Airline kicks over 100 NYC Orthodox Jews off flight over masks - "A group of about 100 Orthodox Jews from New York City say they were barred from boarding a connecting flight in Germany last week — because a few didn’t wear masks on the previous leg"
Mask fetishism means discriminating against people due to religion is good.
Jayde 🇨🇦🏴 on Twitter - "Trudeau is maskless in Ukraine but still continues to wear them in Canada (2 days ago). How does he feel safe around all those unvaccinated people. How does he tolerate them? I know..... they are not Canadians."
‘Does This Mean Snot-Nosed Censors At YouTube Will Come To My Office And Kiss My …?’: Rand Paul Smashes YouTube - "after the release of new guidance on mask-wearing from the Centers for Disease Control, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) fired back at YouTube censors who had suspended him from the website last August after he had warned that cloth masks do not protect against the coronavirus... a spokesperson for YouTube said that the video violated company policy on Covid-19 misinformation, such as “claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects” or that masks were ineffective in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19."
Matt Strauss: I'm a doctor. Here's why I'm done with masking - "the Toronto Star contacted medical officers of health in Ontario to see whether they would be wearing a mask in public once Ontario’s mandate ends Monday. My answer was “no,” but the Star reporter did not seem terribly interested to hear my rationale... Is it that flossing your teeth halves the risk of heart disease? Or is it that people who don’t floss have other habits that cause heart disease? For decades, the question was argued in medical journals and the popular news media. Experiments show no link, and so the skeptics are validated... Overwhelmingly, the skeptics who wait for randomized trials before believing in a medical intervention have been proven right more often. It is only in situations, as with cigarettes, where the correlation is very strong and very dire where I would be tempted to believe otherwise... the Bangladesh study was performed over the winter of 2020, when vaccination rates were roughly zero, and test positivity was very high (10-15 per cent). Currently in Ontario, all adults have had more than ample opportunity to get three if not four doses of vaccine. Of the 10 per cent who have not availed themselves thereof, a high proportion have since been infected and now have robust natural immunity. The marginal benefit of community masking observed in the Bangladesh trial is likely to be even more marginal in present-day Ontario... Many self-styled “experts” are demanding mask mandates be reinstituted in Ontario. We need to be very careful. In modern medicine, our knowledge base is founded on RCTs. At present, the best evidence we have suggests that cloth masks are of almost no value and community masking is of little value to individuals under 50. Anyone who promotes a return to cloth masking or masking for the sake of children would appear to be out of touch with this knowledge base and therefore, definitionally, not an expert."
Revisiting the Bangladesh Mask RCT. - "In an earlier post, I raised a few issues with a large-scale RCT run in Bangladesh aimed at estimating the effectiveness of masks on reducing the spread of the coronavirus. In particular, I was a bit dismayed that the authors did not post the raw number of seropositive cases in their study, preventing me from computing standard statistical analyses of their results. I also objected to the number of statistical regressions run to pull signals out of a very complex intervention. Recently, the authors were kind enough to release their code and data. I send nothing but kudos to them in this regard... The difference between the two groups was small: only 20 cases out of over 340,000 individuals over a span of 8 weeks. I have a hard time going from these numbers to the assured conclusions that “masks work” that was promulgated by the media or the authors after this preprint appeared. This study was not blinded, as it’s impossible to blind a study on masks. The intervention was highly complex and included a mask promotion campaign and education about other mitigation measures including social distancing. Moreover, individuals were only added to the study if they consented to allow the researchers to visit and survey their household. There was a large differential between the control and treatment groups here, with 95% consenting in the treatment group but only 92% consenting in control. This differential alone could wash away the difference in observed cases. Finally, symptomatic seropositivity is a crude measure of covid as the individuals could have been infected before the trial began. Given the numerous caveats and confounders, the study still only found a tiny effect size. My takeaway is that a complex intervention including an educational program, free masks, encouraged mask wearing, and surveillance in a poor country with low population immunity and no vaccination showed at best modest reduction in infection... this was not the message that the majority of the media took away from this study. Instead we were told that this trial finally confirmed that masks worked. I think one of the key confusing points was using “efficacy” instead of relative risk as a measure of intervention power. One of the dark tricks of biostatistics is moving away from absolute case counts to measures of risk such as relative risk reduction, efficacy, or