Are We Overreacting to Omicron?
BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | NOVEMBER 26, 2021
With natural exposure immunity and early outpatient treatment and when combined with no reports of increased lethality, the WHO’s reaction of generating panic toward “Omicron” is causing needless fear and panic. So too with the Biden administration’s newly imposed travel restrictions, which will achieve nothing and will once again disrupt trade and violate human rights.
The WHO has said that the Omicron variant can spread more quickly than other variants. Likely true. The virus is behaving just like how viruses behave. They are mutable and mutate and via Muller’s ratchet, we expect this to be milder and milder mutations and not more lethal ones given the pathogen seeks to infect the host and not arrive at an evolutionary dead-end.
The virus will mutate downward so that it can use the host (us) to propagate itself via our cellular metabolic machinery. The Delta has shown us this: it is very infectious and mostly non-lethal. Especially for children and healthy people. So is the WHO panicking the globe needlessly? Is this Covid-19 February 2020 once again?
The problem with South Africa as is with Australia and New Zealand and even island nations like Trinidad is that it has low natural immunity to SAR-Cov-2. This is because, as we witnessed over the last year and more, if you lock down your society too long and too hard, you deny the nation and population from inching closer to population-level herd immunity. And you have no economy or society from which to reemerge. You devastate your society for a pathogen that is largely harmless to the vast majority of people especially children.
Moreover, governments asked us for two weeks to flatten the curve to help prepare hospitals so that they can tend to surges and other non-Covid illnesses. We as societies gave our governments 2 weeks, not 21 months. They failed to tend to the non-Covid illnesses and we locked down the healthy and well (children and young and middle aged healthy persons) while failing to properly protect the vulnerable and high-risk persons such as the elderly. We failed and it was like killing fields in our nursing homes.
This failure rests on public health messaging and government. Additionally, what did our governments in the US, Canada, UK, Australia etc. do with the tax money for the hospitals and PPE etc.? Hospitals must be prepared by now. Governments have failed! Not the people. The Task Forces have failed, not the people.
These nations thought that they could stay locked down and wait for a vaccine. This is a reasonable view though I was against lockdowns as they would and did cause crushing harms on especially poor persons and children. The problem is there was an opportunity cost because the vaccine we were waiting on was suboptimally developed without the proper safety testing or assessment of effectiveness.
We have data that the Pfizer vaccine loses 40% of antibodies per month, meaning in 3 months post-shot, you have low effective vaccinal immunity. We see it clearly playing out now whereby you got to tamp down spread with the draconian lockdowns, but you did it at the cost of natural immunity. That is the opportunity cost. So we spent on getting the vaccine and it cost us natural immunity and thus herd immunity.
For example, the vaccine has failed to stop infection and spread against Delta. We have research findings by Singanayagam et al. (fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts), by Chau et al. (viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases in vaccinated nurses were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with prior strains early 2020), and by Riemersma et al. (no difference in viral loads when comparing unvaccinated individuals to those who have vaccine “breakthrough” infections and if vaccinated individuals become infected with the delta variant, they may be sources of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to others) that reveal the vaccines have very suboptimal efficacy.
This situation of the vaccinated being infectious and transmitting the virus has also emerged in seminal nosocomial outbreak papers by Chau et al. (HCWs in Vietnam), the Finland hospital outbreak (spread among HCWs and patients), and the Israel hospital outbreak (spread among HCWs and patients). These studies have also revealed that the PPE and masking were essentially ineffective within the healthcare setting. All of the HCWs were double-vaccinated yet there was extensive spread to themselves and their patients.
In addition, Nordström et al. (vaccine effectiveness of Pfizer against infection waned progressively from 92% day 15-30 to 47% day 121-180, and from day 211 and onwards no effectiveness), Suthar et al. (a substantial waning of antibody responses and T cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, at 6 months following the second immunization), Yahi et al. (with Delta variant, neutralizing antibodies have a decreased affinity for the spike protein, whereas facilitating antibodies display a strikingly increased affinity), Juthani et al. (higher numbers of patients with severe or critical illness in those who received the Pfizer vaccine), Gazit et al. (SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant, and substantially elevated risk of symptomatic Covid and hospitalization), and Acharya et al. (no significant difference in cycle threshold values between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups infected with Delta) collectively reveal the poor efficacy and even negative efficacy of the Covid vaccines. Levine-Tiefenbrun et al. reports that the viral load reduction effectiveness declines with time after vaccination, “significantly decreasing at 3 months after vaccination and effectively vanishing after about 6 months.”
As an example, the Swedish study (retrospective with 842,974 pairs (N=1,684,958) is particularly alarming for it shows that while the vaccine provides temporary protection against infection, the efficacy declines below zero and then to negative efficacy territory at approximately 7 months, underscoring that the vaccinated are highly susceptible to infection and eventually become highly infected (more so than the unvaccinated). A further example emerges from Ireland whereby reporting suggests that the Waterford city district has the State’s highest rate of Covid-19 infections, while the county also boasts the highest rate of vaccination in the Republic (99.7% vaccinated). Reports are that the U.S. Covid-19 deaths for 2021 surpassed the deaths from 2020, leading some to state that “more people have died from COVID-19 in 2021, with most adults vaccinated and nearly all seniors), than in 2020 when nobody was vaccinated.”
