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Since first seeing the videos coming out of China in January 2020, there was reason for alarm concerning the coronavirus / covid-19 /
SARS-CoV-2 threat to the world. Later, seeing Senator Tom Cotton addressing the Senate, and subsequent cases and spread… we knew our way of life was about to change.
Now, months later, we have the luxury of time and data in which to gauge our actions and perceptions regarding the coronavirus. How much change was warranted? Was the negative impact of the changes more or less than what the negative impact would have been without them…or with different changes altogether? When did “Flatten the Curve” and “SLOW the spread” morph into the very different “STOP the spread”? And so more questions arise….
Between hysteria and reason, where does the truth rest?
What is the actual “Infection Fatality Rate”? How much lower is it than the “Case Fatality Rate”? Why use the flawed “Case Fatality Rate” as the only metric?
Are masks a net benefit or net detriment? Are those people who don’t wear masks the selfish and indecent people? Are those who wear masks the brainwashed sheeple?
There are many answers to these questions. This post will hopefully serve to give reason as the antidote to the hysteria….and the more healthy an individual is, especially mentally, the more likely that individual is to conquer a disease. So hopefully this post can be an antidote to the coronavirus itself in some small way.
Lockdown Lunacy
In May, Lockdown Lunacy was published in which 16 facts were presented in order to give a thinking person the data and studies necessary to reason their own response to coronavirus. This was followed by a Lockdown Lunacy 2.0 a month later. I will post the 2.0 version first, as it is more current, and the first version will be just after it. Much time can be spent on all the links and studies, so reason can triumph over hysteria.
LOCKDOWN LUNACY 2.0: Second wave? Not even close.
By J.B. Handley
Why did politicians ever lockdown society in the first place? Can we all agree that the stated purpose was to “flatten the curve” so our hospital system could handle the inevitable COVID-19 patients who needed care? At that point, at least, back in early March, people were behaving rationally. They accepted that you can’t eradicate a virus, so let’s postpone things enough to handle it. The fact is, we have done that, and so much more. The headlines are filled with dire warnings of a “second wave” and trigger-happy Governors are rolling back regulations to try to stem the tide of new cases. But, is any of it actually true and should we all be worried? No, it’s not a second wave. The COVID-19 virus is on its final legs, and while I have filled this post with graphs to prove everything I just said, this is really the only graph you need to see, it’s the CDC’s data, over time, of deaths from COVID-19 here in the U.S., and the trend line is unmistakable:
If virologists were driving policy about COVID-19 rather than public health officials, we’d all be Sweden right now, which means life would effectively be back to normal. The only thing our lockdowns have done at this point is prolong the agony a little bit, and encouraged Governors to make up more useless rules. Sweden’s health minister understood that the only chance to beat COVID-19 was to get the Swedish population to a Herd Immunity Threshold against COVID-19, and that’s exactly what they have done, so let me start there.
The Herd Immunity Threshold (“HIT”) for COVID-19 is between 10-20%
This fact gets less press than any other. Most people understand the basic concept of herd immunity and the math behind it. In the early days, some public health officials speculated that COVID-19’s HIT was 70%. Obviously, the difference between a HIT of 70% and a HIT of 10-20% is dramatic, and the lower the HIT, the quicker a virus will burn out as it loses the ability to infect more people, which is exactly what COVID-19 is doing everywhere, including the U.S, which is why the death curve above looks the way it looks. Scientists from Oxford, Virginia Tech, and the Liverpool school of Tropical Medicine, all recently explained the HIT of COVID-19 in this paper:
Calculations from this study of data in Stockholm showed a HIT of 17%, and if you really love data check out this great essay by Brown Professor Dr. Andrew Bostom titled, COVID-19 ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination? Teaching modern vaccine dogma old tricks. I’m going to share his summary with you, because it’s so good:
One of the most vocal members of the scientific community discussing COVID-19’s HIT is Stanford’s Nobel-laureate Dr. Michael Levitt. Back on May 4, he gave this great interview to theStanford Daily where he advocated for Sweden’s approach of letting COVID-19 spread naturally through the community until you arrive at HIT. He stated:
Guess what? That’s exactly what happened. As of today, 7 weeks after his prediction, Sweden has 5,280 deaths. In this graph, you can see that deaths in Sweden PEAKED when the HIT was halfway to its peak (roughly 7.3%) and by the time the virus hit 14% it was nearly extinguished. (Shoutout to Gummi Bear on Twitter, a scientist who makes great graphs.)
How could Dr. Levitt have predicted the death range for Sweden so perfectly 7 weeks ago? Because he had a pretty solid idea of what the HIT would be. (If you’d like to further geek-out on HIT, check out: Why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought.) I absolutely LOVE Dr. Levitt (and as a Stanford alum, so proud he is a Stanford professor), watch this incredible video from just yesterday, go to 10:59 and just listen to this remarkable man!! Thrilled with his brand-new paper, released today, Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line.
By the way, as a quick aside, and something else the press won’t touch: COVID-19 is a coronavirus, and we have ALL been exposed to MANY coronaviruses during our lives on earth (like the common cold). Guess what? Scientists are now showing evidence that up to 81% of us can mount a strong response to COVID-19 without ever having been exposed to it before:
This alone could explain WHY the HIT is so much lower for COVID-19 than some scientists thought originally, when the number being talked about was closer to 70%. Many of us have always been immune! If that’s not enough for you, a similar study from Sweden was just released and shows that “roughly twice as many people have developed T-cell immunity compared with those who we can detect antibodies in.” (We kind of knew this from the data on the Diamond Princess when only 17% of the people on board tested positive, despite an ideal environment for mass spread, implying 83% of the people were somehow protected from the new virus.)
Quick Update: This article came out one day after I wrote mine, and validated everything I just said, except the author is wrong about COVID-19’s HIT, it’s 10-20%, not 60%, which is even better news:
Back to death rates over time. We actually have our own Sweden here in the U.S. It’s called New York City. In our case, we accidentally created a Sweden scenario, in that we took our medicine quickly, because: 1) New York locked down so late that they didn’t flatten anything, 2) they have the highest population density in the U.S. in NYC, and 3) the public health officials and Governors there made the bone-headed decision to send COVID-positive nursing home residents back to their nursing home, accelerating deaths of the most vulnerable. What’s their death curve look like today? In this case, I borrowed the graph from the NYC public health website:
Hmm…notice anything about the chart or its slope? The reason deaths from COVID-19 are dwindling down to nothing isn’t because Governor Cuomo is a policy genius (in fact, he likely created more unnecessary deaths than any other Governor with the nursing home decision), it’s because the virus—like every virus in the history of mankind—is running out of people to infect. The virus has a HIT of 10-20% and 70% of people are likely naturally immune. Hosts are in short supply! That’s what viruses do, and wait until you see what New York’s likely HIT is today.
We can get a crude, but helpful proxy for whether or not a state (or region) has achieved their own Herd Immunity Threshold if we know the following things: the size of the population, the number of deaths from COVID-19, and COVID-19’s IFR, or Infection Fatality Rate. In my first blog post late last month, LOCKDOWN LUNACY: the thinking person’s guide, I discussed Infection Fatality Rate in detail, so I am just going to give a very quick summary here. Stanford’s Dr. John Ioannidis published a meta-analysis (because so many IFR studies have been done around the world in April and early May) where he analyzed TWELVE separate IFR studies and his conclusion lays out the likely IFR for COVID-19:
The data on IFR has now been replicated so many times that our own Centers for Disease Control announced that their ‘best estimate’ showed an IFR below 0.3%. In this article on the CDC’s new data, they also highlighted how the cascading declines in IFR has removed all the fears of doomsday:
In order to be as bullet-proof as possible, and because the IFR is an important part of the math I will do right now, I’ve decided to pick a simple and defensible number, the final number pegged by the CDC for COVID-19’s IFR: 0.26% (As an aside, if we’d known this 3 months ago, no one in the public health world would have panicked. It’s a bad flu, and the rates for younger people are dramatically below 0.26% and approaching zero for children.) Now that you understand COVID’s IFR and the likely HIT, it’s much easier to talk about the second wave, the data, and the implications. Here’s the deal:
Take population, COVID Deaths, and IFR to find HIT
C’mon stay with me! This math is basic, junior high level stuff. And, it’s going to give us the most important, but very crude, number we need to understand all this second wave nonsense: the approximate HIT already attained by state and by the United States. If you know how many people have died from COVID-19 in any one region, you can quickly calculate how many people have had COVID-19 in that same region. All you do is divide deaths by the IFR. Let’s use NY as the example. As of today, there have been 31,137 deaths from COVID-19. Take 31,137/.0026, you get 11,975,969 people infected with COVID-19. Take those 11 million people divided by New York’s population of 19.45 million, you get a HIT of…65%. (Data geek comment: New York’s HIT is clearly OVER-stated, because total deaths drives HIT, and NY has a much higher rate of nursing home deaths due to bad policy.)