the odds ratio. All of these measures are relative, and they tend to exaggerate effects... in this study, community masking improved an individual’s risk of infection by a factor of only 1.1x. As a convenient comparator, the RR in the MRNA vaccine trials was 0.05. In this case, vaccines reduce the risk of symptomatic infection by a factor of 20x... The important thing to realize about efficacy is that the range from 0% to 20% is barely better than nothing. Here, even a 20% efficacy corresponds to a reduction of risk by a factor of 1.25x. 1.25x is not literally nothing, but it’s also not enough to halt a highly contagious respiratory infection. For what it’s worth, a vaccine with 20% efficacy would not be approved. Another major flaw of using efficacy as a metric is that it is highly nonlinear. The difference between 10% and 20% efficacy is very small whereas the difference between 85% and 95% is huge, corresponding to a 7-fold and 20-fold risk reduction respectively. Efficacy is a nonlinear metric, but these percentages are bandied around as if they are linear effects, and this adds confusion to the public dialogue... the observed efficacy for cloth masks in this study is 7%. I think in many people’s minds, the difference between 7% and 11% is small. And 7% should be considered “no effect” as should 11%... Anyone who spends too much time around statisticians will note that I never once tried to compute a p-value for any of these results. As I’ve belabored, obsession with statistical significance distracts us from discussing effect sizes. We should be able to just look at the effect size and conclude the study did not find a significant impact of masks on coronavirus spread"
From Benjamin Recht, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley
Masks don't work. - "There was cluster randomization so the results weren’t significant. However, since doctors don’t understand math (nor care to even consult statisticians before they render a verdict), the doctors hail this study as proof that mask works. We have the blind leading the blind"
What were the effects of the Bangladesh mask intervention? - "the behavior of unblinded staff when enrolling study participants was one of the most highly significant differences between treatment and control groups. The significant impacts on staff and participant behavior urge caution in interpreting small differences in the study outcomes which depended on survey responses... it is quite clear that more mask wearing was observed in the treatment group rather than the control group... Moreover, there was a large difference in observed social distancing... It is notable—even if one did not expect any effect from masks at all—that the increase in observed physical distancing did not translate to clearer differences in symptomatic seropositivity between treatment and control groups... the populations of the treatment and control groups themselves are very different. One of the main difficulties in running a mask trial is the issue of blinding. You certainly cannot run a blinded intervention as people know whether or not they are wearing masks. But in such unblinded studies, it is critical that the populations sampled to be surveyed are identical before the unblinding occurs. Here is where things get a bit subtle. The villages were assigned to treatment at random, but the households were not. The surveyors who handed out masks knew in advance the treatment assignment of their villages. This knowledge alone induced a highly significant difference. The fraction of households approached in each village is significantly different in treatment and control... This selection bias induced a large imbalance in the size of the treatment and control groups, and may have affected the overall seropositivity counts. Interestingly we found that the rate of consent for symptom surveys and the rate of consent for blood draws were indistinguishable between treatment and controls. The main significant difference was due to the behavior of the study staff. That the unblinded staff behaved differently in the different types of villages is not surprising and similar experimenter behavior has blemished randomized trials since their inception. We can’t know the exact cause of the difference in households reached, but perhaps the staff put just a little bit more effort into soliciting responses in the treatment group because they were excited about testing their intervention. Whatever the case, this behavioral difference created a large population difference between the groups: whereas 3,394 of 68,514 households were unreachable in the treatment group, 4,970 of 65,536 households were unreachable in control. This is a difference of over four thousand people, far exceeding the 20 case difference in symptomatic seropositivity. Our analysis suggests that the impact of the mask intervention was highly effective at modifying behaviors (distancing, mask-wearing, symptom reporting), but that any effect on actual symptomatic seropositivity was much more subtle. In particular, whatever effects the intervention had on the rate of symptomatic seropositivity in the villages was certainly not large relative to other factors contributing to variance in this parameter across villages. We suggest that the very large causal effects on consent rates and thus population denominators urge caution in interpreting the small differences we see in symptomatic seropositivity between treatment and controls, which are not statistically significant according to standard nonparametric paired tests."