Thus these nations that locked down and stayed that way are in a quandary for they do not know what to do now. If you open you will get surges in infection. Where is the money that was to go to hospital preparation? Did governments embezzle and steal and misappropriate the money for the hospitals remain still not prepared?
We have a lot of natural immunity in the US, e.g. near 65-70% of the population. The open states (those that did not lock down too long and too hard and opened quickly) will likely do very well with this Omicron or any new variant. This also is the power of natural immunity.
And we need not forget the potency of the overlooked ‘innate’ immunity with the innate antibodies and innate natural killer cellular compartment. This innate response is particularly potent in children (our first line of defense against pathogens) and is what has spared children from Covid and how children typically stave off pathogens, especially young children still laying down immunological memory.
Moreover, there is no reporting of increased virulence/lethality of this new Omicron variant. As yet this will remain the case based on Delta and prior variants. There are no guarantees but we operate based on risk and all things point to the same for this new variant.
Just because there is a wave in SA does not mean that there will be waves in the US or Israel or other places with greater natural immunity. This was the prize of letting people enjoy day-to-day living. The nations that have ended lockdowns are likely to move past this new variant scare, and be fine. This is more of an overreaction by the WHO and governments and much ado about nothing.
Dr Alexander holds a PhD. He has experience in epidemiology and in the teaching clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. Dr Alexander is a former Assistant Professor at McMaster University in evidence-based medicine and research methods; former COVID Pandemic evidence-synthesis consultant advisor to WHO-PAHO Washington, DC (2020) and former senior advisor to COVID Pandemic policy in Health and Human Services (HHS) Washington, DC (A Secretary), US government; worked/appointed in 2008 at WHO as a regional specialist/epidemiologist in Europe’s Regional office Denmark, worked for the government of Canada as an epidemiologist for 12 years, appointed as the Canadian in-field epidemiologist (2002-2004) as part of an international CIDA funded, Health Canada executed project on TB/HIV co-infection and MDR-TB control (involving India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Afghanistan, posted to Kathmandu); employed from 2017 to 2019 at Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Virginia USA as the evidence synthesis meta-analysis systematic review guideline development trainer; currently a COVID-19 consultant researcher in the US-C19 research group
With Low Vaccination Rates, Africa’s Covid Deaths Remain Far below Europe and the US
By Ryan McMaken | MISES WIRE | November 23, 2021
Since the very beginning of the covid panic, the narrative has been this: implement severe lockdowns or your population will experience a bloodbath. Morgues will be overwhelmed, the death total toll will be astounding. On the other hand, we were assured those jurisdictions that do lock down would see only a fraction of the death toll.
Then, once vaccines became available, the narrative was modified to “Get shots in arms and then covid will stop spreading. Those countries without vaccines, on the other hand, will continue to face mass casualties.”
The lockdown narrative, of course, has already been thoroughly overturned. Jurisdictions that did not lock down or adopted only weak and short lockdowns ended up with covid death tolls that were either similar to—or even better than—death tolls in countries that adopted draconian lockdowns. Lockdown advocates said locked-down countries would be overwhelmingly better off. These people were clearly wrong.
Undaunted by the increasing implausibility of the lockdown narrative, the global health bureaucrats are nonetheless doubling down on forced vaccines—as we now see in Austria—and we continue to be assured that only countries with high vaccination rates can hope to avoid disastrous covid outcomes.
Yet, the experience in sub-Saharan Africa calls both these narratives into question: Africa’s numbers have been far, far lower than the experts warned would be the case.
For example, the AP reported this week that in spite of low vaccination rates, Africa has fared better than most of the world:
[T]here is something “mysterious” going on in Africa that is puzzling scientists, said Wafaa El-Sadr, chair of global health at Columbia University. “Africa doesn’t have the vaccines and the resources to fight COVID-19 that they have in Europe and the U.S., but somehow they seem to be doing better,” she said….
Fewer than 6% of people in Africa are vaccinated. For months, the WHO has described Africa as “one of the least affected regions in the world” in its weekly pandemic reports.
Yet disaster for Africa has long been predicted for several reasons even beyond the availability of vaccines. For instance, it is known that lockdowns are especially impractical in the poorest parts of the world. This is because populations in places with undeveloped economies can’t simply sit at home and live off savings or debt. Rather, these people must go out into the world and earn a living on a day-to-day basis. Starvation is the alternative. Moreover, much of this work is done in the informal economy, so enforcing lockdowns becomes especially difficult.
Source: Our World in Data (Confirmed Deaths per Million, November 19, 2021; Share of People Vaccinated against Covid-19, November 19, 2021).
