Masks - The Big Picture

If masks work so well, then why didn't they work?

Is it safe to go out yet?

What does “Work” actually mean?

If somebody tells you something works, you expect it should actually work. A friend of mine bought a special phone case that was guaranteed 100% waterproof. He brought the phone in the pool. You can guess where this story is going…

A great example of a false claim in medicine is that of Oxycontin. Physicians and patients were told it was safe, “non-addictive”, and worked great for chronic pain. Through 20 years of intense marketing we went from hardly using narcotics except in cancer patients, to prescribing bucketloads of it and similar opioid drugs. If opioids worked so well, and we were prescribing more and more of them, we should have seen an overall improvement in chronic pain. But you know what? Rates of chronic pain, and disability from chronic pain, went up and up while we prescribed more and more. That should make a thinking person scratch his head.

The converse of this large-scale failure - a demonstration of something that actually works - is the success we have seen with immune-modulators for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (RA). When I was new in practice I had numerous elderly patients who were completely disabled by RA. I used to do house calls in the country on C, an elderly nurse who had served in the war in Europe. She was a wonderful lady. We had some profound chats that I will always remember. She had “windblown hands” and was so completely crippled that she depended on her husband to dress, feed, and wash her. She was born a couple of generations too early for an RA patient. Effective treatments (DMARDs – disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs) came too late for C. Treatments are now so much better that I no longer have patients like C, even though many of my patients have rheumatoid. These drugs work.

C’s hands were worse.

So what does this have to masks, you say? Well. If masks prevent COVID, they should prevent COVID. In areas that mask, we should see far less COVID than areas that don’t. And with temporal graphs, we should see reductions in COVID (or at least slowing of the spread) when we start to use masks. I think you know where I’m going with this as well.

We shouldn’t be surprised

As a follow up to my previous articles, it shouldn’t be a surprise that masks are unhelpful at best. Well done studies, like this one showing that even N-95’s didn’t make a real difference, or this UK data showing no effect, keep inconveniently contradicting the mantra that “masks work”.)

Given the nature of aerosols and the ineffectiveness of anything short of a firefighter’s respirator to avoid breathing them in, it is unsurprising that cloth, or surgical, or even N95 masks don’t really filter 95% of airborne particulate as advertised even when tested in artificial conditions which would tend to make them better than in real life. This recent Journal of Infectious Diseases article suggests the same thing. If they do have an effect, it is so small as to not produce a blip in the big-picture data.

So where is the proof that they work?

We just do not see trends in the data that compare different areas with differential masking, or look at the impact over time of mask implementation that confirm mask utility. In fact, large-scale data analysis from Europe shows a slight trend in the opposite direction - countries with the most masking had the most COVID. Whether this is a data artifact or a real trend is not known. There are several speculations about how masks might actually make the problem worse (including some by Fauci before the mask flip-flop). Whether or not they do actually increase COVID spread, certainly these negative results speak loudly against masks being useful.

Despite attempts by public health and mainstream media to cherry pick data that suits their conclusion, the overall picture is inescapable. Mask mandates don’t make a difference to COVID rates.

If you’re as geeky as I am, I highly recommend the book “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates” by Ian Miller.You can follow him on Twitter @ianmSC

Does someone you know still think that masks actually work? I highly recommend you get them to take Tom Woods’ very clever Covid Charts Quiz (sample below), which shows you the COVID data curves. You try to guess where masks mandates, lockdowns, etc had been implemented. Because if those measures work, it will show in the data right? (Spoiler alert - they don’t work)

A measurable change in the data is actually the definition of whether something “works” or not. If you buy flea spray for your pet, you should have less fleas. If you start a blood pressure medication, your blood pressure should go down. If you are an authoritarian medical officer of health who forces everyone to wear masks everywhere against their will, it should reduce COVID.

If you don’t already follow Tom Woods, you can check him out, and download his free e-book “Charts that CNN Forgot”, which is full of data like this:

In case you think he is cherry-picking, you can do the same thing with data from all over the world. You can’t tell when a mask mandate was implemented or lifted by looking at the data, because it made absolutely no difference either way.

Why don’t they work? Well, as I’ve explored in previous articles, the basic science is not there to even support plausibility, let alone real data confirming utility. This is a great video well worth checking out. Why did we ever think masks would help?

Is it any surprise that someone on a pure diet of mainstream med

We fully masked. We got big COVID outbreaks anyway. Other countries didn’t mask. They had similar experiences with COVID. Is it really scientific to say that “masks work”? In my opinion, well-done reviews say that the answer is NO. But that doesn’t stop journalists, and “scientists”, from continuing to cherry-pick data to support their case. As I’ve said in a previous article, they want to have their cake and eat it too: Cases stay low? It was the mask mandate. Cases rise incredibly? It was the mask mandate that kept it from being worse.

Hong Kong is a striking example of how the modern media, and scientists, can use confirmation bias to believe they are right, and - in the case of the recent COVID surge - ignore (or suppress) any evidence that they are wrong. Did any media org do a follow up story on Hong Kong’s COVID situation about how wrong they were? Did any physician who tweeted about how “if you troglodytes would only wear masks like they do in Hong Kong COVID would be over by now” apologize, or even speculate as to why they were so wrong? (It’s a rhetorical question, of course). And my guess is they were never hauled in front of a regulatory college hearing committee for spreading “misinformation”.

By the way, that huge outbreak you see on the right of the graph is AFTER 90% vaccination update, as well as draconian masking requirements.

Kids and Masks

Studies continue to show that school mask mandates do not help reduce COVID cases, let alone COVID mortality. Given how low COVID mortality is in healthy children, masks would need to prevent 1 million cases or more to save even one life. Sweden did not close its schools, nor mask their children. The result? In a country of 10 million, there was not one death amongst schoolchildren. (And as an aside, they didn’t have the devastating learning loss that we did in lockdown-happy Canada)

A Finnish study (shoutout to my Finn relatives! Thanks for the grey hair and pale skin genes!) compared Turku to Helsinki, where mandatory masking had a different age threshold. There was no difference in incidence of COVID in masked kids in Helsinki versus unmasked in Turku. A Spanish study (whose interesting design is discussed here by Vinay Prasad) confirms the non-utility of masks for kids.

Should we be surprised that forcing kids to wear a dirty, loose-fitting piece of cloth on their face all day didn’t do anything useful? Not really if one understands science (and doesn’t blindly follow The Science™). One of my favourite funny-sad stories about school masking was from a teacher who told me about watching two grade 1 boys trade their superhero masks, because each liked the other’s. That’s keeping kids safe!

Self-Contradiction

I have been amazed at how COVIDians can self-contradict, without noticing it. Vaccines are so great that everyone has to get it, but so poor that if someone is unvaccinated they are a threat to the vaccinated. “My body My choice”, except for vaccines.

One of the anti-scientific statements that drives me around the bend is “Masks made the flu go away”. The same people arguing this were also tut-tutting and looking down on areas that didn’t have strict mask mandates, stating that was why they had so much COVID. But what they didn’t realize is that those same areas also had no flu. It disappeared around the world - masks or no masks, lockdowns or not. One can argue about the reason why, but saying it was masks is anti-scientific.

If you don’t already know about them, The Brownstone Institute is a new organization committed to reason and science without the political spin. They have a lot of well-done articles on masking, including this one, that are well worth reading.

So if they didn’t prevent COVID, what did masks actually do? Well, nothing good that’s for sure - which I’ll discuss in my next mask article.

Next up: Wearing a mask is not as benign as wearing a seatbelt. Masks really suck.