Huge disclaimer: This math is crude, but it’s also directionally accurate, and the comparisons BETWEEN states helps explain what’s going on. Importantly, the HIT required to snuff out the virus in any one region could be lower than Sweden’s number of 17%, for a million reasons, most notably better medical knowledge today than a few months ago about how to keep a vulnerable person alive. Still, just look at this table I created using the math above:
Notice anything? New York is WELL PAST Herd Immunity Threshold (as is New Jersey), the southern states in the news are BELOW the implied HIT, while the U.S. overall is nearly there with 15%. This is why the death curve from the CDC (and NYC!) that I opened this blog post with looks the way it looks: we are basically done with the virus. Just like Sweden. Oh, and Italy:
Quick update: Mount Sinai doctors just released a study showing a seroprevalence study of a random sample of 5,000 New Yorkers, it states that “by the week ending April 19, the seroprevalence in the screening group reached 19.3%.” If you take that 19.3% number, and consider what we just learned from Sweden—that half of people with immunity won’t show it with this test—and then consider how many more people have been exposed since April 28, it’s entirely plausible that NY is well past 40% or more people, which starts to look closer to the 65% number my math shows. Either way, let’s just keep it simple: New York, and especially NYC, are WELL PAST HIT of 10-20%, which explains why their death curve looks the way it looks.
Florida details
While HIT matters more than anything else in explaining the trajectory of the virus, and tells us that the U.S. is very close to being done with COVID-19, I wanted to take a closer look at one state, Florida, the current whipping boy of the press. They also have great data. No one seems to be listening to the Governor, the health department, or the hospitals in Florida, who all seem to be saying the same thing, which is basically that everything is fine. On June 20, Florida’s department of health produced a presentation that explained how their testing had changed over time. Check out this slide:
So, as the state re-opened, they began to test everyone, “regardless of age and symptoms.” What do you think would happen when they did that? Obviously, more positives. So, here’s my first fact:
Fact #1: All of the “second wave” states have dramatically increased their testing. This alone causes cases to rise, and is the single biggest reason they have.
Still not convinced? Check out this eye-opener of a chart that shows per-capita testing in the U.S. versus other countries. Notice anything about June? Not only do we do MORE testing than any other country, but our testing spiked in June, right as all the headlines about more cases came out. Hmmm…
It’s not quite that simple. Yes, cases are up because more testing is being done. Cases have never, ever been a reliable indicator of ANYTHING. But, hospitalizations have been a reliable indicator. And, unexpectedly, there was an uptick in hospitalizations for COVID-19 beginning around June 6th in Florida, as you can see here:
The most obvious reason COVID-19 hospitalizations are going up is because of what’s happening in the hospital system. Patients are returning to the hospitals for elective surgery that were all delayed during the lockdown. EVERY patient is screened for COVID-19. A patient who is undergoing elective knee surgery and tests positive for COVID-19 even though they are asymptomatic will be classified as “hospitalized with COVID-19.” This was explained in a recent NY Times article:
Fact #2: Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are up slightly because of how COVID-19 positive patients are tracked. They will be in the number even if they didn’t go to the hospital BECAUSE of COVID-19.
Still, there is something else going on. It’s not just more tests and the way hospitalizations are happening. Many states re-opened on May 1 and their trend lines were flat to down for weeks. It’s as if some super-spreader event happened in certain states towards late May/Early June. It’s really clear that something unique is going on if you look at data from Minnesota, the state where George Floyd was tragically murdered, where positive cased are stratified by age:
As you can see, in Minnesota, the percentage of positive cases by people age 20-29 really spiked in mid to late June, which means infections likely happened in early June or late May. Yes, obviously, the densely-packed protests for racial equality and social justice—which *JB Handley personally applauds —appear to have caused a REAL uptick in cases and hospitalizations. See this article, Houston Protesters Begin to Fall Ill With Coronavirus After Marching for George Floyd. Just look at the median age of NEW cases in Florida for mid-June (used to be in the mid-60s): (*denotes slight edit for clarification)
Fact #3: A REAL rise in both cases and hospitalizations perfectly matches the timing of the nationwide protests which included many densely-packed crowds together for many hours and even days.
Not convinced? Check out this great graph that overlays the timing of the protests, lockdowns, social mobility, and hospitalizations using data for the entire US. Note there is a time delay between exposure and hospitalizations (between 8 and 15 days), and look at when the yellow hospitalization line goes up.
However, the good news about all of this is that there has been no impact on the number of COVID-19 patients in ICUs, which is consistent with the fact that we know younger patients are less impacted by COVID-19, check out this chart:
Fact #4: Despite a small uptick in hospitalizations, the number of COVID-19 patients in the ICU continues to decline.
IT’S DEATHS, NOT CASES
You’ve been hearing about a handful of states with rising cases, here they are on a chart, cases are clearly rising:
But for those states, what about deaths? They appear to be going the other way:
And, finally, perhaps the most important slide, using Florida as the example, there is NO correlation between more tests, more positive tests, and DEATHS (red line in the graph). The fact that these three measures are not linear means Florida has a low and stable death rate, and the recent uptick in positive cases—which happens to be perfectly timed to the nationwide protests—means nothing:
Fact #5: There is NO correlation in Florida—the state taking the most heat in the press about a second wave—between positive tests and deaths.
Of course, anyone who has been paying attention to the data could have told you that, because the national data on COVID-19 deaths is looking more and more like Sweden’s, as we already discussed. Today, our national HIT is roughly 15%, which means we are almost done, no matter what any Governor does.
I’ve seen discussion about how the protests caused an uptick in infections amongst younger people. Some in opposition to that fairly obvious reality point to New York, which also had densely-packed protests but has NOT seen an uptick in hospitalizations—how do you explain that? By now, you know the answer: New York’s HIT is already 65%!
Notably, in the math I used, Florida only had a Herd Immunity Threshold number of 6%, well below the target of 17%. So, yes, they MAY WELL have to endure a few more deaths before they achieve HIT. But, it’s highly likely that 1) it won’t need to be as high as 17% because the people being infected are much younger (where death rate is much lower) and 2) that it will happen in the next few weeks, and policy will have nothing to do with whether it happens or not. Either way, because we know the national number is 15%, the virus is almost gone, no matter what anyone says or does, and all you need to do to verify that is look at the CDC’s death curve.
A FINAL THOUGHT ABOUT FLORIDA
John Thomas Littell, MD is a family physician in Florida. I was going to publish an excerpt from his Letter to the Editor of the Orlando Medical News, but it’s so good and so wide-ranging, I want you to read the whole thing, and then we can wrap this up:
Dr. Littell brings up many more issues than I have chosen to address in this post, because I already wrote about them in my previous blog post on May 30.
Wasn’t this supposed to be about hospitals?
The only reason ever given for locking down in the first place was space availability in hospitals. Here’s what Florida said about their hospitals last week:
And here’s what doctors in Houston, Texas said last week:
Sigh. So why is the press making such a big deal out of the “second wave”? I don’t do politics, but if I did I would probably mention that here.
What are Governors doing?
In a quick word: nothing helpful. I think this guy summarizes how I feel:
Seriously, though, the rollbacks of openings are simply ridiculous, and simply compounding a terrible idea, and delaying the inevitable process within each region of achieving a proper Herd Immunity Threshold. If you want to get angry about lockdowns all over again, like I did in my article in May, just read this: The lockdown is causing so many deaths. Here’s an excerpt:
In Conclusion
Dr. Michael Levitt and Sweden have been right all along. The only way through COVID-19 is by achieving the modest (10-20%) Herd Immunity Threshold required to have the virus snuff itself out. The sooner politicians—and the press—start talking about HIT and stop talking about new confirmed cases, the better off we will all be. Either way, it’s likely weeks, not months, before the data of new daily deaths will be so low that the press will have to find something new to scare everyone. It’s over.
A quick note:
Haters of this article will post articles about Sweden saying their approach has been a failure. They will point to recent press about Sweden having higher rates of COVID-19 positive tests lately—Sweden has pushed back strongly—so here’a chart for the haters, it shows positive cases in Sweden, tracked against deaths. There’s no correlation.
For my truly committed readers who made it this far:
“The death rate is a fact; anything beyond this is an inference.”
William Farr (1807 – 1883)
William Farr, creator of Farr’s law, knew this over 100 years ago. Viruses rise and fall at roughly the same slopes. It’s predictable, and COVID-19 is no different, which is why, after looking at all these death curves, it’s not very hard to declare that the pandemic is over. Oxford’s center for Evidence Based Medicine has a wonderful explanation of Farr’s law, and it’s well worth a read. Some of my favorite quotes:
A reader just sent me this chart from the CDC. If you don’t think the COVID-19 virus has run its course according to Farr’s Law, I can’t help you!