It was also assumed covid would be especially deadly in Africa due to the fact many large households live in small housing units.
But that “conventional wisdom” flies in the face of the reality of covid in Africa, which is that there have been fewer deaths.
The “experts” have groped around, looking for possible explanations.
Some sources, for example, insist that the low death totals are only an artifact of incomplete reporting on covid infections and that “a lack of good qualitative data was the issue.”
But Richard Wamai at Northeastern University rejects the claim it’s all about case reporting, and says that “local systems for reporting deaths in Africa make it difficult to hide COVID-19 casualties.” In a paper for the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Wamai and his coauthors conclude, “[T]here is no evidence that COVID-19 mortality data is less accurately reported in Africa than elsewhere” and “While the true picture of infections and mortality in the continent has yet to fully emerge, the quality of data for other diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, indicates that Africa has the capacity to collect and report valid disease surveillance data.”
In any case, the World Health Organization reports that covid deaths in Africa make up only 2.9 percent of covid deaths, while Africa’s population is 16 percent of the global total. Africa’s covid total could double or triple, and Africa would still be faring far better than Europe and the Americas.
Wamai et al. also note that at this point “[i]t is likely that SARS-CoV-2 has already been widely disseminated through Africa… If so, widespread infection is likely to also result in widespread natural immunity.”
In other words, continued claims by health officials—both in Africa and elsewhere—that mass death is right around the corner with the “next wave” look increasingly implausible.
It looks increasingly likely that the lack of covid mortality in Africa is not due to a data issue nor a situation in which covid has been “contained” up until now. So then why is Africa doing so much better than the wealthy West?
Naturally, the advocates of forced lockdowns and coerced vaccines would prefer to ignore this issue altogether, but the undeniable reality of Africa’s experience has forced mainstream researchers to publicly admit the many ways that many factors can explain covid’s prevalence beyond vaccination rates and mask mandates.
For instance, mentioning that obesity is an important factor in covid mortality has in the past been likely to get one savaged in the media for “fat shaming.” Yet the Africa situation has forced the well informed to admit that yes, obese populations clearly suffer more from covid. In Africa, not surprisingly, we find that obesity rates are far below those found in North America and Europe.
Other possible explanations forwarded as reasons for Africa’s situation include past exposure to other coronaviruses, youthful populations, fewer patients lacking zinc and vitamin D, past use of the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccination, climate, genetic background, and parasite load. In addressing the African “enigma” one group of researchers in the journal Colombia medica dared even suggest it’s possible—although not conclusively shown at this point—that “a mass public health preventive campaign against COVID-19 may have taken place, inadvertently, in some African countries with massive community ivermectin use.”
Source: “Global Obesity Levels,” ProCon.org, last modified March 27, 2020; Our World in Data (Share of People Vaccinated against Covid-19, November 19, 2021).
In the West, however, the media drumbeat around covid has consistently been “Shut up, stay home, get jabbed, and stop doubting the experts on forced vaccines.” Fortunately, however, the African situation has forced many researchers to ask inconvenient questions.
In fact, it’s amazing Africa has not been overcome by mass death considering that covid lockdowns and covid “mitigation” measures have contributed to the impoverishment and mass starvation on the continent. Or as Germany’s DW News puts it, “Measures put in place to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus are pushing millions of people in Africa into severe hunger.” And as Wamai notes, “[S]ome of the excess deaths in Africa “can be attributed not to the disease, but to lockdown measures that cut off access to medical care for other illnesses.”
But Africa hasn’t gotten the bloodbath that was promised, and as one Nigerian put it, “They said there will be dead bodies on the streets and all that, but nothing like that happened.”
New Zealand Doctors Speaking out with Science
NZDSOS – 15/11/2021
‘NZ Doctors Speaking out with Science’ featuring Drs Alison Goodwin, Matt Shelton, and Emanuel Garcia. News Conference 15th November, 2021.
See also:
Vaccinated “No Less Infectious” Than Unvaccinated, CDC Study Finds
By Will Jones • The Daily Sceptic • November 24, 2021
A pre-print study out this week from the U.S. Government’s Covid Response Team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found vaccinated people to be “no less infectious” than unvaccinated people.
The study tested inmates in a federal prison with high vaccination rates daily during a SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant outbreak.
The study was very thorough. Inmates who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were, where willing, PCR-tested for 10 consecutive days and reported symptoms via a questionnaire. The researchers performed whole genome sequencing and viral culture analysis on a high proportion of the 978 specimens collected, allowing them to assess the duration of PCR positivity and viral culture positivity.
There were 95 participants in total, of whom 78 (82%) were double vaccinated and 17 (18%) were not double vaccinated (two having received one dose and 15 having received none). No significant differences were found between double vaccinated and not double vaccinated either in duration of PCR positivity (13 days each) or in duration of culture positivity (five days each).
The authors conclude that “clinicians and public health practitioners should consider vaccinated persons who become infected with SARS-CoV-2 to be no less infectious than unvaccinated persons”.
