Cochrane, the most trusted organization on the planet when it comes to reviewing medical data, weighed in on masks early in the COVID crisis. It was clear from a wealth of data and past experience that masks would not help slow the spread of COVID, just as it had not impacted flu’s course for 100 years. Since the flu bug is smaller than the COVID bug, and thus more likely to be stopped by a mask, it follows logically that since masks have never been shown to be effective in flu they won’t work for COVID. Cochrane disseminated this advice gently and largely to an audience whose ears remained shut. Our nation, behind the aegis of the politicized and drug-company entrenched Dr. Fauci and his many “scientific” minions who appeared regularly on CNN, had latched its horse to a masks-are-the-answer crusade that doomed America to have the highest death rate in the world and a drop of 4 years in life expectancy. But having demonized non-mask-wearers, having promoted masks as the only way to stop COVID—sometimes, as the great Dr. Fauci told us, you need two of them—and having shut down all discourse on the subject and berated any—like me—who pointed to the obvious lack of efficacy of masks in slowing COVID or protecting the most vulnerable, the mask zealots refuse to be swayed by science. When Cochrane published its report, the zealots pushed back. “Well,” said one in the BMJ, “Probably people were just wearing them wrong.”
Many of us on the front lines knew otherwise, that masking caused harm to kids and the elderly by isolating vulnerable people and depriving them of love, affection, smiles. I almost lost my license by pointing out the obvious: long term care became infiltrated by COVID cases—well over 90% of people had COVID at least once, many two or three times, despite strictly enforced mask mandates and vaccines and daily temperature checks—because masks were not working. We needed a better strategy, better treatments, better screening. But the medical community would not budge: their mantra remained masks, masks, masks. When we had a surge they told us to keep wearing masks. The myth of the mask became so entrenched that people were wearing them in cars and alone on the street even as they bashed those of us who knew they didn’t and couldn’t work to slow or stop a viral respiratory infection that passes through them like flies passing through a chain linked fence. To even question masks invited ridicule, censorship, even potential loss of jobs. Much like the McCarthy witch hunt that ascribed all evil to communists and buried anyone who dared to question the binary logic of us vs them, destroying innocent lives in the process and enabling an assault of the very foundations of democracy, the mask crusade killed and maimed by promoting a myth that prevented other viable solutions from being implemented. Masks became an unassailable scientific truth, THE truth, and thus its lack of efficacy could not be even uttered lest it be labeled as dangerous misinformation, and this prevented us from orchestrating a sensible and scientific COVID policy that saved the lives of the vulnerable without slaughtering those who needed not worry. Masks were the symbol of medical death, and all those who clung to them were agents in this holocaust.
Now, three years later, mask zealots still rule the roost. They seek to control the discourse, and they won’t let go of a murderous policy that destroyed more lives than any other miscue in American history. If they acknowledge their mistake, if they fess up to the fact that maybe they should have changed course once it became clear that masks were not the answer, that perhaps suppressing research about and discussion of masking wasn’t the “scientific” path to take, that those who refuted forced masking and immunization and massive societal shutdowns shouldn’t have been called “misinformers” and “mass-murderers” and dismissed from their jobs and from any perch of influence, well, if they admit to all that, then indeed they are war criminals, because their zealous embrace of a myth with horrendously deadly tentacles is a true crime against humanity. Hence, they keep at it, and many people continue to wear masks, even insist that everyone should wear them, because they need masks to work, they staked their humanity and reputations on it, so masks MUST work, science and all human decency be damned.
Hence, when Cochrane’s newest analysis came out, examining the seventy-eight most reliable mask studies both before and during COVID (none of which were done in this country, since mask zealots did not want science and evidence to challenge their mask dogma), the pushback was severe. Cochrane’s conclusions were stark and definitive: not a single study demonstrated any benefit to masking, whether in protecting maskers or curbing spread. The three-hundred-page analysis was the most scientifically sound rebuke to the mask myth. A subsequent op-ed in the New York Times echoed what many of us have known for years: not only do masks not work, but their dissemination has been and remains a dangerous affront to science and has led us down a road of ritual and lies that prevented us from saving lives and keeping our nation from falling into a pit of death and despair. The op-ed also offered a warning: given that mask zealots in the CDC, media, academia, and the government refuse to believe the data because, well, masks have to work, they refused to be impacted by facts. Like a religious conviction, the zealots can’t and won’t let go.
The pressure on Cochrane struck hard and forced them to print a rejoinder to their statement. To paraphrase, they stated that their conclusions were misinterpreted. They never said there was proof that masks don’t work. There is only no proof that they do work.