LOCKDOWN LUNACY: the thinking person’s guide
By J.B. Handley
For anyone willing to look, there are so many facts that tell the true story, and it goes something like this:
My goal is to engage in known facts. You, the reader, can decide if all of these facts, when you put them together, equate to the story above.
Fact #1: The Infection Fatality Rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.07-0.20%, in line with seasonal flu
The Infection fatality Rate math of ANY new virus ALWAYS declines over time as more data becomes available, as any virologist could tell you. In the early days of COVID-19 where we only had data from China, there was a fear that the IFR could be as high as 3.4%, which would indeed be cataclysmic. On April 17th, the first study was published from Stanford researchers that should have ended all lockdowns immediately, as the scientists reported that their research “implies that the infection is much more widespread than indicated by the number of confirmed cases” and pegged the IFR between 0.12-0.2%. The researchers also speculated that the final IFR, as more data emerged, would likely “be lower.” For context, seasonal flu has an IFR of 0.1%. Smallpox? 30%.
As the first study to peg the IFR, the Stanford study came under withering criticism, prompting the lead researcher, Dr. John Ioannidis to note,
Like all good science, the Stanford data on IFR has now been replicated so many times that our own Centers for Disease Control came out this week to announce that their ‘best estimate’ showed an IFR below 0.3%. In this article on the CDC’s new data, they also highlighted how the cascading declines in IFR has removed all the fears of doomsday:
If you’re still unconvinced that the IFR of COVID-19 is roughly in line with a bad flu season, the most comprehensive analysis I have seen comes from Oxford University, who recently stated:
“Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%.”
Finally, just last week, Stanford’s Dr. Ioannidis published a meta-analysis (because so many IFR studies have been done around the world in April and early May) where he analyzed TWELVE separate IFR studies and his conclusion is so good, I’ll just leave you with it:
Opinion #1: Dr. Scott Atlas
Soon after the Stanford study released its data (he wasn’t a study author), Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas published an opinion piece in The Hill newspaper with the title, “The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation.” He wrote:
Facts do matter, but no one listened. Dr. Atlas’ article also helps frame Fact #2.
Fact #2: The risk of dying from COVID-19 is much higher than the average IFR for older people and those with co-morbidities, and much lower than the average IFR for younger healthy people, and nearing zero for children
In January 2020, Los Angeles had an influenza outbreak that was killing children, the LA Times noted that “an unlikely strain of influenza has sickened and killed an unusually high number of young people in California this flu season.” COVID-19 is the opposite of that. Stanford’s Dr. Ioannidis said, “Compared to almost any other cause of disease that I can think of, it’s really sparing young people.”
Italy reported three days ago that 96% of Italians who died from COVID-19 had “other illnesses” and were, on average, 80 years old. From Bloomberg:
The best age stratification data I have seen comes from Worldometers.info. Here’s their chart estimating death rate by age group. Please note that death rate is MUCH higher than IFR because death rate uses confirmed COVID-19 cases as the denominator, but it shows you how different the fatality rates are by age:
While this data is “crude”, it’s safe to extrapolate that an 80+ year-old person has a serious risk of dying from COVID-19 while a child faces almost no risk. This fact should drive policy, as Dr. Atlas explains:
Consider this excellent article from the British Medical Journal, titled “Shielding from covid-19 should be stratified by risk” written by Cambridge University professors:
As one simple example: closing schools makes almost no sense given what we know about COVID-19, while protecting teachers over the age of 60—to pick a somewhat defensible age boundary—may well make sense. This is why so many countries who seem to respect data more than we do here in the U.S. have already re-opened their schools. In fact, Denmark’s schools have been open since mid-April!! And, for those keeping score, Reuters just reported yesterday that, “Reopening schools in Denmark did not worsen outbreak, data shows.” Here’s a quote:
Another great article on schools, titled, “It is fear – not science – that is stopping our children being educated” in The Telegraph newspaper last week, here’s a quote:
Brand new science (May 28) released from Northern Ireland clearly shows that schoolchildren do NOT serve as vectors for COVID-19. Titled, No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland, 2020, the study could not be more clear:
Finally, Dr. Scott Atlas took on the topic of schools in this recent interview:
Quick update: after I wrote this, the Wall Street Journal published this article titled Is It Safe to Reopen Schools? These Countries Say Yes. To me, this reads as a bit of a litmus test for countries that have independent and data-driven public health officials, and I give the U.S. an ‘F” for our current approach:
How many more countries need to re-open before the U.S. follows? Seriously, it’s a little embarrassing to be American…IMO we look like total chumps.
Update #2: Dr. Scott Atlas doubled-down on June 1st with this great Op-Ed, once again in The Hill, titled Science says: ‘Open the schools’. As usual, he’s amazingly eloquent, here’s an excerpt but well worth the time to read every word, he simply slays it:
(Special note: there’s a new boogeyman, Kawasaki disease, that some are trying to link to COVID-19. Here’s a great article about that, or see the website of the UK’s Kawasaki Disease Foundation where they discuss the “mishandling of information” about Kawasaki disease. Dr. Atlas’ most recent post discusses this, too: “What about the new threat similar to Kawasaki disease, recently sensationalized as a COVID-19 association? In fact, the association is extremely low, and the incidence of the disorder is itself rare, affecting only 3,000 to 5,000 children in the United States each year. Importantly, the syndrome is typically treatable and never has been regarded previously as a risk so serious that schools must be shuttered.”)
Fact #3: People infected with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic (which is most people) do NOT spread COVID-19
On January 13, 2020, a 22-year old female with a history of congenital heart disease went to the emergency room of Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital complaining of a variety of symptoms common to people with her condition, including pulmonary hypertension and shortness of breath due to atrial septal defect (hole in the heart). Little did she know her case would set off a cascade of events resulting in a recently published paper that should have ended all lockdowns around the world simultaneously. Three days into her hospital stay, her condition was improving. Routine tests were run, and to the clinicians alarm and surprise, she tested positive for COVID-19. As the physicians noted, “the patient had never fever, sore throat, myalgia or other symptoms associated with virus infection.” Said differently, she was completely asymptomatic for COVID-19.
It’s not that easy to find people who are infected with COVID-19 but asymptomatic, because they don’t seek medical attention. Here in Oregon where I live, you can’t even get a COVID-19 test unless you have symptoms. So, the stars aligned to put this woman in a hospital with researchers studying COVID-19, and she became the subject of an extensive contact study published on May 13 in Respiratory Medicine, titled, “A study on infectivity of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carriers.”
The researchers wanted to find out whether this woman, with a COVID-19 infection but no symptoms, had infected anyone else, so they chose to look at every single contact they could identify within the previous 5 days prior to her positive test. So, how many people did they have to screen? 455. Not a small number, as the researchers explain:
As you can see, being hospitalized led to the majority of the contacts this woman had, both with other patients and with many members of the hospital staff. Notably, all of these contacts took place indoors and one might argue many of the contacts—at least with hospital staff—would have involved relatively intimate contact. Amongst the patients, the average age was 62, arguably making them higher risk, and many of those patients were immunocompromised for a variety of reasons, including chemotherapy and cardiovascular disease. So how many of the 455 people were infected by the asymptomatic 22-year old woman?
Said differently, exactly zero people were infected. The scientists, in typically understated fashion, offer up a comment about the question I hope you are asking yourself right now (namely, why are we all on lockdown if asymptomatic people with COVID-19 can’t spread the infection?), stating, “the result of this study may alleviate parts of the public concern about asymptomatic infected people.”
If this study had been published in early March, the odds that the world would have locked down are very, very low. Yet, this study, published only two weeks ago, is nowhere to be found in the media, and is never mentioned by policy makers. It just sits there, sharing the truth for anyone willing to listen.
Quick Update on Fact #3: Of all the facts presented, this one has received the most pushback from skeptics who argue it’s based on a single published study. Of course, science is something that accumulates with time, so the criticism is legitimate, which is why this announcement from the World Health Organization today—June 8th—is so devastating to anyone who still contends asymptomatic people can spread COVID-19:
Unlike myself, the World Health Organization is privy to emerging data from all over the world of studies being done, which is why this quote from Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for Coronavirus response, is such a big deal:
Meanwhile, so many of the silly rules developed all other the place presume asymtptomatic people CAN spread COVID-19. In fact, I also read today that California’s superintendent has issued guidance for opening schools in the Fall, which will likely include all students wearing masks…it’s simply unbelievable how far public officials seem to be deviating from what the FACTS are telling us! Knowing that COVID-19 is not spread by asymptomatic people makes 99% of COVID-19 rules established completely useless and also makes public health guidance extremely simple: if you’re sick, please stay home. Everyone else? Carry on. When will the facts on the ground and the absurd imposition of random rules somehow confront each other? Hopefully soon, and I’m rooting for the facts.