This is in line with the findings of Public Health England and others.
While this sounds like more good news for countering vaccine passports, vaccine mandates and all other vaccine-based coercion and discrimination, it may be less good news for ending general restrictions and interventions. The authors state: “These findings are critically important, especially in congregate settings where viral transmission can lead to large outbreaks.” Which suggests they think the lack of efficacy against transmission is a reason to intervene more generally to prevent “large outbreaks” in “congregate settings”. It could be a long winter.
French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen speaks out against vaccine passports
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | November 25, 2021
Presidential candidate in next year’s election in France, Marine Le Pen, has promised to remove vaccine passport mandates if she is elected because they are “useless” and a “disproportionate” restriction.
She will be running against current President Emanuel Macron, who supports the controversial measures.
“What is the vaccine passport for, apart from imposing a useless and disproportionate constraint on the French people?” Le Pen said in an interview on French radio France Inter.
Le Pen is against mandatory vaccination for everyone, including medical professionals. She supports “vaccine-freedom,” especially considering the vaccine does not prevent you from getting COVID or from contaminating others.”
Referring to vaccinated Prime Minister Jean Castex testing positive for the virus, Le Pen said, “I think we have a good example at the top here.”
“The real question is: can the vaccine prevent the spread of the virus? I think today the answer is no,” she said.
When asked if she supported vaccine boosters, she reiterated that vaccination should be a choice.
“I don’t have to be for or against it. I think everyone has to be free to do it or not, since in reality, it’s only your own life which is at stake,” Le Pen said.
“Everyone has to determine the risks and benefits for themselves.”
Le Pen said those with a vaccine passport could be more dangerous than the unvaccinated because they “shake hands and go to the restaurant” while sick with the virus.
“Nothing, it seems, can stop the spread of this virus, so all these constraints are meaningless,” she insisted.
She said she would remove the “senseless restrictions” if she is elected, particularly the suspension of healthcare workers who have not been vaccinated.
“The suspension of healthcare professionals is useless, [and] we need them,” she said.
“Hospitals are the main problem,” she added.
“It’s the government’s responsibility [to ensure there are enough hospital beds]…. They’ve removed beds [and] have allowed hospitals to become medical deserts with 30% of posts now vacant,” she continued.
“For the rest, we remove all of these constraints which are obviously useless.”
Ignorant and Afraid
Politicians and bureaucrats aren’t immune to their own propaganda, and they really are as ill-informed as they seem.
eugyppius | November 25, 2021
I’ve mentioned this episode a few times: On 11 March 2020, Angela Merkel held a press conference where she remarked that the best hope was to slow the spread of SARS-2, and that 70% of Germans could be infected. The Italian lockdown was only a few days old, and it was plainly not Merkel’s intent to go down the path of mass containment. The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and likely a few other countries too still planned for an ordinary approach to Corona, with minimal mitigations.
All the while, though, Team Lockdown was hard at work behind the scenes, to bend policy in their direction. As this leaked email from 20 March shows, German medical bureaucrats deputised by the Ministry of the Interior were soon consulting experts on how best to instil “fear and a willingness to obey in the population.”
Because Western governments doubted their capacity to enforce Chinese-style lockdowns outright, fomenting mass panic became a non-pharmaceutical intervention in its own right. The histrionic media messaging has continued to this day, and it has contributed to a profoundly important division in our society: There are on the one hand those people in essential roles, who have endured exposure to Corona from the beginning, and most of whom have had the virus by now. And there are on the other hand those in Martin Kulldorf’s “laptop class,” that is to say well-off urban professionals, who have spent most of the last 21 months at home, hiding from a virus that many of them believe is approximately as dangerous as SARS. Mass infections among these people are only starting to happen right now.
As members of this privileged, sheltered class, politicians and bureaucrats have absorbed the virus hysteria that they helped seed in their social milieu. In the beginning, Merkel did not especially fear the possibility of mass infections in Germany. Six months of press hysteria later, in October 2020, she had grown accustomed to carrying two plastic envelopes in her bag. One was for the careful, hygienic disposal of used surgical masks. The other carried precious new ones, whenever she judged her current mask had reached a dangerous state of virus saturation.
Press photographs captured her awkward mask-changing routine:
Merkel’s remarkable virus paranoia, quietly acknowledged by the press now for months, explains her fixation on social isolation, closures and curfews as the only acceptable pandemic policies.
She is a 67 year-old sedentary woman who likely suffers from one or more undisclosed health problems. And she is surrounded by other older, unfit government officials, like 73 year-old interior minister Horst Seehofer, who nearly died of a B19 virus infection in 2002, and so has a reason to fear viral infection. For months and months, all of these people have been taking every possible personal precaution – including house-arresting the entire domestic populations of the countries they govern – in the vain hope of escaping Corona.