A note on sampling biases in the Bangladesh mask trial - "A recent cluster trial in Bangladesh randomized 600 villages into 300 treatment/control pairs, to evaluate the impact of an intervention to increase mask-wearing. Data was analyzed in a generalized linear model and significance asserted with parametric tests for the rate of the primary outcome (symptomatic and seropositive for COVID-19) between treatment and control villages. In this short note we re-analyze the data from this trial using standard non-parametric paired statistics tests on treatment/village pairs. With this approach, we find that behavioral outcomes like physical distancing are highly significant, while the primary outcome of the study is not. Importantly, we find that the behavior of unblinded staff when enrolling study participants is one of the most highly significant differences between treatment and control groups, contributing to a significant imbalance in denominators between treatment and control groups. The potential bias leading to this imbalance suggests caution is warranted when evaluating rates rather than counts. More broadly, the significant impacts on staff and participant behavior urge caution in interpreting small differences in the study outcomes that depended on survey response."
A cluster randomised trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers - "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... This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks"
And this is with healthcare workers, not the general population. So it'd be even worse with the general population
What the Mask Did - "Most of us surely accept without question that it’s near-impossible to fall in love, learn to trust or form any significant attachment to another without visual access to their face. To cover up the face as a diktat of public policy is, therefore, nothing short of a crime against humanity... as Judy Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively show in their painstaking volume The Truth About Masks, prolonged masking poses a danger to actual health. Masks may cause hypoxia and consequent immune deficiency issues through the ingestion of one’s own CO2, and create fungal and bacterial biosafety risks. Similarly, Alberta respirologist Bao Dang recently testified as an expert witness that “having the public wear masks, most of which are often wet, dirty, reused, and incorrectly worn, can lead to health problems and inhaling pollutions and secretions over and over.”... Citing Danish and other prestigious academic reviews, Bao Dang concurs: mask mandates have been driven not by valid antidotal and preventative assumptions but by “a social and political aspect…causing mass paranoia and fear and panic.” Many people were constrained to mask up in order to keep their jobs; they, too, suffered the humiliation of depersonalization in a world which obliged them to become travesties of their full humanity. There is another element at play, no less disheartening: the utter lack of intelligent curiosity, of mind itself, in vast portions of the susceptible mask-wearing public. They are an easy prey to “mass formation psychosis,” as Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent, has persuasively argued, and perhaps best symbolized by the commonly seen masked driver alone in his vehicle (a practice that achieves parody when such a vehicle is on an empty country road, parody being surpassed by the California motorcyclist photographed cruising along without a helmet, but with a mask). The fact remains. Ordinary commerce between people has been perverted and maimed. Perhaps even more toxic, the mask has robbed children of their healthy development as social beings picking up facial cues – smiles, expressions of interest or concern or disapproval, signals of availability, semaphores of meaning – which they then learn to copy. The emulative faculty crucial to mental, cognitive and behavioural growth for children is indispensable, but the mimetic component of normal human relationships has been delayed and possibly permanently inhibited by masking."
Are Face Masks Effective? The Evidence. - "A May 2020 meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the US CDC found that face masks had no effect, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control...
A July 2020 review by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine found that there is no evidence for the effectiveness of face masks against virus infection or transmission...
An August 2021 study published in the Int. Research Journal of Public Health found “no association between mask mandates or use and reduced COVID-19 spread in US states.”
A large Spanish school study, published in March 2022, found that “mask mandates in schools were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission.”...
