Unreported Truths About Covid-19 and Lockdowns: Part 3: Masks

by Alex Berenson

Having decreed masks could save people from Sars-Cov-2, media outlets tried to embarrass anyone who refused. Not to wear a mask was to refuse to “follow the science” – a catchphrase repeated endlessly – and a sign of selfishness.

The distinction between an aerosol and a droplet is size: aerosols are smaller. But the word “droplet” doesn’t mean what it seems to mean. It does not imply a raindrop-sized visible particle, like a mucus ball that a person with a cold might blow into a handkerchief. An average raindrop is about 1/25th of an inch, or 1 millimeter – 1/1000th of a meter. Most people can’t see objects smaller than about 0.1 millimeters without using a magnifying glass or microscope. Viruses, aerosols, and droplets are measured on much smaller scales.

Unless future large randomized controlled trials find different results, the Danish mask study essentially should end the debate if surgical masks protect people who wear them outside hospitals. As physicians and infectious disease professionals largely agreed until April, the answer is that they don’t. Anyone who says otherwise, for whatever reason, is being untruthful – and as of Nov. 10, that group, unfortunately, includes the Centers for Disease Control.

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.

On June 5, the organization had released a statement entitled “Advice on the use of masks in the context of Covid-19.” The paper ran 16 pages and included 80 footnotes and this stunning statement: At the present time, the widespread use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not yet supported by high quality or direct scientific evidence and there are potential benefits and harms to consider. [emphasis added]

The fight didn’t end there. Some hospitals kept trying to make nurses wear masks. The nurses objected again. Again they won. In a September 6, 2018 decision, arbitrator William Kaplan agreed with Hayes’s ruling. In fact, Kaplan went further than Hayes, calling the evidence in favor of mask mandates “insufficient, inadequate, and completely unpersuasive.” Later in his ruling, he wrote: The preponderance of the masking evidence is compelling – surgical and procedural masks are extremely limited in terms of source control: they do not prevent the transmission of the influenza virus. (https://www.ona.org/wp-content/uploads/ona_kaplanarbitrationdecision_vaccinateormask_stmichaelsoha_20180906.pdf) These arbitrators were not anti-mask. They were chosen for their neutrality. But both looked at the evidence and reached the same conclusion. The decisions came in the context of the flu, not the coronavirus. But all the evidence we have suggests that both viruses, which are roughly the same size, are transmitted in the same way.

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.