You could feel their collective relief when the vaccines were rolled out. All of them eagerly accepted vaccination. Merkel even provided pictures of her personal yellow vaccine pass to the press, with the stamp documenting her first dose of AstraZeneca. (Her purpose, in part, was to allay public concerns over the propensity of AstraZeneca to cause blood clots.)
To the profound disappointment of Merkel and everybody like her, the vaccines have not eradicated Corona. Every day, the prospect of personal infection looms for these people as a new, uncomfortable certainty. Every day, they and the rest of the work-from-home bureaucracy become ever more terrified. The prime minister of Austria is so afraid that he has confined all unvaccinated Austrians to their homes. When asked, he declared that this measure would have no end date. The Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory is terrified. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is terrified.
You know who isn’t terrified right now? Everyone outside these circles. I and many of the people I know have had Corona, and we’re not terrified. Blue-collar workers have mostly been infected, and they’re not terrified. Grocery clerks, nurses, police officers and bus drivers aren’t terrified. All of the terror is at the top, blaring down at us all of the time. All these people know they are going to get sick in the next few months, and they are railing against this reality.
While I don’t agree with James Lindsay, that we are on the verge of a Second Enlightment, I think his distinction between official, curated, peer-reviewed information and analysis; and counter-cultural internet hive-mind information and analysis, is instructive.
All in all, it is the hive-mind that has been vastly more successful at understanding what is going on – not only as far as Corona, but everywhere. This has been obvious now for years. It is even true in my own field, where the official discourse suffers from a pervasive, unoriginal banality, while alternative theories pondered by intelligent outsiders and anonymous Twitter accounts become every day vastly more interesting. The reasons are simple: There are more people involved; the barriers to publishing are lower; nodes that provide bad analysis are easily removed; the thinkers are more thoroughly networked to each other; they gather audiences solely on the basis of their ability; they consider everything, not just the official line.
Meanwhile, it is only official, curated information that is allowed to inform bureaucratic decisions. Products of the hive-mind are deliberately excluded, via gate-keeping mechanisms like peer review and credentialism. All of the terrified Angela Merkels of the world act within an environment of outdated, poor-quality information, all the time.
Again, this is not unique to Corona. In an interview I will never find again, someone asked Noam Chomsky about the failures surrounding the American debacle in Afghanistan. He responded that it was above all a reflection of the distorted and inaccurate intelligence assessments that pollute the thought of American foreign policy planners and military strategists. Random people on the internet, he said, had a better view of the situation from the start.
Exactly the same phenomenon plagues official responses to Corona. The problem with curated information isn’t just that it is slow, subject to inertia, and produced by insular out-of-touch functionaries. Because the information has political importance, there are incentives everywhere to manipulate and degrade its quality. Bureaucratic actors will lie about what is going on to curry favour, save face or evade blame. What is more, many advisers, analysts and modellers are only in the position of providing analysis in the first place, because we need more women in STEM, or because they tell the Faucis of the world what they want to hear, or because they have the right combination of sociopathy and narrow-mindedness necessary to ascend complex bureaucratic hierarchies.
Corona policies really are as stupid as they look. Politicians and bureaucrats have locked themselves into a sad parody of the film Contagion, and their increasingly unsustainable, erratic behaviour merely reflects their desperation.
Covid Scariant With “Horrific Mutations” Arrives In Time For Christmas
By Richie Allen | November 25, 2021
A new covid variant has emerged, just in time for Christmas. It was discovered in Botswana, but is believed to have shown up in South Africa and Hong Kong too. Scientists are claiming that it has 32 “horrific mutations” and might be capable of beating the vaccines.
According to The Mail Online:
British experts have sounded the alarm over a new Covid variant believed to have emerged in Botswana that is the most mutated version of the virus yet. Only 10 cases of the strain, which could eventually be named ‘Nu’, have been detected so far.
But it has already been spotted in three countries, suggesting the variant is more widespread.
It carries 32 mutations, many of which suggest it is highly transmissible and vaccine-resistant, and has more alterations to its spike protein than any other variant.
Professor Francois Balloux, a geneticist at University College London, said it likely emerged in a lingering infection in an immunocompromised patient, possibly someone with undiagnosed AIDS.
Dr. Tom Peacock is a virologist at Imperial College London. He practically shit himself when he looked at the new covid strain, describing it as “horrific.”
He said that B.1.1.529 (its scientific label) has the potential to be worse than any other covid mutation including the world-dominant Delta strain. Good God! Close the borders. Bomb Botswana back to the Stone Age. Cancel Christmas.
They’re nothing if not predictable eh? Covid-19 is the gift that keeps on giving, or taking, depending on your perspective of course.