An August 2020 review by a German professor in virology, epidemiology and hygiene found that there is no evidence for the effectiveness of face masks and that the improper daily use of masks by the public may in fact lead to an increase in infections."
Mask Mandate Science - Is there really any?? - "In this much touted 2021 study, participants compared the weakest masks, cloth and surgical, and only wore them for ten minutes, at which point they found very slight differences in levels. However, buried in the analysis, we find that “Walking with a surgical mask did lead to a modest increase in heart rate (103.7 [93.8–110.7] vs. 101.2 [89.0–111.8].” That is a 2% change after a mere ten minutes of walking, and as referenced above, heart rate is part of the bodies oxygen regulation methods. There was no measurement of breathing volume whatsoever, or consideration of how the body regulates itself to ameliorate to the applied pressure. The clear takeaway of mask comparisons research is that N95 masks are really the only ones that make a serious difference in particle inhalation. But as anyone who works in situations that require them can tell you, they are not meant for prolonged wear. A 2021 study of CO2 concentration while wearing an N95 show that 15 minutes exceeds recommended levels, and 2010 study states that at one hour, “dead-space carbon dioxide and oxygen levels were significantly above and below, respectively, the ambient workplace standards, and elevated P(CO2) is a possibility.” These are fifteen minute to one hour studies, with very narrow observations, and despite the evidence from Hawaii, governments are telling us to mask all day every day, and now even outside in Oregon!"
AJ Kay on Twitter - "The Univ. of Michigan has a strict mask policy
The Univ. of Michigan is having a flu outbreak
So it looks like masks no longer stop the flu"
"For everyone who tells you that it was masks that disappeared the flu last year:"
Lauren Southern on Twitter - "Met a guy last night who just yells “I’m Muslim” anytime people ask him to put a mask on - and apparently he hasn’t had to listen to a single mandate for two years 😂"
Covid Arithmetic for Anxious Parents - Bet On It - "The question, to be blunt, is: What are the odds that not wearing a mask will lead a child to die of Covid?... a child’s annual risk of death in an auto accident is about 1 in 50,000. That’s 100 times higher than the non-masking risk. Honestly, if you’re worried about your kids’ safety, it would make vastly more sense to just drive less. Most obviously, you could withdraw your kids from sports, scouting, dance, and travel.
If you protest, “That’s a crazy overreaction; I want my kid to actually enjoy his life, not just stay alive,” I agree. And that is a great argument against masking as well. After all, masks aren’t merely inconvenient. They are dehumanizing. There is a reason even mask hard-liners unmask around immediate family members. Namely: Covering your face emotionally cuts you off from other human beings. If masking reduced kids’ risk of death by 1 in 100, you could reasonably respond, “Tragically, this dehumanization is worth the price.” But not if masking reduces the risk by 1 in 100,000, much less 1 in 5,000,000... Does this mean that schools have been hysterically overreacting from the get-go?! My answer: Probably...
Can you quibble with my numbers? Of course; they’re all estimates. But no credible modification will change the fact that risks of Covid to kids have gone from tolerable to microscopic.
Should we really make decisions about children’s health using math? Well, why do you think we teach kids math? The main point of math is to improve human decision-making. Life entails risk. No one is perfectly safe. Not you, not me, not your kids, not my kids. If you can moderately increase safety with mild precautions – like seatbelts – great. If you can drastically increase safety with strong precautions, maybe that’s the right path, too. But microscopically increasing safety with strong precautions isn’t just a bad idea. It is childish.
Clever readers will object, “We’re not masking kids to protect kids. We’re masking kids to protect adults. The adults who work in schools. The adults kids live with.” I say this is greatly overstated. Yes, many adults worry about catching Covid from kids. But actions speak louder than words. And what most adults’ actions say is that they worry more about kids’ health than their own. Plenty of parents will go to an unmasked party, but still insist the Girl Scouts mask at their meetings. Much the same goes for school employees. The fundamental problem is that adults are “thinking” emotionally about issues that you can only understand mathematically...
