Masks

Masks ‘a possible risk’ for spreading COVID, ‘predisposing’ people to infections: study
Mask mandates ‘have resulted in no reductions in incidence of COVID-19, as detected by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests among nations or US states.’

By Michael Haynes


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February 16, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A new study warns that the wearing of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is not only non-effective, but also a hazard to individuals’ health, given that mask wearing seems to lead to an increase in infection rates.

The , a “peer-reviewed online medical journal” without attachments to businesses or political interests, published a four-part study on the use of masks in relation to COVID-19. The study is entitled, “Masks, false safety and real dangers.”


The of the study details the “proposed mechanisms by which masks increase risk of COVID-19,” and is authored by Colleen Huber, a Naturopathic Medical Doctor and Naturopathic Oncologist (FNORI) who specializes on the issues of masks, COVID-19, cancer and nutrition.

Huber’s findings, which have already been subject to peer review and revised accordingly, reveal that the various mask mandates which were implemented throughout the world so quickly in 2020 “have resulted in no reductions in incidence of COVID-19, as detected by positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests among nations or US states.”

Quite the opposite is true, states Huber, as she found that “[i]ncreased rates or insignificant change in incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections, as detected by PCR tests, have followed mask mandates throughout the world and in US states.” As a result of her findings, Huber wrote that masks “are therefore a possible risk factor for infection with SARS-CoV-2 and higher incidence of COVID-19 disease.”


In order to defend her statements, Huber points to the results of various studies of mask enforcement and wearing. Following up on a study of 25 countries conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations regarding masks, Huber’s team found that three months later, there was no “clear, identifiable pattern with regard to deaths.” In fact, the countries which had reported the lowest mask wearing in the study had “generally fewer” cases of COVID-19.

Referring to results for a number of U.S. states and various countries drawn from the COVID Tracking Project Data Download and Our World In Data, Huber noted that the cases of the virus had “more often increased than decreased after government ‘mandates’ to their citizens to wear masks in those jurisdictions.”

Seven countries (Israel, Peru, the Philippines, Spain, France, Hungary and Argentina) revealed “no impact” of the mask mandates in terms of either cases or hospitalizations.

However, in the next three months, all seven countries showed an increase in cases, and the same was found in the results from the U.S. Only Mississippi and New York City had drops in infections, as they were found to continue on their “sharp descent” of COVID cases, which had begun two weeks before the respective mask mandates.

“None of the examined jurisdictions experienced decreased incidence of COVID-19 after the introduction of mask mandates, except two that had already begun a sharp descent in COVID-19 cases weeks earlier.”

Huber also drew on the results of the Danish mask study, the first of its kind, which found that masks had no “statistical significance” in reducing the prevalence of infections. She observed that the authors of that study had admitted to having a pro-mask bias, yet could not find any significant effects mask wearing.
Masks as an aid to infection


Huber also warned that masks can be not only an aid in spreading infection, but also pose a risk to personal health. A 2020 study performed by North Carolina’s Duke University found that respiratory droplets fall to the ground quicker, and therefore are less likely to reach someone, when one does not wear a mask. This was due to the “mesh of certain masks” dividing larger, heavier respiratory droplets into smaller, lighter fragments, which were “more likely to stay airborne longer.” With results like these, Duke University declared cloth masks to be “counterproductive.”

Huber mentioned the “nozzle effect” which masks have in channeling the exhaled air through the side openings. Due to higher air pressure behind the mask, “side jets, back jets, a crown jet, brow jets and a downward jet … emerge from the mask in each of those directions.” Furthermore, “[b]ackward airflow was found to be strong with all masks and faceshields studied, compared to not masking,” Huber wrote.

A jet of exhaled air, capable of travelling “up to several meters” could come from an individual wearing a mask.