Fact #4: Emerging science shows no spread of COVID-19 in the community (shopping, restaurants, barbers, etc.)
“There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time…”
– Professor Hendrick Streek , University of Bonn
We just learned that asymptomatic people infected with COVID-19 are very unlikely to be able to spread the infection to others. Emerging and published science shows transmission of COVID-19 in retail establishments is extremely unlikely. Professor Hendrik Streeck from the University of Bonn is leading a study in Germany on the hard-hit region of Heinsberg and his conclusions, from laboratory work already completed, is very clear:
Uh oh. You mean closing parks, closing stores, wearing gloves and masks at the grocery store, fumigating our groceries, and just being generally paranoid wasn’t necessary? As Dr. Streeck confirms:
And he continues:
And, finally:
Fact #5: Published science shows COVID-19 is NOT spread outdoors
In a study titled Indoor transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and published on April 2, 2020, scientists studied outbreaks of 3 or more people in 320 separate towns in China over a five-week period beginning in January 2020 trying to determine WHERE outbreaks started: in the home, workplace, outside, etc.? What’d they discover? Almost 80% of outbreaks happened in the home environment. The rest happened in crowded buses and trains. But what about outdoors? The scientists wrote:
“All identified outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in an indoor environment, which confirms that sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk.”
Said differently, there’s really no science to support all the outdoor bans that my home state of Oregon and so many other states have put in place. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the study because it’s really quite infuriating to read when you consider some of the ways Governors here in the U.S have behaved (and some still do) by banning all sorts of outdoor activities, arresting paddle boarders on the water, etc.:
Quick Update: Apparently the health minister of British Columbia, Canada, got the memo about the lack of airborne risk, this article appeared on June 1:
The article says:
I sure hope Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the NCAA are all paying attention…not to mention all the people in Portland here still riding bikes and running with masks on.
Fact #6: Science shows masks are ineffective to halt the spread of COVID-19, and The WHO recommends they should only be worn by healthy people if treating or living with someone with a COVID-19 infection
Just today, the World Health Organization announced that masks should only be worn by healthy people if they are taking care of someone infected with COVID-19:
Just before the COVID-19 madness, researchers in Hong Kong submitted a study for publication with the mouthful of a title, “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures.” Oddly, the study, just published this month, is actually housed on the CDC’s own website, and directly contradicts recent advice from the CDC about wearing a mask. Namely, the study states:
English translation: there is no evidence that wearing masks reduces the transmission of respiratory illnesses and, if masks are worn improperly (like when people re-use cloth masks), transmission could actually INCREASE. Moreover, this study was a meta-analysis, which means it dug deep into the archive of science (all the way back to 1946!) to reach its conclusions. Said differently, this is as comprehensive as science gets, and their conclusions were crystal clear: masks for the general population show no evidence of working to either slow the spread of respiratory viruses or protect people.
This study is far from the only one to reach this conclusion (which makes the choice of a grocery store chain like my beloved New Seasons to make masks mandatory for all customers really quite unbelievable). The purpose of science is to arbitrate these thorny issues and while the science is clear, the hysteria continues. It turns out, the effectiveness of masks has a long history of debate in the medical community, which explains why so much science has been done on the topic. I will just highlight a few studies before you fall asleep:
My favorite article is actually a review of much of the science and it’s a great place to start for anyone who likes to do their own research. Titled, “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review”, it was written to challenge the need for dentists to wear face masks, but all the science quoted and conclusions drawn apply to airborne pathogens in any setting. Some of the best quotes:
And my favorite quote:
Here’s an article published in ResearchGate by noted Canadian physicist D.G. Rancourt, written directly in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, published last month. Titled, Masks Don’t Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy.
To put this in simple terms: in order for a mask to really be effective that covered both your nose and mouth, you would asphyxiate. The minute the mask allows you to breathe, it can no longer filter the micro-particles that make you sick.
Finally, I often see this study from 2015 in the BMJ cited: “A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers“, and it bears repeating, since MOST of the masks I see people wearing in the community right now are cloth masks. Not only are these masks 100% ineffective at reducing the spread of COVID-19, but they can actually harm you. As the researchers explain:
Increased risk of infection? Yes, that’s what it says. Other studies have also looked at the impact masks have on your oxygen levels (because you’re are forced to re-breathe your own Co2) and it’s not good. Scientists looked at oxygen levels of surgeons wearing masks while performing surgery and found: “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.”
Just this past week, this article came out in the New England Journal of Medicine, written my several doctors and public health officials with the title, “Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era,” and this statement seems a perfect way to end my discussion of masks:
Fact #7: There’s no science to support the magic of a six-foot barrier
Iceland has already made the two-meter (6 foot) rule optional, according to this article. The reason for the recommendation to keep 6-feet of distance from your fellow citizens during the pandemic dates back to 1930, explained here by the BBC:
Are you impressed with that science? Me neither. As this wonderful article explains:
It goes further:
The article takes dead aim at so many Governors who are absolutely running with these completely unsupportable recommendations:
Recently, one of the top scientific advisors in the UK to Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made the same point, his statements covered in the Daily Mail last week in an article titled, Government scientific adviser says Britain’s two metre social distancing rule is unnecessary and based on ‘very fragile’ evidence. Professor Robert Dingwall stated:
When you digest all of the facts we now know about COVID-19, the simplest policy recommendation actually makes the most sense in my opinion: If you have COVID-19, stay home. If you must go out, wear a mask. Everyone else, wash your hands, and get on with your life. It should have been that easy, but instead we chose to lockdown society, an unprecedented step. Why?
Oh, and this is a real headline. God help us all.
“The Lockdowns Were the Black Swan”
Indeed, why did we lockdown society, and has it worked?I stole the phrase above from an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal written by Editorial Board member Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., I believe he captured it perfectly:
Why did we lockdown in the first place? Here are the facts.
Fact #8: The idea of locking down an entire society had never been done and has no supportable science, only theoretical modeling
In fact, the first time the idea was ever raised to lockdown everyone was in 2006, in this paper titled Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza. The paper detailed “how social contact network–focused mitigation can be designed” and modeled (more on that in a moment!) various outcomes based on how people behaved. At the time, cooler heads prevailed and criticized the ideas in the paper, notably this critique from Dr. D.A. Henderson, the man who led the public effort to eradicate smallpox. According to the New York Times:
Soon after, Dr. Henderson and several other prescient colleagues penned an important paper encapsulating many of these ideas, Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, including this astonishing (given what just happened) conclusion:
And they ended with a sentence so important I’m going to use really big font:
If you’d like to read more about the origins of the lockdown idea and how it continued to circulate in public health circles, check out, “The 2006 Origins of the Lockdown Idea.” If you’d like to read more about Dr. D.A. Henderson, check out, “How a Free Society Deals with Pandemics, According to Legendary Epidemiologist and Smallpox Eradicator Donald Henderson.” Both articles are awesome and will make you sick to your stomach when you realize how many good scientists knew that a lockdown would be a disaster, and cost more lives than it could ever save.
You’re likely equally shocked to see that as late as 2019, the World Health Organization DIDN’T EVEN LIST the idea of a total lockdown in their report titled “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza.” Here’s their table of 18 possible non-pharmaceutical measures for countries to take in a pandemic, note all the things listed under the “Not recommended in any circumstances” row that are now happening every day!
Obvious question: if there was no science to support a lockdown and we’d never actually done one before and many in public health said it would be a terrible idea, why did it happen? There’s really two answers as best I can tell. The first answer is that the World Health Organization, early on in the pandemic, chose to praise the Chinese response of locking down Hubei Province, which effectively served to legitimize the practice, despite the extreme limitations of data available to anyone about the Chinese lockdown’s actual effectiveness. This article discusses the issue, and raises the question:
The second answer is that newly-created disease models scared the living daylights out of world leaders, and the modelers stood ready to offer a simple solution to their made-up numbers: lock everything down, NOW!
Fact #9: The epidemic models of COVID-19 have been disastrously wrong, and both the people and the practice of modeling has a terrible history
While many disease models have been used during the COVID-19 pandemic, two have been particularly influential in the public policy of lockdowns: Imperial College (UK) and the IHME (Washington, USA). They’ve both proven to be unmitigated disasters.
