I don’t know how he did it. While I agree with his column, I am shocked that the bible of the left, the N.Y. Times, published a column by sometimes conservative columnist Bret Stephens called “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?
His column began by referencing a scientific study by Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist. Tom said, “There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop,” Jefferson added that the famous M-95 masks weren’t any better.
Stephens didn’t mention it. However, I can say with confidence I’m confident that the Tom Jefferson, who led this study, is not the third President of the U.S. If he was, at 280 years old, he would be slightly older than President Biden.
The despotic politicians who insisted that people wear masks used “non-randomized studies flawed observational studies.”
In other words, all those Democrats who said Conservatives didn’t believe in science were too imbecilic to understand what a scientific study was.
But where did these studies come from>
These observations don’t come from just anywhere. Jefferson and 11 colleagues conducted the study for Cochrane, a British nonprofit that is widely considered the gold standard for its reviews of health care data. The conclusions were based on 78 randomized controlled trials, six of them during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries. And they track what has been widely observed in the United States: States with mask mandates fared no better against Covid than those without.
As someone who got nauseous every time I wore a mask for more than three minutes. I stopped going anywhere that required. the wearing of masks (except for Doctors)
(…) When it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.
Are you listening Gavin Newsom, or are you too busy eating at the French Laundry?
The CDC believes the truth is wrong. “Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change.” Surely she consulted with Teacher’s Union head Randi Weingarten. I hear she also requested that all teachers get seven paid years off.
By acting like a lemming and following Rochelle Walensky off a cliff, the CDC’s adherence to its masking guidance simply continues the eroding of the CDC’s reputation, the belief that it relies on politics, not science, and eroding the public’s adherence to their recommendations.
It also betrays the technocratic mind-set that has the unpleasant habit of assuming that nothing is ever wrong with the bureaucracy’s well-laid plans — provided nobody gets in its way, nobody has a dissenting point of view, everyone does exactly what it asks, and for as long as officialdom demands. This is the mentality that once believed that China provided a highly successful model for pandemic response.
Something you won’t hear from the CDC or the MSM is they probably knew from the beginning the mask mandate was a sham even before it was imposed. “They may have created a false sense of safety — and thus permission to resume semi-normal life. They did almost nothing to advance safety itself. The Cochrane report ought to be the final nail in this particular coffin.”
There’s a final lesson. The last justification for masks is that, even if they proved to be ineffective, they seemed like a relatively low-cost, intuitively effective way of doing something against the virus in the early days of the pandemic. But “do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the courage to say as much deserved to be listened to, not treated with contempt. They may not ever get the apology they deserve, but vindication ought to be enough.
Despite the research saying that mask-wearing isn’t needed, I propose that people who look like Nancy Pelosi, Madonna at the Grammy’s, Keith Olbermann, or Rob Reiner should be required to wear a mask. This has nothing to do with their health but for the well-being of anyone unfortunate enough to look at them.