The most “adult” thing for parents and teachers to do on this March 1 is walk kids through the Covid math. Even third-graders should be able to follow it. And if you really want to show your maturity, you should confess that for the last two years, most adults have been acting like children. Life gave us a math project, yet we acted like it was a poetry assignment. Our kids deserve better. Let’s start giving it to them!"
Meme - @laurenboebert Lauren Boebert: "Hey libs, if you're mad about the mask mandates being lifted... start your own airline."
Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - "Jen Psaki says that Kamala Harris wasn't wearing a mask indoors because "it was an emotional day, it was a historic day.""
"Toddlers don't have emotional or historic days I guess."
More Evidence from the UK that Masks Don't Work - "the head of the National Health Service has already called for the return of “tougher” COVID measures... Matthew Taylor called for several “interventions” to be reintroduced in the UK to “protect” the NHS... Matthew should be required to explain exactly what “living with COVID” actually means. He says that the “measures that are necessary” should be put in place to help the National Health Service while the virus “continues to attack.” So apparently he’s advocating for permanent restrictions on normal life… How else are we supposed to interpret this? Putting aside the glaringly obvious fact that the highest surge of infections in the UK happened while restrictions like mask mandates and vaccine passports were in place. Let’s also ignore that mandates have failed quite literally everywhere they’ve been tried. Assuming his advocacy is based on reality, that masks do in fact work, in this scenario, what is the end game? Forcing masks in daily life will be an indefinite, endless revolving threat. Because it will never be eradicated, the virus will always be “attacking.” There will always be seasonal surges followed by waning periods that inevitably transition back into surges... It’s also telling that Taylor specifically called to increase vaccinations, considering the UK already has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates... Nearly everyone over 50 has had at least one vaccination dose, with ~96-97% of that age group fully vaccinated, and 90% boosted. If a remarkable uptake like this isn’t enough to prevent a “brutal” Easter in NHS hospitals, shouldn’t they be asked why the product they’re promoting so ferociously apparently isn’t working particularly well? And of course, no one in the media deems it necessary to ask these questions — during his interview, there was no push back as to who exactly the UK government should be targeting to receive more vaccinations. No questions for the NHS chief on how it’s possible for his system to be so overwhelmed with COVID patients in an era with 90-99% vaccination rates among those over 50, not to mention the unsurprising lack of questioning as to why he would recommend masking given its unequivocal failure to prevent a larger surge of infections just a few months earlier in the UK. As always with the media’s coverage of COVID policy, there’s no interest in asking the difficult questions health authorities may not be prepared to answer, but only in promotion and nodding acceptance that our wise bettors in the health service know more, data and evidence be damned. Not once did they ask why mask mandates should be brought back when England and Scotland had conducted this very experiment, which showed once again that mask mandates do not matter... best of all, data released just a few days later by his own government shows once again how useless mask wearing is. The ONS (Office of National Statistics) Coronavirus Infection Survey released on April 13th, contains a summary of data collected from March 13th to March 26th, a period of generally increasing infections throughout the UK, and well after mask mandates had been lifted in England. There are numerous categories and comparisons between different characteristics throughout the document, but one portion in particular is especially illustrative — the section on mask wearing and its relationship to the likelihood of testing positive for COVID during this time period... adults who worked or attended school in settings where masks were “not needed” were less likely to test positive than those who “always” wore masks in those same settings. Masks don’t work."
