Horowitz: What have we gotten from two years of mask-wearing?
It’s truly hard to overstate the damage done to a generation of children by the two-year masking regime. From language and developmental inhibition to social and behavioral anxiety, these Chinese cloths have created a generation of bumbling fools. So, was it worth it?
In a preprint published in the Lancet, Ambarish Chandra of the University of Toronto and Tracy Beth Høeg of the University of California at Davis replicated a CDC study comparing counties with school mandates to those without mandates. However, rather than using the CDC’s artificial and arbitrary number of counties and duration of study, they extended the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. Using this updated method to measure the relationship between mask mandates and per-capita pediatric cases, they found “no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates.”
The study observed over 1,800 counties from July through October 2021, which is presumed to be the largest observational sample ever conducted on the mask issue.
In fact, for most weeks, there was a non-statistically significant higher case rate among the masked counties. What this demonstrates is that with all of the CDC’s observational studies, arbitrary endpoints were clearly manipulated to show results they knew did not reflect reality.
Similarly, a study of fatality rates in 35 European countries during the 2020-2021 winter peak found no positive relationship between reduced mortality rates and mask compliance. If anything, there was a reverse correlation. “While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission,” concluded the author in an April study published in Cureus. “Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”
Several months ago, an observational study published in Medicineby German doctor Zacharias Fögen compared the overall case fatality rate in 81 counties in Kansas without mask mandates compared to the 24 with mandates. He actually found a statistically significant higher fatality rate in the mask counties. “Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates.”
Dr. Fogen posits as a potential reason for negative efficacy that the mask-wearing can make the virions smaller and cause them to penetrate deeper into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis. “A rationale for the increased RR (risk ratio) by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets,hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration.”
While negative efficacy is still a hypothesis, there have been documented negative side effects to mask-wearing. A preprint Italian study from earlier in May found that short-term surgical mask usage was associated with an increased inhaled CO2 level greater than 5000ppm in 90% of 10- to 18-year-olds in the sample. “Shortly after wearing surgical masks, the inhaled air CO2 approached the highest acceptable exposure threshold recommended for workers, while concerningly high concentrations were recorded in virtually all individuals when wearing FFP2 masks,” concluded the authors. “The CO2 concentration was significantly higher among minors and the subjects with high respiratory rate.”
Yet here we are, over two years into this saga, and schools are still masking children, while some that stopped are bringing back this barbaric practice. To this day, people with severe mental and physical disabilities are being forced to wear masks when seeking medical attention at health care facilities. Trauma survivors who suffer panic attacks from having their faces covered are forced to choose between panic attacks and loss of medical care.
But children will, by far, be the most harmed by this policy. The language development impediment that will result from the past two years of inhumane mask mandates is incalculable. The head of the U.K.’s Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills found that children suffer from “limited vocabulary,” while some babies “struggled to respond to basic facial expressions,” partly due to interacting with people wearing face masks.
Talk about a cost-benefit analysis!
To this day, only a few states have banned mask mandates from coming back. The New Hampshire governor recently vetoed a bill from the state legislature banning local school boards from implementing such immoral policies upon children. What we really need is a ballot initiative in every state to spell out in the state’s constitution that a person has a fundamental right to refuse to wear a medical device and cannot be discriminated against in the realm of public accommodations for exercising that right. Moreover, there should be criminal penalties for any adult who forcibly masks a child.