If this sounds convoluted to you, it’s because it is, but the political and financial pressure of mask zealots upon any group or individual who seek to help people and preserve the sanctity of science is just too much. The Cochrane backstep mirrors all of COVID science, or masked science as I call it. Facts are irrelevant, data is irrelevant; if “experts” declare it to be so, then it is, much as Medieval scientists could easily decry Galileo’s findings because the experts declared that the sun rotates around the earth and thus it must, and just like racial scientists could bury any notion of equality beneath their fabricated myths because experts said it was so. If COVID science concludes that masks work because—despite the fact that no studies show they work and in every area where mask mandates were imposed they didn’t work—there is no proof that they don’t, only no proof that they do, then the bar is so low so as to establish other possible ways to prevent disease spread. For instance, we have not proven that drinking your neighbor’s urine every Thursday doesn’t stop COVID, so maybe it does, and maybe we should mandate that very sensible action. And maybe too eating tree bark twice a day should be mandated since we have not proven that doesn’t work. COVID science is not science at all; it is the very antithesis of science, but sadly it is now entrenched into the hearts and minds of those who claim to value science.
The profits of Pfizer continue to roll in because of the mask culture; masks are not just mythical symbols of pseudoscience, but they are also, as I have stated before, a symbol of violence that helps to disseminate a cloud of never-ending fear that justifies the suspension of civil liberties and permits drug companies to sell their dangerous wares under emergency authorization without any legal recourse for the deaths they have caused and the lies they have sewed, tossing us all into a biopolitical hell all in the name of “necessity.” This is a familiar tactic used by bad people throughout history, and it works.
After the Cochrane report came out, many people I know who still cling to the mask myth refused to budge. I see so many young people still wearing them who are liberal and believe themselves to be scientific and humanitarian, continuing to chastise those who do otherwise. They’ve been wearing them faithfully since day one, blaming the crisis and deaths on everyone who didn’t wear them, so how can they now change course and admit that they are wrong? How can they admit that if they had really looked at the data, or spoken with people who understood that masking kids and the elderly and everyone else was not going to help a soul but would harm millions by depriving people of happiness and oxygen and draping them in a stench of never-ending fear, that maybe our nation could have taken another course and, like Sweden which had the best outcome in the world, confronted COVID scientifically and humanistically without resorting to myths and rituals and contorted science? How can they admit their error when in fact these people who often chastise corporate America and anti-choice right-wingers and pseudoscience were enabling drug companies to misuse a viral outbreak to frighten and trick people and deprive them of choice and of control over their own bodies and make tens of billions of dollars while leading us into a deadly ditch? So, they turn their heads away from science and facts and reality and continue to hide behind their masks.
I have stated before that the massive, unprecedented drop in our nation’s life expectancy can’t be explained by COVID. The average age of death of COVID was higher than the prior life expectancy, so if just COVID was factored in, our life expectancy would have increased from COVID deaths, as was the case in Sweden. No, only by understanding that our mask-based COVID policies led to the death of kids and young adults can we understand why our nation’s life expectancy plummeted. We shoved masks and fear down the throats of our youth, we deprived them of education and socialization, we told them that they might die unless they shoved experimental drugs into their veins and wore masks and stayed away from people, and by doing so we didn’t help a single one of them. Rather, we paved a path to despair and death. Suicide, depression, drug overdoses, unexplained sudden deaths; these were the results of our masked culture. We slaughtered so many young people that we dropped our life expectancy more in three years that we did during World War 2 when hundreds of thousands of young men died fighting the war. That’s the real result of masking, of a culture that cares not about science or human life but rather seeks to plaster the world with fear and never-ending restrictions.
A recent article in JAMA shows us just that. Kids and young people died of COVID, but in tiny numbers, far less than they die in other infections and from other causes. A flu outbreak in 2017 killed more kids and young people in one year than COVID killed in three. Car accidents and gun deaths claim ten times more young lives annually than COVID claimed in three years. CNN and Dr. Fauci and the horde of mask zealots tried to convince us that kids were dying, that we had to force them to mask and stay away from each other, that we had to injected experimental drugs in their veins lest they not be allowed to go to school or travel or work or be part of our world, that we had to shut down schools and society. No, young Americans didn’t die of COVID, they died of the mask culture.
The JAMA article was walking a tight rope. Like all medical publications, medical schools, and medical organizations, JAMA is largely funded by drug company money, and so it can’t be too harsh when it provides its facts. So, it waffled. Maybe all those kids died, it suggested, because their parents had died of COVID so they were sad. Really? Let’s face it; parents and caregivers die all the time, and there is no evidence that more died in the past three years than usually die, especially since most of COVID’s victims were frail elders. The article then subtly let the truth be known: we took life and hope away from our children, we choked them with masks and fear, and that is what killed them.
What will happen to that generation? Many still wear masks, from kids in my college class to toddlers running around local playgrounds in my town. Do they really believe this will help them, will help society? Are they so unwilling to look facts in the face and acknowledge that masks are not and never will be the solution, that they are the problem, that they are the symbol of everything we did wrong the past three years? It’s so sad to see. They are probably good people, but so too were people who did horrific things throughout history. Masked purveyors of COVID science can’t let it go. They are dangerous. And I fear that an entire generation of them will perpetuate this myth and drive us into a biopolitical anti-democratic hell that values drug-company fearmongering over personal choice, science, and humanism. They have, in effect, decimated science in their attempt to be scientific. We’ve seen this dance too many times already in history, and it never ends well.