The Magical Thinking and Dangers of Masks
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | November 24, 2021
Are you prepared to wear masks forever? Some are, but their positive attitude toward masks is a likely result of deceptive and misleading information. The resulting magical thinking relating to masks has created one of the most polarized debates in U.S. history and led to anti-maskers being labeled as “grandma killers.”1
To be clear, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has blatantly lied about masks’ effectiveness. November 5, 2021, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky tweeted, “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%.”2
But as Dr. Vinay Rasad, MPH, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco, put it in the Brownstone Institute, “I don’t know how to put this politely, but it is a lie, and a truly unbelievable one at that … The idea that masks could reduce the chance of infection by 80% is simply untrue, implausible and cannot be supported by any reliable data.”3
Masks Have Meager Effectiveness, if Any
Walensky didn’t give a reference for her claim that masks reduce COVID-19 infection by 80%, but a large study4 from researchers at Yale, Stanford and the University of California Berkeley found much less impressive results from masks.
The trial involved 342,183 people from 600 villages in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021. In villages that received masks, the number of symptomatic COVID-19 infections were 9.3% lower compared to villages without masks, or 11% lower in villages that received surgical masks instead of cloth masks.5
Why, then, hasn’t Walensky’s tweet been flagged for misinformation and targeted by “fact checkers” calling out the blatant lie? Rasad featured a tweet6 by Carnegie Mellon University mathematician Wesley Pegden, who said:7
“The head of the agency responsible for providing Americans with accurate and trustworthy information about interventions (like vaccines) that we actually know are really effective should not also be making fabricated quantitative statements in support of poorly evidenced ones.”
Antibiotic-Resistant Pathogens Live on Face Masks
While face masks continue to be recommended or mandated, little has been said about the risks inherent to covering your mouth and nose with fabric or other materials. Both cotton and surgical masks collect pathogens that may increase your risk of infectious illness — a factor that’s rarely taken into account when discussing their merits.
When researchers from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, analyzed the microbial community on surgical and cotton face masks from 13 healthy volunteers after being worn for four hours, bacteria including Bacillus, Staphylococcus and Acinetobacter were found — 43% of which were antibiotic-resistant.8
In order to best clean masks to remove the bacteria, the study found boiling at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees F), washing at 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees F) with detergent or ironing with a steam iron worked best, but only 21% of survey respondents said they cleaned their cotton face masks daily.9 According to the researchers:
“Taken together, this study suggests that a considerable number of bacteria, including pathobionts and antibiotic resistant bacteria, accumulate on surgical and even more on cotton face masks after use. Based on our results, face masks should be properly disposed of or sterilized after intensive use. Clear guidelines for the general population are crucial to reduce the bacteria-related biosafety risk of face masks …”
Researchers from Germany similarly questioned whether a mask that covers your nose and mouth is “free from undesirable side effects” and potential hazards in everyday use.10 It turned out they were not and instead posed significant adverse effects and pathophysiological changes, including the following, which often occur in combination:11
- Increase in dead space volume
- Increase in breathing resistance
- Increase in blood carbon dioxide
- Decrease in blood oxygen saturation
- Increase in heart rate
- Decrease in cardiopulmonary capacity
- Feeling of exhaustion
- Increase in respiratory rate
- Difficulty breathing and shortness of breath
- Headache
- Dizziness
- Feeling of dampness and heat
- Drowsiness
- Decrease in empathy perception
- Impaired skin barrier function with acne, itching and skin lesions
Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome Is Prevalent
The study referred to this cluster of symptoms as mask-induced exhaustion syndrome (MIES) and warned that children, pregnant women and those who are sick or suffering from certain chronic conditions may be particularly at risk from extended masking. While short-term effects include microbiological contamination, headaches, exhaustion, carbon dioxide retention and skin irritation, the long-term effects may lead to chronic issues:12
“Extended mask-wearing would have the potential, according to the facts and correlations we have found, to cause a chronic sympathetic stress response induced by blood gas modifications and controlled by brain centers. This in turn induces and triggers immune suppression and metabolic syndrome with cardiovascular and neurological diseases.”
Further, “it can be assumed,” they wrote, “that the potential adverse mask effects described for adults are all the more valid for children: … physiological internal, neurological, psychological, psychiatric, dermatological, ENT, dental, sociological, occupational and social medical, microbiological and epidemiological impairments …
The masks currently used for children are exclusively adult masks manufactured in smaller geometric dimensions and had neither been specially tested nor approved for this purpose.”13
Again, in taking on these unknown risks — both short- and long-term — to wear masks, the benefits are highly questionable and intended to thwart a pathogen with a low death rate for most populations:14
“[R]ecent studies on SARS-CoV-2 show both a significantly lower infectivity and a significantly lower case mortality than previously assumed, as it could be calculated that the median corrected infection fatality rate (IFR) was 0.10% in locations with a lower than average global COVID-19 population mortality rate.
In early October 2020, the WHO also publicly announced that projections show COVID-19 to be fatal for approximately 0.14% of those who become ill — compared to 0.10% for endemic influenza — again a figure far lower than expected. On the other hand, the side effects of masks are clinically relevant.”