Imperial College: It’s safe to say that the reason the United States locked down, and the reason the White House extended their lockdowns was almost exclusively due to the models created by Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson. As the Washington Post explained:
Oddly, Professor Ferguson has a history of massive overestimation of pandemics, but apparently no one bothered to consider that in taking his advice. The Spectatorspelled out his incredibly bad calls on three previous emerging diseases (he actually has more terrible calls, I’m just highlighting three):
2002, Mad Cow Disease:
2005, Bird Flu:
2009, Swine Flu:
I don’t know, don’t you think that history should have mattered more before relying on his model to lock down our entire country? It actually gets worse. From the National Review:
And more:
One simple example of how wrong the Imperial College model was would be Sweden, here’s the details:
And, finally:
Oh, and Professor Ferguson recently resigned from his position because he broke lockdown curfew…to have an affair with a married woman. I’ll end with a quote from the man who I believe will emerge as the biggest hero of this whole mess, Sweden’s Anders Tegnell, the man who chose not to lock his country down:
IHME: If the Imperial College model was really the motivation for both President Trump, Boris Johnson, and then many other world leaders to lockdown, the IHME models have almost always been the “science” state Governors cite to demonstrate how many lives their lockdowns are saving. It’s a nice gig, really. Find a model that massively overestimates the deaths in your state, lock it down, and then have the modelers show you how many lives you have saved. Luckily, other scientists have been watching, and the IHME model has received one of the most ferocious beat-downs I have ever seen in the scientific literature from Professors at the University of Sydney, Northwestern, and UTEP. Titled, Learning as We Go – An Examination of the Statistical Accuracy of COVID-19 Daily Death Count Predictions and released last week, the study effectively says that the IHME model is dangerously inaccurate, but in a somewhat cordial, scientific way. The authors write:
And then they land the big punch:
In English: the IHME models are so bad at forecasting they shouldn’t be relied upon for anything. Need more? National Review’s Andrew McCarthy was very eloquent all the way back on April 9th in criticizing the IMHE models’ inaccuracy and uselessness:
And how does Mr. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, think these models have performed?
My own Governor here in Oregon, Kate Brown, is fond of invoking the phrase that she is “following the science.” Recently, a Circuit Court overturned her lockdown order after a lawsuit was filed from a number of churches. Governor Brown released this statement:
What “science” is Governor Brown relying upon? The IHME model. Still think that’s “science”?
Finally, Michael Fumento wrote an excellent article arguing that “After Repeated Failures, It’s Time To Permanently Dump Epidemic Models.” As he explains:
Opinion #2: Roger Koppl, inside the mind of a disease modeler
I just thought this was such a great description of the human side of being a disease forecaster, written by Professor of Finance Roger Koppl from Syracuse:
Makes sense, and I think most American Governors who locked down are running with this: the model said we’d have X number of deaths. Now the model says the lockdown ensured a fraction of X deaths—I’m your savior!
Fact #10: The data shows that lockdowns have NOT had an impact on the course of the disease.
This is certainly the fact that people will have the hardest time with: who wants to believe that all this suffering and isolation was for no reason? But, there are more than enough states and countries that didn’t lockdown, or locked down for a much shorter time, or in a much different manner, to provide plenty of data. Perhaps the simplest explanation for why lockdowns have been ineffective is the easiest: COVID-19 was in wide circulation much EARLIER than experts thought. This alone would explain why lockdowns have been so ineffective, but whatever the final explanation, let’s see what the data says.
I’m going to start with a source that you might consider unusual, the global bank JP Morgan. Of all the facts I have covered, this one about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns has become the most politicized, because it’s being used to begin playing the blame game. JP Morgan, on the other hand, creates their analysis to do something very nonpartisan: make money. Their analysts crunch data to see which economies are likely to restart first, and you shouldn’t be surprised at this point to discover three things: 1) the least damaged economies are the ones that did the lest onerous lockdowns, 2) lifting lockdowns has had no negative impact on deaths or hospitalizations, and 3) lifting lockdowns had not increased viral transmission. Reading the JP Morgan conclusions is profoundly depressing, because here in the U.S. many communities are STILL being put through many different lockdown mandates, despite overwhelming evidence to their ineffectiveness. Consider this chart from JP Morgan that shows “that many countries saw their infection rates fall rather than rise again when they ended their lockdowns – suggesting that the virus may have its own ‘dynamics’ which are ‘unrelated’ to the emergency measures.”
JP Morgan strategist and paper author Marko Kolanovic is another one of my heroes, because, well, he says everything I wish many other people were saying, consider this quote:
Kolanovic and his team also show that transmissibility of the virus has actually DECREASED after lockdowns have been lifted in U.S. states, through the measurement known as “RO”. As the Daily Mail explains, “many states saw a lower rate of transmission (R) after full-scale lockdowns were ended.”
TJ Rogers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, and a team of his engineers also analyzed the data, and published their results in this piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.” They explain:
Translation: something other than lockdowns must explain the course of the virus (see Fact #14). Thomas A. J. Meunier of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution released this report in early May titled “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic.” Like JP Morgan’s report, his conclusion is depressing:
And, the clincher:
Bloomberg’s Elain He and colleagues also analyzed the data in this article titled, “The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are In.” Their conclusion is unlikely to surprise you:
Speaking of Europe, we should all thank God for Sweden. By choosing NOT to lockdown, the Swedes have proven that society can survive without a strict lockdown, and hopefully their results will prevent lockdowns from ever happening again. If you have followed this story closely, you know that naysayers were predicting doom for Sweden (and for Florida and Georgia, more on them in a moment), and none of that has ever come to pass. Conveniently, the World Health Organization went from praising the response of the Chinese lockdown in Wuhan—which likely ignited the lockdown mania—to holding up Sweden as the model for how to combat an epidemic. (Read: “WHO reverses course, praises lockdown-ignoring Sweden”.)
Fact #11: Florida locked down late, opened early, and is doing fine, despite predictions of doom
The best article I have read about Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis comes from this one on the National Review on May 20th. I was pleasantly surprised by what a rational student of history Governor Desantis was, as he explains:
Unlike many of his peers, Governor Desantis found doomsday models to be unhelpful:
Instead, they took a rifle shot approach on the citizens most at-risk: nursing home residents, of which Florida has the most in the nation:
Which brings us to New York, the state that every other Governor who locked their people down points to, and says something to the effect of, “by locking down early, we avoided being New York.” Is that really true?
(Special note: there are MANY other states—and countries—with data similar to Florida’s, including Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Utah, Japan, and of course, Sweden, to name just a few. In ALL cases, the media predicted doom, and even President Trump criticized Georgia’s early opening by their courageous Governor Brian Kemp, and Georgia’s numbers today look great.)
Fact #12: New York’s above average death rate appears to be driven by a fatal policy error combined with aggressive intubations.
Forbes recently published an article explaining just how concentrated COVID-19 deaths really are in a single population, titled “The Most Important Coronavirus Statistic: 42% Of U.S. Deaths Are From 0.6% Of The Population,”the article explains:
Forbes also points out that the risk coronavirus-type illnesses represent to nursing home populations is nothing new:
In his recent meta-analysis on the real Infection Fatality Rate of COVID-19, Dr. Ioannidis explained the policy error in New York that likely contributed to thousands of preventable deaths:
Dr. Ioannidis also mentions the choice by medical personnel in New York to quickly put patients on ventilators, which doctors now realize likely does more harm than good (Read: 80% of NYC’s coronavirus patients who are put on ventilators ultimately die, and some doctors are trying to stop using them.):
The New York Post was particularly harsh in criticizing New York’s nursing home policy:
When your Governor tries to tell you that their destructive decision to lock everyone down saved you from being New York, remember Florida and Sweden. Oh, and don’t forget the country no doomsday folks want to even discuss: Japan:
Fact #13: Public health officials and disease epidemiologists do NOT consider the other negative societal consequences of lockdowns
If you asked me for how a suggestion for how to lose a few pounds and I said, “Stop eating or drinking anything,” would you take my advice? It would work to achieve your goals, but you may not like the side effects. That’s basically what has happened here. Rather than being ONE input on policy, public health officials were handed the keys to the convertible without their license, and off they sped! Look what Dr. Anthony Fauci said to Congress earlier this month:
The Wall Street Journal actively criticized this single-dimensional thinking by American public health officials, noting, “Dr. Fauci is clear on the fact that Americans should not rely on him to conduct cost-benefit analysis of the policies he is recommending.” This excellent critique of the Imperial College model makes a similar point: “The Imperial College paper is a one-sided analysis. It looks at the benefits of a lockdown without going into the costs.”