At this point, there are really no political choices for those of us who believe in science, in choice, in people over profits, in humanity and democracy. Once the liberals embraced the mask culture, once they pushed us off a cliff into a sea cluttered with Pfizer sharks, they became the same as the other guys, the same dogmatic fearmongering zealots that they have always claimed to decry. They are now just one cheek on a giant political ass that has trapped us all into a choice between one side or the other of the same thing.
The right cheek has always denied science, been a friend to big corporations, rejected choice when it comes to women’s bodies, pursued a faith-based culture that brings the Christian God into school and all life, and had no sympathy for immigrants and people of color who they believe don’t deserve to be protected or even be allowed in our nation.
Now, after COVID, the left cheek is no different than the right.
· It rejects personal choice, and has decimated its long held belief in “our bodies, our choice” by shoving dangerous experimental medicines into our veins and covering our faces with masks despite no evidence that either is safe or effective. The left cheek says it must mandate these things and deny people choice out of necessity, but that is what the right cheek has been saying for years. And to strip from people a meaningful existence in society unless they are medicalized against their will is the most egregious violation of civil rights and ethics that the world has ever seen since the Nazism and the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. Just the other week I had to provide a medical exemption for someone seeking to matriculate to one of the top liberal art colleges in the country because he would not get a COVID booster, would not subject his body to a potential poison and which even the most pharmaceutical-loyal medical journals conclude does not prevent disease spread. The college rejected my medical exemption, claiming that you can’t be part of society unless you comply with forced medicalization. Our bodies our choice? No, the left cheek is now like the right one in this regard.
· It is faith based, seeking to bury science beneath the declarations of “experts” most of whom are either directly tied to industry seeking to profit from unending fear or who are “just following orders” like other criminals of the historical past. Discussion of whether COVID science works is actively suppressed and labeled as misinformation. Studies are either not conducted that could challenge the COVID faith, or if they do put a nick in the faith, as the Cochrane analysis did, they are simply discredited or ignored. The left cheek has destroyed science by transforming it into unassailable dogmatic faith.
· It cares not about human life. The people whose lives were ended or destroyed were all not important as long as those sacrifices forwarded the mask agenda. People became abstractions; COVID counts—cases, hospitalizations, deaths—meant more than life itself. The left cheek was willing to sacrifice humanity, kids, elders, the poor upon a cross of dogmatic mask zealotry.
· It is a tool of corporations, doing the bidding of Pfizer, of Anthony Fauci’s long established marriage of industry and academia, of the richest among us. The wealth gap increased dramatically during COVID, as the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. This was all well and good to the left cheek, since it was done in the name of “necessity” during a “grave national crisis.” Those words could have been uttered by Joseph Goebbels or John Calhoun. Pfizer runs and finances the CDC and FDA, the head of the Biden COVID commission is a former Pfizer CEO, but to the left cheek, these are all experts seeking to help the world. Well, if helping the world is the same as spinning lies and fears in the name of corporate profit, then they are right.
· It is an enemy of democracy. As Hitler did after the Reichstag fire, as Southerners did before and after the Civil War, as the Roosevelt did when he incarcerated innocent Japanese Americans, the left cheek believes that democracy is expendable if the “experts” say that freedom gets in the way of necessity. Like the right cheek, democracy is not as important as the COVID myth upon which they have latched their very faith.
· It is anti-kids, imprisoning them in a penitentiary of fear and myth, closing schools, depriving them of seminal events and normal life, and inculcating in them a bizarre version of mask science that will likely sully them for generations. Kids suffered more than anyone due to the inhumanity and ani-science agenda of mask zealots. Kids were not endangered by COVID, but they were decimated by the left cheek’s callous crimes against humanity in the name of mask culture.
And so that’s what we’re left with in America, a left check and a right cheek, both much the same but for the side of the ass upon which they sit. And between them is an anus that spews out malodorous gas and large chunks of crap. Welcome to post-COVID America. The masked zealots continue to congratulate themselves for being so vigilant, driving our nation into a hell that it has never before known. And the other cheek, while assailing the hypocrisy and anti-scientific bullying of the left cheek, is doing the very same thing, but under a different guise. That’s what the mask is hiding. It’s hiding the fact that our democracy has become a staid and homogenous assault on all things good and decent, and that we are left with nothing but gas and shit. The only question is whether there are voices out there who will reject both sides of the ass and construct something better, something truly American, something that understands the danger of a corporate run “democracy” that buries science and goodness, democracy and choice, under a pile of perfumed manure in the name of profit. If only masks help to protect us from that stench!
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