April 18, 2022

Wearing a mask may still give some people a sense of security, but they could breathe more easily if they’d face the facts.

The pandemic has eased, but not the compulsion of many Americans to cover their faces. Fully vaccinated adults are still wearing masks on their solitary walks outdoors, and officials have been enforcing mask mandates on airline passengers and on some city-dwellers and students. (Though today’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle in Tampa, declaring the Biden administration’s mask mandate for public transportation unlawful, comes as welcome news.) Maskaholics in the press are calling for permanent masking on trains, planes, and buses. High school students in Seattle staged a protest demanding that a mask mandate be reinstated, and psychologists now deal with the anxieties of children who don’t want their classmates to see their faces. They’re suffering from “mask dependency,” as this psychological affliction is termed in Japan, where a long tradition of mask-wearing during flu season has left some individuals afraid at any time to expose their faces in public.

The graph tracks the results of a natural experiment that occurred nationwide during the pandemic. Eleven states never mandated masks, while the other 39 states enforced mandates. The mandates typically began early in the pandemic in 2020 and remained until at least the summer of 2021, with some extending into 2022. The black line on the graph shows the weekly rate of Covid cases in all the states with mask mandates that week, while the orange line shows the rate in all the states without mandates.
As you can see from the lines’ similar trajectories, the mask mandates hardly controlled the virus.


If you add up all the numbers on those two lines, you find that the mask mandates made zero difference. The cumulative rate of infection over the course of the pandemic was about 24 percent in the mandate states as well as in the non-mandate states. Their cumulative rates of Covid mortality were virtually identical, too (in fact, there were slightly more deaths per capita in the states with mask mandates).

If this hasn’t persuaded you to take off your mask, you can find lots more reasons in a book by Ian Miller, the data analyst who created the graph for City Journal. Miller, who has tracked pandemic trends for the Brownstone Institute, has assembled the damning evidence in Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates. The book documents how mask mandates were implemented without scientific justification, how they failed around the world, and how public officials and journalists have kept making fools of themselves by pretending otherwise.

In their pre-Covid planning strategies for a pandemic, neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the World Health Organization had recommended masking the public—for good reason. Randomized clinical trials involving flu viruses had shown, contrary to popular wisdom in Japan and other Asian countries, that there was “no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission,” as the WHO summarized the scientific literature. The pandemic planners at the United Kingdom’s Department of Health had reached a similar conclusion: “In line with the scientific evidence, the Government will not stockpile facemasks for general use in the community.” Anthony Fauci acknowledged this evidence early in the pandemic, both in his public comments (“There’s no reason to be walking around with masks,” he told 60 Minutes) and in his private emails (“I do not recommend you wear a mask,” he told a colleague, explaining that masks were too porous to block the small Covid virus).

But then Fauci, like the CDC and the WHO, bowed to political expediency and media hysteria. Mandating masks gave the illusion of doing something against the virus. When the initial spring wave in 2020 subsided, public officials and journalists claimed that the mandates had worked, and they kept up the pretense even when Covid surged again later that year despite the continuing mandates. The resurgence was blamed on people disobeying the mandates, never mind the surveys showing widespread compliance.

The CDC received some criticism for its junk science on masks, particularly for its false claims about the benefits of masking schoolchildren, but the press mostly promoted the agency’s narrative. Little attention was paid to more rigorous research, like a review of the literature that found little or no benefit from masks, or a study that compared infection rates with mask policies and with rates of mask use in all 50 states over the first year of the pandemic. The study concluded that “mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level Covid-19 spread during Covid-19 growth surges.” The media’s narrative about masks extended throughout the world.

More here- https://www.city-journal.org/the-failed-covid-policy-of-mask-mandates#.Yl7PE17Nv...

Wear your mask, you little pussy.

And while you're at it get a job and a jab.