In contrast to such mask-propelled jets of exhaled air, those without masks do not pose a risk of being able to transmit particles of the virus “anywhere near the distance that a masked individual can unwittingly contaminate.”
Masks damaging the health of the wearer

Aside from an increased risk of infecting those around, a mask poses a health risk to the one wearing it, Huber wrote. In just ten seconds of wearing a mask, the “available oxygen as a percentage of available air volume decreased to less than the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) required minimum of 19.5%,” and stayed below that figure.

This state of hypoxia causes the body to produce “hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1),” which is known “to lower T-cell function.” The cells which suffer as a result, are those known to “fight viral infections,” and hence the mask places the wearer at risk by virtue of depriving the body of the necessary oxygen and cell function needed.

Another effect of HIF-1 is the reduction in an enzyme (ACE2) which “plays key roles in maintaining blood pressure and electrolytes and controlling inflammation.” The receptors for the enzyme ACE2 are the “initial portal” used by the COVID-19 virus to “enter cells of the upper respiratory tract.” Since COVID-19 attacks the receptors for ACE2, and the enzyme itself had already been reduced through lack of oxygen, “the masked person with a new SARS-CoV-2 infection is especially at risk of marked inflammation and accompanying disease severity.”

Huber also explained the danger of hypercapnia (carbon dioxide retention), as carbon dioxide had been found to rise after just “30 seconds” of mask wearing. The retention of carbon dioxide leads to the immobilization of microscopic-sized “cilia,” which play a key role in removing harmful pathogens from the airways. “This leads to predisposing mask wearers to respiratory tract infections and vulnerability to deep entry of pathogens,” Huber warned.

In light of such evidence, not only against the effectiveness of masks in preventing infection, but also concerning the very real danger posed by their use, Huber stated: “This raises concerns that masked persons might more easily acquire, incubate and subsequently transmit a virus that has been the focus of intense attention, fear and concern throughout the world in 2020.”

“Caution is therefore urged against use of masks among those who wish to reduce the risk, either for themselves or others, of infection with SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 disease,” she closed.

Covid19

Lockdown lunacy is frying our minds


ADAM CREIGHTON


Victoria to Western Australia: hold my beer.

If you thought Perth’s bizarre five-day lockdown over a single person, who wasn’t sick and infected no one else, was strange, then Victoria’s statewide third lockdown of 6.6 million people is so freakish it raises a worrying possibility.

The west, and Australia and New Zealand in particular, are suffering mass psychogenic illness, where only sociology, psychology and the perverse incentives of large welfare states, can explain the ongoing obsession with COVID-19 and our medieval responses to it after almost a year of improved treatments and new information.

For three German and Spanish economists, it’s time to ask this question: have we forgotten the rationality that’s meant to define policymaking in advanced liberal democracies? Their new research paper, COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria, lays out how our biological tendency to overreact coupled with a social and mass media that profit from panic, plus powerful welfare states, make mass psychosis likely, and hard to reverse.

“Governments have prohibited activities that reduce fear and anxiety, such as sports and socialising, thereby contributing to anxiety and psychological strain,” one of the authors, Philipp Bagus, told The Australian.

“They have instilled fear in the general public to achieve political goals, exploiting the negativity bias of the human brain,” he said, revealing how a leaked German government paper last year recommended scaring people to ensure compliance with health advice. “Politicians have an incentive to overshoot the mark in their responses to a threat because they are largely exempt from the risk of possible wrong decisions and their costs, which they pass on to others,” Bagus added.

Whether we’ve reached mass psychosis is debatable, but some seriously weird behaviours have emerged, quite beyond doublemasking and the odd burst of toilet paper hoarding.

Australia and New Zealand have incurred costs equivalent to a world war — and more than any other nation has — fighting a pandemic that has killed not even 1000 people, with a median age in the mid-80s, between them. And this is widely seen as brilliant.

Having insisted early last year that lockdowns were necessary to “flatten the curve”, rolling capital city “snap” lockdowns of millions of people have become the norm, at extraordinary economic, psychological and social cost, without a single person in ICU across either country.