‘The Mask of Your Enslavement’
It’s clear that the evidence in support of masks for physical protection against disease is lacking, while their potential for psychological harm is immense. Brownstone Institute highlighted the story of folk saint Escrava Anastácia, a slave of African descent who lived in Brazil during the 19th century.15
She was forced to wear a metal, muzzle-like mask during her lifetime in order to silence her from speaking out about the oppression and injustice she was facing. As written by Roberto Strongman, associate professor in the department of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara:16
“The apparition of Anastásia at anti-lockdown rallies represents an opportunity to understand the current medical tyranny as a form of enslavement and to forge links of solidarity between communities whose freedom is threatened across all racial groups. The claim of cooptation deserves to be unpacked for a valid claim of cultural usurpation could easily work towards severing important alliances in a divide-and-conquer model.
While there are clear specificities between the suffering of Africans under the system of chattel slavery and the deprivation of civil liberties endured by most citizens around the world during the current pandemic panic, Anastásia reminds us of certain transhistorical constants in the process of dehumanization and subjugation of populations through the gagging and muzzling of their bodies to quell their protestations.”
Strongman pointed out several undeniable reasons why face mask mandates “fashion the citizenry as slaves” and act as symbols of enslavement. Among them, they:17
- Lead to oxygen deprivation, promoting a state of physical and mental weakness
- Are symbols of submission and used as part of master-slave dynamics
- Enforce the creation of a carceral culture
- Erase personhood and homogenize the masses — “The collectivized wearing of masks results in an enforced uniformity in which the individual cedes way to the nameless collectivity as the neo-meta citizen.”18
- Are theatrical and act to conceal identities, rendering us alien to others and ourselves
- Delete facial expressions and inhibit nonverbal communication, including that necessary for social organization that can lead to revolution
- Reduce verbal output
- Are visible displays of allegiance to the “system of medicalizing technocratic control”
- Are part of preparing individuals for new societal roles — “However transitory the current regime of face masking might be, the population must face that we are beingforced to undergo a rite of passage, a process of resocialization into the new normal.”
- Promote a culture of fear
- Act as deterrents of solidarity by making your neighbor into a “nameless pathogenic vector instead of your ally”
Magical Thinking on Masks
In addition to flat-out lies, the CDC also makes nonsensical statements, like this: “Cloth masks will not protect you from wildfire smoke … They might not catch small, harmful particles in smoke that can harm your health.”19
But we are to believe that they will protect us from an aerosolized virus? “The virus is 25X smaller than a smoke particle,” wrote Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation. “So it’s like trying to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence.”20
Yet magical thinking — the belief that you can influence outcomes by doing something that has no causal connection to them — persists. Robert Dingwall, a consulting sociologist, questioned why the U.K.’s Health Security Agency expert panel used only a second-class evidence base that failed to demonstrate clear benefits on which to base their conclusion that face masks in the community help reduce transmission. He wrote:21
“The state of the face mask debate is rather as if Galileo had published his account of the heliocentric universe and then included a paragraph at the end telling the reader to ignore all the evidence because the Church had declared that everything revolved around the Earth.
In the absence of better-quality work — and we must ask why that research has not been done — some of the claims for face masks look much more like magical thinking than anything that demonstrates the sort of casual connection that might be recognizable as science.”
As the pandemic stretches on, science continues to be ignored and recommendations are primarily pushed based on emotional justifications and triggers. If science were actually followed, universal mask wearing by healthy people would not — indeed could not — be recommended.
In the beginning, health officials did, in fact, advise against masks for healthy people,22 but somewhere along the way — early on — they flip-flopped. Why? According to Strongman:23
“Just as masks function as liminal artifacts in rites of passage and as part of animal training, these covid mask are harbingers of further intrusions to our integrity.
Wearing the masks is just one step away from receiving the shots, then accepting the vaccine passports and the implantable neural links until one’s original persona is buried by a cyborg. The masks function as an empirical compliance test for the projected acceptability of future corporeal technologies of control. Where will you draw the line?”
Sources and References
- 1, 20 Steve Kirsch Newsletter November 7, 2021
- 2 Twitter, Rochelle Walensky November 5, 2021
- 3, 6 Brownstone Institute November 7, 2021
- 4 The Impact of Community Masking on COVID-19: A Cluster-Randomized Trial in Bangladesh November 8, 2021
- 5 ABC Action News September 1, 2021
- 7 Twitter, Wes Pegden November 5, 2021
- 8, 9 Frontiers in Medicine September 3, 2021
- 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Apr; 18(8): 4344
- 15 History Collection December 13, 2018
- 16, 17, 18, 23 Brownstone Institute November 4, 2021
- 19 U.S. CDC, Wildfire Smoke and COVID-19
- 21 Social Science Space October 25, 2021
- 22 Life Site News July 31, 2020
Why another lockdown would be met with mass non-compliance
By Andrew Devine | TCW Defending Freedom | November 25, 2021
LIKE many people, I went along with the first lockdown. I wasn’t very keen, and I was somewhat critical of it, but I believed the lie that it would be a temporary one-off measure. From the time of the second lockdown, I have been vehemently opposed to the policy. While I have never denied that Covid can be a nasty life-threatening illness for some people, I am critical of the way that governments have manipulated data to exaggerate the extent of the threat.
