Eleven months ago, I posted a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine. To this day, it remains one of the most popular topics on my tiny site:

New England Journal of Medicine says wearing masks in public is stupid

Posted on MAY 28, 2020

Science!

A virus is so small, it sails right through cloth masks, not to mention around the sides of masks, not to mention into your eyes. The only good a mask can do, if you are highly symptomatic, is to stop your own cootie boogies from flying out of your face onto other people. Which is why sick people should stay home.

Here is the straight skinny, from an article first published last month, that is miraculously still available online. Thank you, Michael Klompas, M.D., M.P.H., Charles A. Morris, M.D., M.P.H., Julia Sinclair, M.B.A., Madelyn Pearson, D.N.P., R.N., and Erica S. Shenoy, M.D., Ph.D.

“We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.”

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372

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To my amazement, (13 April 2021) that link is still active.

Today, Dr. Briggs published a new study that concluded, guess what?

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Important New Paper: MASKS DO NOT WORK

BY BRIGGS ON APRIL 13, 2021 • ( 36 COMMENTS )

The paper is Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis in Medical Hypothesis, by Baruch Vainshelboim. (I am thrilled to say this beats me to the punch on the mask-reality paper I’ve been working on.)

Let’s begin at the Conclusion:

The data suggest that both medical and non-medical facemasks are ineffective to block human-to-human transmission of viral and infectious disease such SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, supporting against the usage of facemasks. Wearing facemasks has been demonstrated to have substantial adverse physiological and psychological effects. These include hypoxia, hypercapnia, shortness of breath, increased acidity and toxicity, activation of fear and stress response, rise in stress hormones, immunosuppression, fatigue, headaches, decline in cognitive performance, predisposition for viral and infectious illnesses, chronic stress, anxiety and depression. Long-term consequences of wearing facemask can cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death. Governments, policy makers and health organizations should utilize prosper and scientific evidence-based approach with respect to wearing facemasks, when the latter is considered as preventive intervention for public health.

Do us all a favor, will you? Send this paper to your ruler if you live in a medical tyranny locale. They won’t acknowledge these results, of course, because rulers are loathe to admit error; the bigger the mistake, the more it is not their fault.

But perhaps it will help forestall or block mask criminalization next time. For there will be a next time. As I’ve told you hundreds of times, we get pandemics every 10-20 years. This is our first global panic, though. Since we’ve proved to our rulers how cowardly we all are, they’ll surely try to grab more power next time. This paper can help lessen that.

The paper proves each of the contentions in the Conclusion. It is a review paper, examining the evidence from dozens of meta-analyses and other papers. Recall that if you can’t “prove” your hypothesis with a wee P-value in a single paper, you can always up the N (which guarantees weer Ps) by doing a meta-analysis. If you can’t get a wee P there, well, what you’re trying to “prove” just can’t be done. Masks just don’t work.

Here are a list of demonstrated ill effects of prolonged masks usage:

“But Briggs, you The Science denier, what about surgeons!”

Surgeons wear, and frequently change, special masks so they don’t snot into patients, and so that they don’t get splattered with blood. Contagious surgeons don’t operate on patients.

This paper is eminently readable. If you can read this blog, you can surely read it. So click on over—don’t trust me!—and prove to yourself that masks don’t work. Meanwhile, here are some key quotes (I’m leaving off references; all emphases mine).

• “Interestingly, 99% of the detected cases with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic or have mild condition, which contradicts with the virus name (severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2)”.
• “…’the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 are similar to those of severe seasonal influenza’ [5], having a [true] case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%.”
• “Due to the difference in sizes between SARS-CoV-2 diameter and facemasks thread diameter (the virus is 1000 times smaller), SARS-CoV-2 can easily pass through any facemask“.
• “among symptomatic individuals (those with fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose ect…) there was no difference between wearing and not wearing facemask for coronavirus droplets transmission of particles of > 5 μm”
• “suggesting that asymptomatic individuals do not transmit or infect other people “
• “A meta-analysis among health care workers found that compared to no masks, surgical mask and N95 respirators were not effective against transmission of viral infections or influenza-like illness based on six RCTs”.
• “Based on four COVID-19 studies, the meta-analysis failed to demonstrate risk reduction of facemasks for COVID-19 transmission”.
• “In early publication the WHO stated that ‘facemasks are not required, as no evidence is available on its usefulness to protect non-sick persons’. In the same publication, the WHO declared that ‘cloth (e.g. cotton or gauze) masks are not recommended under any circumstance‘”.
• “…the WHO repeatedly announced that ‘at present, there is no direct evidence (from studies on COVID-19) on the effectiveness face masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection of respiratory viruses, including COVID-19.’”
• “In addition to hypoxia and hypercapnia, breathing through facemask residues bacterial and germs components on the inner and outside layer of the facemask. These toxic components are repeatedly rebreathed back into the body, causing self-contamination.”
• “The adverse physiological effects were confirmed in a study of 53 surgeons where surgical facemask were used during a major operation. “
• “…wearing facemasks causing hypoxic and hypercapnic state that constantly challenges the normal homeostasis, and activates ‘fight or flight’ stress response, an important survival mechanism in the human body.”
• “Encountering people who wearing facemasks activates innate stress-fear emotion, which is fundamental to all humans in danger or life threating situations”.
• “global estimates showing that COVID-19 will cause a catastrophe due to collateral psychological damage such as quarantine, lockdowns, unemployment, economic collapse, social isolation, violence and suicides.”

(click link at top to read the whole thing)