The nation tuned into the Victorian Premier’s 100-minute press conference on Monday to hear how the state was handling one new COVID case, while a few kilometres away tennis stars Nadal and Medvedev were about to square off to the sound of artificial clapping.

Two exhausted Auslan interpreters tag-teamed to convey the latest daily update from Daniel Andrews on Melbourne’s “ring of steel”, nebulisers, and the “highly infectious UK strain”, which has barely infected a soul and killed no one in Australia or New Zealand. A day earlier more than 25,100 Victorians, on government orders, flocked to testing centres to see if they had COVID-19.

“I am proud,” said Mr Andrews. Well, I’m embarrassed that so many people, the bulk of them healthy, waste hours and the $100 it costs taxpayers for each of the 13.7 million tests carried out so far.

Across the Tasman, Auckland entered its own three-day lockdown (the science is a little different there) on Sunday. Valentine’s Day diners fled restaurants midmeal at 8.30pm, the media reported, as patrons’ mobile phones, courtesy of government apps designed for earthquakes, lit up with the announcement of the city’s third lockdown.

The venerable Economist magazine even wrote last week that 150 million people would die (three times the number killed by the Spanish flu) from COVID-19 without strong government action, a claim breathtaking in its absurdity. Globally, 2.4 million people have died from or with COVID-19, yet every year other communicable diseases kill more. A death is a death, whatever its cause, yet the world is not shut down. It’s time our leaders started pouring cold water over an electorate that’s worked itself into a lather. Welcome vaccines are not a silver bullet. Israel with a population of nine million, where more than 80 per cent of the population had been vaccinated by the end of January, is still recording about 40 deaths and 5000 new coronavirus cases a day.

The idea that all Australian adults — only 19 per cent of whom bothered to get a flu vaccine in 2009, a pandemic year — will voluntarily vaccinate themselves against COVID, a lesser threat for most, now and forever, is ridiculous. I’m not an anti-vaxxer but I’ve never had an influenza shot, given the minuscule risk to me.

Our leaders should level with voters that we can’t remain an open liberal society without incurring further deaths and cases from COVID-19. Let vulnerable groups be vaccinated, and let everyone else get on with their life. The three authors, at universities in Spain and Chile, argue that hysteria dissipates more quickly in nations that respect civil liberties, where the minority who wish to behave rationally “can just ignore the collective panic and continue to live their normal lives”, illustrating to the hysterical majority that they too can safely return to normal.

Unfortunately that’s not an option in Australia or New Zealand, where the freedoms taken for granted before 2020 — to come and go, see whomever, and privacy — have been sacrificed to the god of “public health”.

Pockets of sanity remain. Norway apologised to its people last June for a lockdown, promising never to do it again. Meanwhile Sweden, where deaths from all causes were no higher last year than in 2015, valiantly trudges on, letting Swedes live their lives relatively normally, as the pandemic rule book allows, notwithstanding the fact that every other nation has torn it up.

And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So thank god for NSW, where relative sanity has prevailed for now.


A death is a death, whatever its cause, yet the world is not shut down

ClimateMadness

Climate of fear dooms rational decision-making


JUDITH SLOAN


Last month I wrote a column about overblown environmental prophecies that pique the attention of the progressive media, particularly during quiet news periods.

You know the sort of thing: parts of Sydney will become uninhabitable in the coming decades. The rise in sea levels will be even bigger than expected, with parts of Melbourne to be flooded out this century. These dubious projections were picked up by a small number of media outlets.

Mind you, there have been some similar doozies when it comes to epidemiological predictions. Last year, one academic had the number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia at 138,000. Another estimate put the figure at 250,000.

The ABC’s Norman Swan had the number of cases in Australia at between 70,000 and 80,000 for just April last year.

Given that the actual numbers have been tiny fractions of these estimates — just more than 900 deaths and less than 29,000 cases in total — you may think an apology is in order. But doomsayers tend not to apologise.