Joe Biden’s Night at Fiola Mare Invites Criticism Over Maskless Exit - "Photographers and diners captured images of the president walking through Fiola Mare without wearing a mask"
Are Masks In Schools Effective? UK Study Fails to Prove They Work - Bloomberg - "The study cited by the department didn’t provide proof of a statistically significant decline in absences. The research compared 123 U.K. schools that used masks with about 1,200 others that didn’t during the Covid wave fueled by the delta variant. Schools with face-covering rules in October 2021 saw their absence rate drop by 2.3 percentage points, to 3%, two to three weeks later. In schools that didn’t use masks, absences fell by 1.7 percentage points, to 3.6%. However, the sample size was too small and researchers couldn’t exclude the possibility that the higher reduction in schools using masks was due to chance"
It is telling that the quasi-experimental evidence is less favorable for masks than the observational studies. This does have an advantage over the RCTs though - under mask mandates, adherence to the intervention is excellent - and yet we don't have evidence that masks work
Scott W. Hunter on Twitter - "The people who’ve yelled for months that they “believe in science” now don’t want to stop wearing masks bc they don’t want to be confused for one of *those* people."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caught maskless again in Miami drag bar - "“Hasn’t Gov. DeSantis been inexplicably missing for like 2 weeks? If he’s around, I would be happy to say hello. His social media team seems to have been posting old photos for weeks. In the meantime, perhaps I could help with local organizing. Folks are quite receptive here :)”... Hours later, it was revealed that DeSantis had spent part of his time out of the spotlight accompanying his wife as she underwent treatment for breast cancer."
Addendum: Meme - "Gov. Ron DeSantis has a wife fighting aggressive breast cancer and 3 small children that he is caring for. His youngest is 1 year-old. You sip a martini in a red state he runs as your blue district collapses under your garbage policies. Sit down, Queen Marxist Antoinette"
Eric Swalwell is seen maskless in Miami after blaming GOP for prolonging pandemic - "'When a guest saw [Swalwell] sitting there with his child and another person they sarcastically said: "Nice to see you in Miami",' one eyewitness told DailyMail.com. 'He said: "Thank you."' But when the hotel guest went on to ask about his lack of face covering and if he was vaccinated, Swalwell was left 'speechless,' according to the source. Swalwell, like many fellow Democrats, has been a huge proponent of mask and vaccine mandates throughout the pandemic and has openly criticized his Republican counterparts for failing to enforce such measures... 'As we end 2021, mired in a deadly pandemic, you should know who has prolonged it. THESE GUYS. Republican liars. Your vacation cancelled. Your kids back to virtual learning. And back to masks everywhere. For blame look no farther than #theseguys'... Former Trump advisor Steve Cortes shared a photo of the sighting on Twitter Friday, questioning why the New York congresswoman had been 'frolicking in free Florida', while advocating for mask and vaccine mandates in her home state. '1. If Leftists like AOC actually thought mandates and masking worked, they wouldn't be frolicking in free FL. 2. Her guy is showing his gross pale male feet in public (not at a pool/beach) with hideous sandals,' Cortes tweeted. Ocasio-Cortez replied with scorn, bizarrely claiming that Republicans were just angry because they want to date her... 'These people clearly need therapy, won't do it, and use politics as their outlet instead. It's really weird.'... Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Monday blasted the so-called 'lockdown politicians,' like AOC for flocking to the state during the pandemic despite pushing for mask and vaccine mandates in their own districts. 'If I had a dollar for every lockdown politician that decided to escape to Florida over the last two years, I'd be a pretty doggone wealthy man,' DeSantis said during a press conference. 'Congresspeople, mayors, governors, you name it.' The governor suggested the politicians were hypocrites, saying: 'I think a lot of Floridians will say "wait a minute, you're bashing us because we're not doing your draconian policies and yet we're the first place you want to flee to...to be able to enjoy life."' DeSantis stated the hypocrisy extends beyond the New York representative, alleging 'there are probably about a half dozen governors who have restrictions on their people and then were spotted at various points in Florida'. 'Some of it's been public, some of it has not been public,' he added. 'I am happy though that Florida is a place where people know they can come, they can live like normal people and they can make their own decisions.'"
I love the projection from AOC
AOC shares video of her boyfriend's feet, reiterating her claim Republicans are obsessed with them - "'If Republicans are mad they can't date me they can just say that instead of projecting their sexual frustrations onto my boyfriend's feet. Ya creepy weirdos.'... 'These people clearly need therapy, won't do it, and use politics as their outlet instead. It's really weird.'"