When Covid 19 vaccines were first rolled out in the UK and around the world in late 2020, we were promised by Western governments and their teams of scientific ‘experts’ who wield enormous, unaccountable power, the media and Big Pharma that the vaccines were a game-changer and that mass vaccination would lead us back to some kind of normality. I was initially very resistant to take the vaccine because it is a new drug with no long-term data regarding side effects and risks. I also have two autoimmune conditions, and while they are easily treated, I am genetically predisposed to a third one that can be quite serious.
However, in the end, and with much hesitation due to the already known side effects and autoimmune risks, I took the Pfizer vaccine. I did so for several reasons. Firstly, I am around my elderly parents a lot, and I thought I would be protecting them as I believed the ‘experts’ that the vaccines would significantly reduce transmission.
This has turned out to be false.
Secondly, I was convinced by the data that seems to show that getting vaccinated almost entirely eradicates the chances of someone my age ending up in hospital with a severe case of Covid. Due to fitness and age, my risk of serious illness was already low, but as a neurotic who is sometimes prone to viewing the glass half empty, I admit to having moments when I worried that I might be one of those outliers for my age group cut down prematurely by Covid and so this was an added factor, but not the main one, in my capitulation. The final reason was because I currently reside in the Republic of Ireland where the government have been very keen to enforce some of the harshest lockdowns globally with draconian rules on both inward and outward travel as well as compulsory vaccine certificates for access to various sectors. Therefore, one of my main reasons for getting jabbed, while I still defended vehemently the rights of others not to do so, was that I thought I would be doing my bit to put an end to these hideous lockdowns and other excessive restrictions once and for all. Looking at what has happened in Austria and Holland and the refusal of both the UK and Irish governments to rule out more lockdowns, it is now clear how very wrong I was. Another way of putting it is that I’ve realised how easily I have been duped.
In recent weeks, I have become even more sceptical of everything that the UK and Irish governments and their appointed health experts tell me with regard to Covid-19. For a start, if they were wrong about the effectiveness of the vaccines with regards to transmission, why would I trust them with regards to how rarely serious side effects occur? There would be far more political and career capital at stake to motivate suppression of this data. I’m not accusing governments, scientific ‘experts’ or Big Pharma of doing so, merely noting that there is a much bigger price for them to pay if they didn’t.
With regards to coercive measures and the removal of rights from the unvaccinated, governments don’t even have recourse to the dubious argument that it’s for the greater good as we now know that the vaccinated can also transmit the virus. I keep making the argument to vaccine zealots that people can exercise their right to abstain from taking any medications due to the risks of side effects, but that many governments now believe this right should be removed solely with regard to Covid vaccines. There is no compelling moral argument for why Covid vaccines fall into an exceptional category that warrants the state using coercion whether it be direct (vaccine mandates) or indirect (segregation and removal of rights) to force its citizens to reluctantly take a medicine they would otherwise refuse.
The enthusiasm for vaccines and excessive restrictions are now articles of faith for their proponents. It has become an ideological stance that no amount of reasoned scrutiny can alter. Rational analysis of the extent of the threat from Covid and strategies to deal with it have been abandoned for the simplistic dogma of ‘vaccines good’ and ‘lockdowns and restrictions good’. The truth is much more nuanced than the doom-mongering analysis which permeates the mainstream media. Lockdown enthusiasts and vaccine zealots, like all ideologues, have opponents whom they despise and whom they seek to demonise. This is why only ‘far Right conspiracy theorists’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ would have an issue with mandatory vaccines which can have serious side effects being given to children to protect them from a virus that rarely makes children very ill.
How have we reached a stage in Western liberal democracies when those of us questioning and disagreeing with extreme public health policies that strip individual citizens of their inalienable rights under false pretences are the ones deemed to be the extremists? Asking questions and being critical of government policy is now viewed by the obedient media class and the political elites and partisan scientific ‘experts’ they serve as being synonymous with the far Right. In truth, it is your democratic duty to question all government policies and especially more so those that would remove your fundamental freedoms. For any government to wish to suspend the rights of its citizenry on a temporary basis, it must first seek consent from the people after explaining the exceptional circumstances in which they seek to do so. There has been no public debate and little media scrutiny across the English-speaking world about whether the threat posed by Covid-19 meets the very high threshold that could justify temporary lockdowns and other extreme restrictions imposed on the citizenry.
If the UK or Irish government or any of the devolved administrations try to impose another lockdown, I predict there will be mass non-compliance. It is very likely that much of the population of these islands will conclude that if several lockdowns, mask mandates and ‘game changing’ vaccines have not eradicated transmission, why comply with another lockdown, possible financial ruin and separation from loved ones? What would be the purpose? As someone once said (it wasn’t actually Einstein): ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’
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From the Archives
Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis
By Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | December 17, 2023
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.
The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. … continue
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