So wait, all these models that predicted doom from COVID-19 didn’t consider deaths caused by the lockdowns from suicide, skipped doctors appointments, and unemployment? So who should be making these complex policy decisions? At least in the United States, I hold 51 people responsible: the President and 50 state Governors. And, if you expect any of them to issue a mea culpa for a terrible decision, don’t hold your breath, from the Issues & Insights Editorial Board:
Opinion #3: Yoram Lass, former director of Israel’s Health Ministry
Unlike American public health officials, who seem wed to the idea of preventing COVID-19 no matter what the cost, I have been heartened to see public health officials in other countries with a much more complete understanding of the TOTAL cost to society than any public health decision causes. And of all the international straight-talking public health officials, no one puts it any more directly than my favorite: Yoram Lass of Israel. In this excellent interview with Spiked Online—which you should really read in full—Dr. Lass offers up the following nugget:
Fact #14: There is a predictive model for the viral arc of COVID-19, it’s called Farr’s Law, and it was discovered over 100 years ago
Dr. Lass, in his interview highlighted above, also made a point that we already knew, long before the lockdowns, how COVID-19 was likely to behave because, well, we’ve been dealing with new viruses since the dawn of man:
That ALL viruses follow a natural bell curve, with slopes roughly equal on the way up and down, was discovered by Dr. William Farr more than 100 years ago, and it’s known as Farr’s law. Recently, Chinese and American scientists published a study to see if COVID-19 would behave according to Farr’s law, and here’s the chart from their recent paper:
As you can see, the predicted path of the virus in China (orange dotted line) and the actual path of the virus (blue dotted line) are a match. This paper, created all the way back on February 8th, could have saved policy-makers much heartache. A renowned Israeli scientist made this same point about the natural arc of the virus more than a month ago, in the middle of Israel’s lockdown:
(Dr. Ben-Israell, FYI, is arguably Israel’s most famous scientist, read his resume for yourself.) I put the Farr’s law idea to the test with the local data I have here in Oregon, and what you can clearly see is that COVID-19 was ALREADY following a natural, expected viral arc BEFORE our Governor Kate Brown imposed a lockdown. (Note: Lockdown order issued on March 23rd, it would take 2 weeks to see a positive impact on hospitalization numbers, but the virus was already on the decline, much as both Dr. Lass and Dr. Ben-Israel predicted.)
I really enjoyed this explanation of Farr’s law by Michael Fumento:
Fact #15: The lockdowns will cause more death and destruction than COVID-19 ever did
My final fact is the most depressing. Of course, it’s impossible today to find all the data to show how destructive unnecessary lockdowns have been, but many people are already trying. Economically, the costs to the United States will be measure in the multi-trillions. It didn’t have to be this way, Sweden just reported that GDP grew in their first quarter!
I’ll highlight a number of different takes so you get the basic picture, and it’s really ugly. Last week, writing in The Hill, a group of professors from Stanford, Duke, University of Chicago, and Hebrew University penned a sobering piece titled, The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life, where they explained:
One of the lead authors of the study, the aforementioned Dr. Scott Atlas, went on Fox News to further explain the results of their analysis:
Remember how the lockdown was supposed to keep hospitals open to manage a surge of patients? Well, now the healthcare system is facing disaster: Doctors face pay cuts, furloughs and supply shortages as coronavirus pushes primary care to the brink CNBC reports:
Stanford’s Dr. John Ioaniddis penned an excellent article for the Boston Review, spelling out the catastrophic impact the lockdown is having on healthcare:
Heck, more than 600 doctors recently appealed to President Trump to lift the lockdowns, according to Forbes:
More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients.
It’s no surprise that suicides are on the rise in localities that locked down, and that prescriptions for sleep and anti-anxiety medications have skyrocketed. And it was just reported that, “Social isolation can increase a person’s risk of dying early by up to 50 per cent, a new study has suggested.” Even Dr. Fauci, arguably the lockdown’s most enthusiastic supporter, has gotten religion recently, as CNBC reported:
Dr. Fauci, you are very, very late to the party. In fact, one of my biggest issues with this entire mess, is how Dr. Fauci and others like him have done almost NOTHING to educate the American public about the new science and information we now have about COVID-19, which would have not only meaningfully reduced panic but also perhaps given Governors more support to re-open more quickly…
Fact #16: All these phased re-openings are utter nonsense with no science to support them, but they will all be declared a success
I found this Wall Street Journal article about Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee to be particularly telling:
Yup, still waiting for your Phase 1 or Phase 2 re-opening? Trust me, whomever conjured up your state’s plan is quite literally making things up as they go along. And, given the extreme range of plans taking place—even in neighboring counties—the odds that they have ANYTHING to do with the arc of the virus is exactly ZERO, but you already knew that if you read this far. The good news is they will ALL succeed, because we never needed to lockdown in the first place—MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
(It’s interesting to look back to early May at the headlines where public health officials predicted disaster for Florida—Miami Herald: How safe is Florida’s reopening plan? Public health experts give a candid critique—are other Governor’s ever going to think for themselves the way Ron DeSantis did?)
How the hell did we get here?
This week, I was really struck by this headline from the Foundation for Economic Education:
Stanford’s Dr. Scott Atlas is, IMO, one of the true heroes of this quagmire, and I found his essay about the lack of leadership by American public health officials during this crisis to be one of his best. While the public health officials have done a great job scaring the daylights out of Americans, they’ve done very little to update Americans on the emerging science that has proved many of our initial fears to be unsupported by science. We still have MILLIONS of Americans who are scared to leave their home, and my guess is that many think COVID-19’s IFR is closer to smallpox (30%) than to the seasonal flu. As Dr. Atlas wrote on May 3rd in The Hill:
I still struggle to make sense of how the hell we got here. I think one of the best essays you will ever read on this topics a 2-part series written by bioengineer Yinon Weiss:
Part 1: How Fear, Groupthink Drove Unnecessary Global Lockdowns. Excerpt:
Part 2: How Media Sensationalism, Big Tech Bias Extended Lockdowns. Excerpt:
I’ll end these thoughts with a final quote from Israel’s Yoram Lass, who neatly summarized what just happened (and is still happening in many places):
Now what?
What should be done is so damn simple, IMO, but it never will, because too many people would have to admit they were wrong. But, I’ll say it anyway. My policy recommendation: remove 100% of newly created lockdown rules, secure nursing homes using Florida’s approach, tell everyone with an active COVID-19 infection to stay home until symptoms resolve or wear a mask if they need to go out in public, and encourage everyone else to wash their hands. Done deal.
I saved one of my favorite quotes for last from Karolinska Institute’s Johan Giesecke (no surprise he’s Swedish), from an essay that appeared in early May in The Lancet:
If you made it this far, thank you. You now share my burden in knowing the facts about Lockdown Lunacy. And, thank you to the many courageous medical professionals and scientists who are taking serious risk to their careers to publicly tell the truth. If you’d like to stay abreast of this complex topic, I recommend the Twitter feeds of both Aaron Ginn and Alex Berenson, they are a welcome respite from “Team Apocalypse.”
Masks, Cloth Face Coverings, Nothing
The above Lockdown Lunacy posts addressed masks… but here is another post which contains many, many more links… It may appear one sided because it is. He published his post, then posted the links in the comments. So I will copy the comments to here as well to present all at once. It serves to give the mind of reason the studies to combat the narrative of authoritarians and hysteria.
131 Scientific Articles and Reasons to Refuse
Posted byJason Hommel
Why I Refuse to Wear a Mask (And You Should Too)
Mask wearing is only a CDC recommendation, not a law.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover.html
The CDC is a cesspool of liars.
The CDC has a top ten list of things people die from. The list is grossly incorrect, and neglects deaths from medical causes. https://revealingfraud.com/2019/08/health/cdcs-leading-causes-of-death-list-is-fraud/ This proves they are horrible liars, and grossly incompetent.
As further proof that the CDC lies, the CDC recently agreed to settle a lawsuit where the CDC was refusing an information request to provide studies upon which they based their claim “vaccines do not cause Autism”. They failed to provide any studies to show that the vast majority of vaccines do not cause Autism. They mostly only studied MMR, and the study they rely upon was shown to be fraud by a whistleblower. https://revealingfraud.com/2020/03/health/vaccines-may-indeed-cause-autism-cdc-fraud-exposed/
Believing the CDC, as per the above, can literally get you killed, in many ways. Mainly, you would grossly underestimate the deadliness of the medical establishment.
Mask wearing, can literally get you killed. It’s already killed several people who were running while wearing masks. Their lungs exploded, and they died. https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-two-chinese-boys-die-face-masks-gym-class-20200507-ruyinz7czjbqde3tprx647q3dm-story.html and https://nypost.com/2020/05/15/wuhan-man-suffers-collapsed-running-while-running-with-face-mask/
The CDC reason for wearing a mask is fraudulent, and based on an illegal false accusation, and/or slander and/or unproven science. The reason is “to protect others”. This fraudulently assumes and falsely accuses everyone is an asymptomatic carrier. This fraudulently assumes, and falsely accuses that asymptomatic carriers can spread the disease, even though there is no science to suggest that is true. (See point about false CDC claims on autism not backed by science above.) This also inverts the legal maxim, “innocent until proven guilty”. Where is the proof of asymptomatic transmission?