So much projection...
AOC Tests Positive For COVID-19 After Hitting Up Miami - "the New York representative was caught vacationing in Florida and partying at a drag club with celebrity Billy Porter while skipping voting in person at the Capitol in Washington, D.C, because of the “ongoing emergency pandemic.”... Despite the similar, if not better, COVID-19 numbers to Democratic-run states per the NYT, some progressives have attempted to label Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) as “DeathSantis” for his supposed dangerous approach to the pandemic in letting citizens make responsible choices for themselves."
Lisa Boothe on Twitter - ""Hey mean girl @LisaMarieBoothe She put her life at risk to see her mother. You are awful."
"LOL, she put her life at risk to go to bars!… "
Reply: "Factually (statistically) speaking there’s very little risk if you’re vaccinated and boosted."
Viewers Rage at Maskless Emmys: 'But Kids Have to Wear a Mask to School. What the F**k'
Rage and relief flood the internet as Ontario finally lifts mask mandate
So many people who are upset that they won't be able to control others with their security blanket by proxy anymore. If 2 years into the pandemic, with super high vaccination rates and a variant with lower mortality, it is not time to stop compulsory masking, that suggests to these people, it will never be the right time to do so - because they are obsessed with the narrative and want to live in fear forever. At least the shibboleth will become more effective once it's voluntary
Mask Mandates Don’t Need to Make Sense - The Atlantic - "If the goal of mask policies is to reduce transmission of the coronavirus as much as possible, then D.C.’s new rules are difficult to reason out. Why should children, who are generally at low risk of severe disease, have to mask while sitting quietly in class when their more vulnerable elders can sing, unmasked, in church? It seems arbitrary, inconsistent, absurd. Then again, so does just about every community mask mandate. If the rules don’t apply equally in different settings, they’re unfair. If they do, they’re ridiculous: Good luck complying in a restaurant, bar, or airport food court. Pointing out the logical flaws in mask mandates is easy... It all feels rather performative and silly. Why have a mandate if it can be so easily ignored? “The public sees right through that, and I think that’s led to a lot of the backlash,” Joseph Allen, the director of Harvard’s Healthy Buildings program, told me. To Allen, mask mandates’ contradictions and compliance failures are signs that the U.S. should stop trying so hard to influence human behavior, and start focusing on improving ventilation and filtration in buildings. Masking, because it’s obviously visible and has become unavoidably politicized, is the pandemic-mitigation strategy that’s easiest for most people to notice—which might explain why it’s received so much attention from the public and the media. But structural improvements can operate in the background, protecting people without making them feel inconvenienced... “From my perspective, the main benefit is not so much the masking itself, but the message to society that this wave is not yet over,” Dowdy told me. A mask mandate may not magically swaddle the faces of everyone in its jurisdiction, but it could remind already enthusiastic maskers to avoid large gatherings, or lead non-maskers to give the people around them a little more space... Mask policies can still make sense, so long as they serve a community’s shared goals."
This is very telling: an admission that mask mandates are political theatre
Feynman on Twitter - "For a group that purports to be concerned about misinformation, elite media outlets continue to hammer consumers with stories undercutting vaccine efficacy and overstating the efficacy of masks. It’s gotten to the point where many Americans act like masks are more effective.
Here are some commonly held beliefs among Americans currently getting their news from
@CNN @nytimes @washingtonpost @MSNBCand more:
-Vax protection is fragile & low (people think they’ll still die of Covid after vax)
-Vaxxed people spread Covid just as much as un-vaxxed
-Variants render vax ineffective
-A vaxxed person outside is both at personal risk AND putting others at risk if unmasked
-Masks essentially stop spread MORE than vax
-A vaxxed person is placed in mortal danger by unvaxxed people
->75% must be vaxxed to ease restrictions
-Long Covid is very common and widespread
-Natural infection confers NO immunity
-The vax immunity won’t last long
I could go on! My point is that there’s a TON of misinformation flowing out of the “trusted” media outlets!"