In the main, the purpose of putting out truly scary forecasts is not to be accurate but to induce responses — preferably the responses they advocate. They want people to be scared. They want governments to take notice. They want bureaucrats to take their chilling projections into account when making decisions and advising ministers. And here’s the tragic thing: it works. While those proselytisers standing on the boxes in Hyde Park corner declaring the end is nigh provided good theatre but were easy to ignore, these modern-day doomsayers mean business.

Take the famous prediction that mammalogist Tim Flannery made in 2007, that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”. Just a few years later it was clear this was utterly wrong. Indeed, I’m told residents of Tully in Queensland — a very wet place — now call inches of rain “Flanneries”.

But here’s the key: Flannery’s bravado contributed to real impacts. In particular, the Victorian government was dissuaded from constructing any new dams, including one in Gippsland that could also aid flood mitigation, but invested instead in a ruinously expensive desalination plant.

This plant has never been needed since it was completed at extraordinary cost. Victorians continue to pay for its existence — more than $600m a year — because of the take-or-pay arrangements in the contract.

The desal plant has been turned on from time to time for political purposes, but that’s about it. Rats have eaten through the pipes and costly repairs have been required. It was recently flooded out. Now that’s ironic.

When it came to the Brisbane floods of 2011, the failure of the managers of the Wivenhoe Dam to release water earlier in the year was one factor contributing to the devastating outcome.

Obviously these examples were not Flannery’s errors but those of the Victorian government and the dam operators, but it’s not a stretch to imagine his words — the dams will never fill again — must have been ringing in their ears. Is it surprising their professional judgment was impaired?

Then we have all the predictions of rising sea levels and the impact this will have on properties close to the coast. This is notwithstanding that some of the strongest climate change advocates are more than happy to live in expensive waterfront houses.

Local officials have taken up this cause with gusto, egged on by some Green-left council members. Restrictions have been placed on developments and values of properties have been reduced in some cases. Rarely is any distinction made between localised erosion and the presumed impact of climate change.

In Victoria, local governments have been instructed to take into account a rise of 0.8m in sea levels by 2100 when considering planning applications. It is being proposed that this number be raised to 1.1m. But one council in western Victoria has got ahead of the game. The Moyne Shire uses a sea level rise of 1.2m by 2100 in its coastal strategy.

That a country such as The Netherlands is able to survive and thrive with land below sea level and the possibility of various engineering solutions are rarely taken into account.

Of course, local government actions go well beyond restricting developments because of presumed rising sea levels. In the Melbourne CBD, with its ostensibly pro-business mayor, the city is completely hostile to cars, with bike lanes turning once wide twolane roads into choked, singlelane thoroughfares.

The insurance companies also have got into the climate change game by warning us all of the potential damage caused by extreme weather events and the need to raise premiums to cover this eventuality.

This linking just might be a convenient excuse to put up prices and become more profitable given that extreme weather events, worldwide, have not become more common. Indeed, there is evidence that the incidence of cyclones, for instance, has declined in many parts of the world.

A careful reading of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports points to only low to medium confidence in the future path of extreme weather events. But promoters and followers of the climate change cause tend not to worry about details: they probably don’t even bother to read the dense and lengthy periodic reports put out by the IPCC.

(Here’s a warning: it’s not enough to read the executive summaries of the reports; the hands of other authors, possibly not trained in science, are easy to detect.)

There’s also the recycling religion. Apart from a small number of products — aluminium cans and possibly lithium car batteries

— the most efficient and environmentally sensitive means of dealing with rubbish is to use wellmanaged landfills.

But that doesn’t meet the requirements of the climate change urgers, including the CSIRO. (Check out its recent abysmal report on the circular economy, a current trendy term.)

For some media outlets, doomsaying climate prophecies no doubt attract readers, particularly if it is linked with the evils of capitalism. Indeed, a few hot days are now regularly reported on as if they are newsworthy. That’s what summer throws up.

The more fundamental problem is that too many ill-advised government decisions are made on the basis of dubious projections while ignoring the scope for offsetting actions and adaptation. Mind you, there has never been a better time for unelected, activist bureaucrats.