The World Health Organization has stated that “to date there has been no documented case of asymptomatic transmission”. As of April, 2020. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200402-sitrep-73-covid-19.pdf In case they change their form, it has been downloaded and uploaded here:
https://revealingfraud.com/2020/05/silver-gold/who-no-asymptomatic-transmission-april-2020/
This should be a far more than sufficient counter argument:
Anyone who is smart enough to evaluate two things at once, and compare risk vs. reward, can instantly see that wearing a mask is a very very bad idea.
There are many, many more reasons to avoid wearing a mask, but the above are so sufficient, the below need not be substantiated at this time.
Those were my initial 16 reasons. Below, in the comments, are 115 links compiled by others, most are links to scientific articles, showcasing the dangers of wearing masks, and their ineffectiveness.
37 Comments
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241845881.htmlReply
Whereas others may be simply receptive becuase they let their resistance get depleted. H5N1 reacts the same way with certain animals, as well as, humans.”
Retired, 1991 to 2014, Classified Level IV disease first response health professional (87 countries, over 200 deployments). I cannot verify, other than Margaret Chan (Director General 1996-2017), our boss who could; however probably wouldn’t. My team’s classification was beyond “Top Secret.” My knowledge, and experience as a nurse, in the world of disease first response surpasses many of CDC, HHS, and US Army first response. There were 15 members on my team. However, I was the Deputy, and later, the Incident Commander for the US H5N1 outbreak (2015), in Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa and Louisiana, which can be verfied by the USDA, and Witt O’Brien.Reply
1. They never developed it.
2. They never infected others.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32405162/?fbclid=IwAR2UlNFWFlYL75IRzjb0fnVCFtsfUmQvAIUSZfykdbpD5y_ICs6XwiEgsHUReply
The person who wears the mask is also considered to be in direct association with the mask’s spirit force and is consequently exposed to like personal danger of being affected by it. For the sake of protection, the wearer, like the mask maker, is required to follow certain sanctioned procedures in using the mask. In some respects he plays the role of an actor in cooperation or collaboration with the mask. Without the dance and posturing routines that the mask wearer performs, often to the accompaniment of music, the mask would remain a representation without a full life-force. The real drama and power of its form is the important contribution of the wearer. Covered by the mask and costume, the performer loses his previous identity and assumes a new one. Upon donning the mask, the wearer sometimes undergoes a psychic change and as in a trance assumes the spirit character depicted by the mask. Usually, however, the wearer skillfully becomes a “partner” of the character he is impersonating, giving to the mask not only an important spark of vitality by the light flashing from his own eyes but also bringing it alive by his movements and poses. But often the wearer seems to become psychologically one with the character he is helping to create. He seems to become an automaton, without his own will, which has become subservient to that of the personage of the mask. At all times there remains some important, even if sub rosa, association between the mask and its wearer.”Reply
https://www.ada.gov/filing_complaint.htm?Reply
The person who wears the mask is also considered to be in direct association with the mask’s spirit force and is consequently exposed to like personal danger of being affected by it. For the sake of protection, the wearer, like the mask maker, is required to follow certain sanctioned procedures in using the mask. In some respects he plays the role of an actor in cooperation or collaboration with the mask. Without the dance and posturing routines that the mask wearer performs, often to the accompaniment of music, the mask would remain a representation without a full life-force. The real drama and power of its form is the important contribution of the wearer. Covered by the mask and costume, the performer loses his previous identity and assumes a new one. Upon donning the mask, the wearer sometimes undergoes a psychic change and as in a trance assumes the spirit character depicted by the mask. Usually, however, the wearer skillfully becomes a “partner” of the character he is impersonating, giving to the mask not only an important spark of vitality by the light flashing from his own eyes but also bringing it alive by his movements and poses. But often the wearer seems to become psychologically one with the character he is helping to create. He seems to become an automaton, without his own will, which has become subservient to that of the personage of the mask. At all times there remains some important, even if sub rosa, association between the mask and its wearer.”https://www.britannica.com/art/mask-face-covering/The-wearing-of-masksReply
For general malaise, B complex, 1 pill, up to 5 times a day. Get “doctor’s best” brand, or look for “methylated” B vitamins.
For being tired, take copper in the morning, 1 x 3mg pill x 3 times a day.
For Lyme, iodine and colloidal silver; together they will kill it.Reply
Shared from Jason Grieve“So I did a test today that I am quite confident has never been done, relative to the mask guidelines.So in order to live healthy we must breathe the correct atmospheric oxygen which is 19.5% -23.5% of the air must be O2. OHSA requires a confined space environment to maintain this atmosphere or you must remove yourself from that environment immediately. So we breathe in that O2 in two places mouth and nose, both of which are confined to the mask.My hypothesis was that the atmosphere inside of the mask was not meeting the lower 19.5% atmospheric oxygen levels making the mask immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH).The test:I took an industrial MSA air gas monitor and tested 3 face coverings. I wore each mask covering appropriately and inserted the gas monitor wand inside the mask. The results of the atmospheric oxygen levels are as follows: (remember under 19.5% is IDLH)Double layer hanker chief – 17.5%
Half face respirator with 2 valves and particulate filters – 18.0%
N95 with single valve – 18.0%Conclusion – these face coverings that are being recommended are depleting the oxygen to your brain and is immediately dangerous to life and health. The reason: gas exchange isn’t happening fast enough inside the mask and you are breathing too much expended CO2.”Reply
From the WHO: There is limited evidence that wearing a medical mask by healthy individuals in the households or among contacts of a sick patient, or among attendees of mass gatherings may be beneficial as a preventive measure.14-23 However, there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.Masks-Prolonged wearing of the surgical mask causes loss of intellect potential and cognitive performance due to a decrease in blood oxygen and subsequent brain hypoxia. Note – some changes may be irreversible.“Report on surgical mask induced deoxygenation during major surgery” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18500410
“Seventy percent of the patients showed a reduction in partial pressure of oxygen (PaO2), and 19% developed various degrees of hypoxemia. Wearing an N95 mask significantly reduced the PaO2 level”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15340662“Wearing N95 masks results in hypooxygenemia and hypercapnia which reduce working efficiency and the ability to make correct decision.”
