AusGeoff wrote on Feb 8
th, 2023 at 5:33am:
MeisterEckhart wrote on Feb 7
th, 2023 at 11:03pm:
I'd bet the pandemic years are going to be known as the pandemic political panic - a sociopolitical contagion - mandated lockdowns, masks and vaccinations (developed in a fevered rush) - all enforced by hastily drafted and enacted legislation.
Will it happen again? You bet - given enough time and faded memory.
Panic runs by its own logic.
LOL... the only people "panicking" are the fraidy cats. All hot and bothered
about "losing" their rights; government tyrannies; big pharma; conspiracy
denialists; mask and separation mandates; harmful vaccinations; evil twins
Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci; David Icke; bio-weapons; the New World Order;
Joe Biden; the lefties.....
Funny thing is, the fraidy cats never have any viable evidence supporting the
reasons they're in such a state of panic. They're led blindly by intellectual
incompetents like Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, Robert Malone, Peter McCullough,
Tucker Carlson
et al.
Follow the science, Laffin' Boy.
In that context, a new,
rigorous study that found masks did nothing to slow Covid-19 might have made the news. But no; a 305-page Cochrane analysis published globally on January 30 that assessed 78 high-quality scientific studies that included more than 610,000 participants has yet to rate a single mention in The Washington Post, The New York Times or on CNN, for instance.
Even passionate maskers, such as Baltimore epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, conceded Cochrane reviews were the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine and its latest mask study “a very serious undertaking”.
Cochrane found that surgical masks, the kind doctors wear in operating theatres to avoid accidentally sneezing into an open wound, did nothing to stop Covid-19.
READ MORE: ‘Striking cognitive impact’: how Covid babies are different | A fourth year of the ABC’s lead doomsayer | Covid deaths through roof amid aged-care warnings
More embarrassing for Team Mask, those even more uncomfortable N95 masks made little to no difference either.
Only hand washing seemed to work to prevent the spread of corona and influenza-like viruses.“There is just no evidence masks make any difference. Full stop,” University of Oxford associate tutor Tom Jefferson, one of the study’s 12 authors, told Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi last week.
“In the absence of evidence, you shouldn’t be forcing anybody to do so,” he said, describing advocates of forced masking as “activists, not scientists”.
It turns out the billions upon billions of masks that were manufactured in response to government mandates and now are floating in oceans or piling up at rubbish tips were likely to have been a colossal waste. American multinational 3M alone produced 4.5 billion N95 masks in 2020 and 2021, according to Statista; the mind boggles at what the global total for all masks might be.
“Governments completely failed to do the right thing and demand better evidence,” Jefferson says. “At the beginning of the pandemic there were some voices who said masks did not work and then suddenly the narrative changed.”
Thankfully, the narrative is changing again, in part to a US House of Representatives Republican majority that is determined to probe some of the madder aspects of the great madness.
“I had doctors who spent years in medicine telling me masks were not effective, and yet these were being forced on people and school kids,” Republican congressman Gary Palmer said last week at a congressional hearing that included US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky. “We’re seeing a devastating impact on their educational attainment, so it surprises me that the CDC didn’t do any follow-up testing even while this was going on.”
Wearing a mask sent a powerful message throughout the pandemic: I follow the science. Increasingly, it’s sending a different one: I’m a credulous goose. Or perhaps even, following new research in Frontiers in Psychology published last month: I’m not very attractive.
“Our results consistently demonstrated that self-perceived unattractive individuals were more willing to wear a mask, as they believed it would benefit their attractiveness,” the authors concluded.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/unmasked-the-failure-ofcovid-mandate...