duped, especially when the science…true scientific facts…are readily accessible to anyone. But no, people just go along with it, wearing their virtue-signaling masks alone in their cars, outside exercising, etc. And as soon as fake Fauci says to double up, they do! If he says 10 will they? Yep. They’re willing to drop over dead to follow the orders of their czar. And all this for a virus with 99% recovery rate. Makes no sense, no sense at all.
My husband (69 with a pace maker) and I (63 good health) make a point of putting a mask on below our noses, after we’ve walked into the store and immediately removing it after paying for our purchase. Never wear a mask beyond a needed purchase.
My mask is purposely cut and hemmed to look like a mouth bandaid. One store employee was very agitated by my nose showing so I replaced the cloth “bandaid” with a full mask made from open netting. Shut her right up…me, breathing even more freely than with the bandaid, eye roll at the
sheer mind numbing propaganda so easily, sadly perpetuated on people.
In my neighborhood, parents push strollers wearing masks, with the toddler in the stroller wearing a toddler mask. While walking outside in a 7 mph breeze. Joggers go by wearing masks. When I ride my bike at a nearby trail, people coming the other way walk off into the bushes as I ride by as they wear their masks. Afraid of the boogeyman inhabiting their obedient heads. Amazing how people are just willing to follow edicts without question.
Northern California is MUCH more fearful than Southern, but yeah, it’s disturbing to see the fear-driven, virtue signaling…
I wear an American Flag or “Make America Free Again” neck gaiter, which is absolutely useless, but counts towards the “rules” to gain access to stores…much more comfortable, even though I run warmer with it down around my neck….
Haven’t worn a mask ever, and won’t….
(This was posted elsewhere earlier, and on the same topic and with some additions. )
This thing is the 55mph speed limit all over again, complete with government incompetence and showboating, manufactured public panic and pandering to the germ phobics and hysterics, rent seeking, market distortion, bureaucratic empire building + foot dragging and an endless dreary, agenda-driven debate – complete with ginned up statistics – over its extent and virulence if any and when and if it can finally be done away with. And recall the the 55mph national speed limit – the national joke that was widely and increasingly ignored, something Americans are good at – lingered for years.
It was unnecessary them, and this is unnecessary now.
I’m sick of it. (No pun intended.) From the get-go I’ve not worn the face rag unless it absolutely could not be avoided – taking my grandmother to the doctor say. That includes walking out of stores and vowing never to return ever if they insisted I must wear one.
And now I’m noticing others doing the same. A slight increase, but noticeable. More people are seemingly starting to say to hell it it. And when it reaches a certain critical mass, a tipping point, it will be done away with.
I’m waiting for that day. But I also fear that certain businesses and agencies, the airlines and DMV for example, will continue to demand proof of some sort of (toxic) vaccine, one thing leading to another in order to deflect torts or enhance control. (A vaccine TSA anybody?) That means in turn there will be a huge black market in certificates, something you’re seeing in Israel already. And that means that this thing may well hang around for at least a decade as the various players try to cling to whatever advantages this whole fraud has given them.
In other words and to repeat, like the 55mph, the damage and fallout from this…really bad burlesque is going to linger.
I’m just free-associating here, ranting really, complete with run-on sentences. Thanks for listening anyway just the same.
Just a thought.
VicB3
If you go to the California Dept. of Public Health website there is actually a list of exceptions to mask wearing:
“Outdoors and maintaining at least 6 feet of social distance from others not in your household,” “In a car alone or solely with members of your own household…” But there is an increased shortage of critical thinkers these days. With all our progress, the 21st Century has become the Age of Fear and Superstition.
TLAV has been the best on this: LastAmericanVagabond.com