…
“Medical staff are at increased risk of getting ‘Severe acute respiratory syndrome’ (SARS), and wearing N95 masks is highly recommended by experts worldwide. However, dizziness, headache, and short of breath are commonly experienced by the medical staff wearing N95 masks. The ability to make correct decision may be hampered, too.”https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00173017
https://www.researchgate.net/…/7332926_Headaches_and_the_N9…“Chronic hypoxia-hypercapnia influences cognitive function”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331781
“Hypercapnia status has been shown to predict mild cognitive impairment https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35797-3Chronic hypoxia – hypercapnia has been seen as a cause of cognitive impairment https://www.atsjournals.org/…/fu…/10.1164/ajrccm.186.12.1307https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31479137https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26952529https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577#T1
updated to find information on cloth mask particle filtration. I did also include a review from 1967 on all the studies about development of masks that is a fascinating read. It is important to read the whole thing if you start. If you just read the first page you will be differently informed than reading the whole thing (it’s short!)Fit testing matters less vs it’s an N95 mask: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21477136
Masks don’t seem to impact family infection as much: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28039289
Cloth masks not effective relative to normal medical masks: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.long
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20584862Gotta use the mask and do all the other things too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22188875
Medical or N95 isn’t that different: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31479137Cloth masks worse than surgical masks for anything <2.5 uM: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27531371What kills things on masks?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29855107: yes: bleach, UVC,autoclave, TERC no: UVA, alcohol
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29678452: UVGI is a yes
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25806411 UVGI works, and mask still good, but much more fragile (90% more)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186217Can you breathe if you double mask?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23108786 : less well if it’s a surgical mask over an N95We need more studies
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25858901This might be where we get the guidance from:
https://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04272006_______________________________________2020. Lancet. We have no uniform policy:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30134-X/fulltextHistory of surgical masks: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5333967
This paper was actually a great read. Basically walks up to the invention of plastic masks with filters. You can’t get a fabric mask wet, and it’s much less effective without a lining (in the citation they were using packed cotton as the best lining)The take home wrt cloth masks stopping viral particles of ~120 nm or cough particles less than 1 um:Distribution of particle sizes in a cough maxes out at ~9Distribution of particle sizes in a cough maxes out at ~900 nm: https://bmcpulmmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2466-12-11
Most particles under 1 um: Fabian P, Mcdevitt JJ, Dehaan WH et al. (2008) Influenza virus in human exhaled breath: an observational study.Cloth masks not very efficient with small particles (in some cases negligible filtering):
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577.full: Laboratory tests showed the penetration of particles through the cloth masks to be very high (97%) compared with medical masks (44%) (used in trial) and 3M 9320 N95 (<0.01%), 3M Vflex 9105 N95 (0.1%).Highly recommend reading this one- particle size breakdown and fabric differences for cloth masks and particle penetration: https://doi.org/10.1093/annhyg/meq044Cloth masks worse than surgical masks for anything <2.5 uM (** the one brand had a filter, and was the best performing cloth mask): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27531371_______________________________________________________https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2In conclusion, both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2764367/effectiveness-surgical-cotton-masks-blocking-sars-cov-2-controlled-comparisonMask wearing can increase infection. Most people do not even know how to wear or use them.https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200315/Wearing-masks-may-increase-your-risk-of-coronavirus-infection-expert-says.aspxUS surgeon general warns against wearing face coverings.https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-dont-need-masks-pence-says-as-demand-increases-2020-2Reply
https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/05/dr-blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy-hypoxia-and-hypercapnia/Neurosurgeon says face mask pose risk
https://truepundit.com/neurosurgeon-says-face-masks-pose-serious-risk-to-healthy-people/https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1342?fbclid=IwAR2541ssvUEtFyw04kMVI_5lr3yJeUg3ttYIEs849FwmKXNGYn518CF8Akc&Results
The rates of all infection outcomes were highest in the cloth mask arm, with the rate of ILI statistically significantly higher in the cloth mask arm (relative risk (RR)=13.00, 95% CI 1.69 to 100.07) compared with the medical mask arm. Cloth masks also had significantly higher rates of ILI compared with the control arm. An analysis by mask use showed ILI (RR=6.64, 95% CI 1.45 to 28.65) and laboratory-confirmed virus (RR=1.72, 95% CI 1.01 to 2.94) were significantly higher in the cloth masks group compared with the medical masks group. Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%.Conclusions
This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/BLAYLOCK MD on MASK
https://www.citizensforfreespeech.org/blaylock_face_masks_pose_serious_risks_to_the_healthy?fbclid=IwAR3hg0EIiHfFp_Tq4fPTrDt7KdtyWelrRiR4eKtSL_vuy1g3kn0kkGlsWUIRespiratory consequences of N95 type mask usage in pregnant healthcare workers
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4647822/A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577Covid-19: important potential side effects of wearing face masks that we should bear in mind
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1435/rr-40Controlled research study shows fabric masks increase infection.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577Controlled study shows fabric masks are NOT recommended
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577Problems caused by wearing masks
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1435/rr-40Fabric masks increase infection rates
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releas…/2015/…/150422121724.htmMasks increase risk of infection
https://interestingengineering.com/face-masks-might-actuall…WHO states masks shouldn’t be worn by healthy people as it leads to increase in infection
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-no-need-for-healthy-peo…Increased skin infections from masks https://www.thejakartapost.com/…/beware-of-skin-infections-…Increase infections from masks
https://www.aa.com.tr/…/improper-use-of-medical-mas…/1766676Masks worn over 2 hours should be thrown away due to increase microorganisms load (surgical mask)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/artic…/pii/S2214031X18300809https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/does-wearing-face-mask-increase-co2-levels%3famp=truePizza Gate update Tom Hanks etc
https://www.facebook.com/1905037476390714/videos/592444051703478/?vh=eOSHA Mask
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/osha-issues-faqs-regarding-face-88221/Mask do not work
https://www.thehealthyamerican.org/masks-dont-work?fbclid=IwAR2PmNRmN9KFPw07rPc3AaP2kpCWEFPF_O7F3y5vW4TLazhfkZQQzPkSH3EDo mask prevent
https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/15/do-masks-and-respirators-prevent-viral-respiratory-illnesses/Mask fail to filter
https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85814Reply
Masks Are Causing More Harm Than Good!
Cloth masks – dangerous to your health!TWO DOCTORS SAY WEARING A MASK HURTS YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM
https://www.bitchute.com/video/jJ26bdQ4rhxYAsymptotic have not been linked to any cases as of date.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32513410/?duplicate_of=32405162Masks: Are There Benefits or Just a Comfort Prop? Let the Facts Speak
https://www.healingwithouthurting.com/single-post/2020/05/21/Masks-Are-There-Benefits-or-Just-a-Comfort-Prop-Let-the-Facts-SpeakFace-Masks-For-All Is Not Scientific
https://www.timesofnewrome.com/2020/05/face-masks-for-all-is-not-scientific-but-whats-the-harm-in-wearing-one-anywayNew Jersey Driver Crashes Car After Passing Out From Wearing N95 Mask
https://www.healthnutnews.com/ny-post-new-jersey-driver-crashes-car-after-passing-out-from-wearing-n95-maskTwo boys die from wearing masks in gym class https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-two-chinese-boys-die-face-masks-gym-class-20200507-ruyinz7czjbqde3tprx647q3dm-story.htmlNo good choices: A mask may block out some pollution but have other ill health effects.
A mask may also cause respiratory distress and become a hotbed for microbes to thrive.
https://scroll.in/pulse/860276/no-good-choices-a-mask-may-block-out-some-pollution-but-have-other-ill-health-effectsAccording to the Florida Statutes if you are wearing a face mask in a public business, on a public way, or in someone’s house or on someone’s property you are committing a criminal act.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Laws/Statutes/2011/Chapter876Face Mask Pose Serious Risk To The Healthy
https://www.technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy/Cloth masks compared to medical masks and no mask
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971Mask deoxygenation:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18500410Physiological impact of n95:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00173017Chronic hypoxia:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18331781Cluster randomized controlled trial to examine medical mask use as source control for people with respiratory illness:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28039289Efficacy of cloth face masks:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27531371Increased risk of coronavirus:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200315/Wearing-masks-may-increase-your-risk-of-coronavirus-infection-expert-says.aspxUS Surgeon general: Data doesn’t back up wearing masks in public amid coronavirus pandemic:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/surgeon-general-explains-masks-public-coronavirus“WHY YOU’RE WEARING A MASK; THE PAGAN RITUAL OF TRANSFORMATION”:
https://avoidthemark.com/2020/04/22/why-youre-wearing-a-mask-pagan-ritual-transformation/U.S. Surgeon General: “…STOP BUYING MASKS!
They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus…”:
https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160Forced face masking is a civil rights offense:
https://tinyurl.com/ybas9cddHealthy People Wearing Masks, Should They or Shouldn’t They?
https://jennifermargulis.net/healthy-people-wearing-masks-during-covid19‘Masks Are Symbolic,’ say Dr Fauci and The New England Journal of Medicine
https://hennessysview.com/masks-are-symbolic-dr-fauci/Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372Sorry Oregon, your mask is useless (according to the science)
https://www.professorhinkley.com/blog/sorry-oregon-your-mask-is-useless-according-to-the-scienceCarbon Dioxide Triggers Primordial Fear of Suffocation
https://www.livescience.com/5910-carbon-dioxide-triggers-primordial-fear-suffocation.htmlMasks, Quarantine, and Lockdown
https://lesberensonmd.com/?attachment_id=5321https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150422121724.htmhttps://www.thehealthyamerican.org/masks-dont-workhttps://deeprootsathome.com/does-a-face-mask-pose-serious-risk-to-children-or-to-the-healthy/https://technocracy.news/blaylock-face-masks-pose-serious-risks-to-the-healthy/The reasons why wearing a mask for a considerable amount of time and isolating yourself actually drops you immunity.
Hypercapnia is excess carbon dioxide (CO2) build-up in your body. This can happen from wearing a mask for extended amounts of time.
What’s a symptom of Hypercapnia? An inability to concentrate or think clearly.
What’s the third leading cause of death in the US? It’s medical errors.
Who wears a mask for long periods of time?
The use of cloth masks by healthcare workers may actually put them at increased risk of respiratory illness and viral infections and their global use should be discouraged, according to a UNSW study.
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/cloth-masks-–-dangerous-your-healthMost of our communications are non-verbal. Wearing a mask hides our full compliment of expressions. We need to understand how harmful this is to us all on such a deep level.We need to breathe fresh air. With a mask on, we inhale way more carbon dioxide, leading to a host of problems, even serious or life threatening. While wearing a mask, we are not breathing fresh oxygen and are re-breathing carbon dioxide!Masks are another control mechanism meant to silence us! Masks are a clear symbol of being subservient to agendas which do NOT have our good health in mind! The wearing of masks has, in fact, been orchestrated by those who have monetized our suffering. Please consider these points.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/restoreliability/permalink/1145151192505177/The Psychological Manipulation of Universal Masking
https://www.facebook.com/notes/heather-leigh/the-psychological-manipulation-of-universal-masking/10159673405413146/Reply
Hope this post will help you in seeing reason conquer hysteria.