Two recent articles highlight the very real danger caused by prolonged use of masks against COVID-19.
First, City Journal discusses "The Harm Caused by Masks".
Evidence continues to mount that mask mandates were perhaps the worst public-health intervention in modern American history. While concluding that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” in preventing the spread of viruses, a recent Cochrane review also emphasized that “more attention should be paid to describing and quantifying the harms” that may come from wearing masks. A new study from Germany does just that, and it suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers may have substantial ill-effects on their health—and, in the case of pregnant women, their unborn children’s.
Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”
In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.
There's more at the link.
Next, we learn that "Study Shows MOST People Now Have Microplastics — Found in Disposable Masks — in Their Lungs".
Researchers in the United Kingdom looked at lung tissue obtained from study participants and found microplastics in all regions of the lungs, including the deeper section. According to the study, this is the first time microplastics have been found in human lung tissue samples using μFTIR spectroscopy ... Though the researchers did not confirm the source of the microplastic contamination, the plastic fibers found in the lungs are commonly used in surgical masks.
. . .
In 2020, the amount of disposable face masks littered into the environment increased by a staggering 9000 percent. Billions of people strapped polypropylene masks to their faces every day for two years and sucked their air through plastic fibers for 8 hours or more. To not have discovered plastic in lungs would have been surprising.
The confirmation of microplastics in the lungs also backs up a study conducted in 2020 which predicted a microplastic inhalation risk posed by wearing masks.
. . .
Dr. Osita Onugha, thoracic surgeon and assistant professor of thoracic surgery at Saint John’s Cancer Institute at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California told Medical News Today that the implications for microplastics in the lungs are unknown given our current knowledge on this type of contamination but it can't be good.
Again, more at the link.
And yet, despite this and other evidence (there's more every day from multiple sources in multiple countries), you still have some states mandating that kids at school must wear masks every day, and businesses such as some doctors' offices, hospitals, clinics, etc. demanding that anyone coming in must put on a mask and keep it on until they leave.
I'm beginning to think that in terms of demonstrating one's overall intelligence, likelihood to survive a crisis, and overall value to society, the wearing of a surgical mask to "protect" against COVID-19 is like the "mark of the beast" in the Book of Revelation. If you're wearing one for that reason, you're marked. If not, you're not. Guess which camp my wife and I fall into? Furthermore, any authority trying to compel us to wear masks marks itself with the same stigma. We obey them at our peril.
*Sigh*
Peter
I get annoyed wherever I see someone still wearing a mask.
ReplyDeleteIt is rare but unheard of in my area, but the last time I went to California (February) they were all over the place. Some businesses still required them...
I wore them as little as possible, and almost always used a very light cloth mask my wife made.
Interestingly, there is a cafe in the next town south of me that has had a no mask sign up the whole time - they won't serve you if you're wearing one.
Conversations with early-elementary school teachers said that masks had a devastating effect on how young children learn.
ReplyDeletePart of teaching "letter and sounds" involves showing the kids how certain sounds are made "Look at me making the letter 'O' sound and see that my lips are in the shape of an 'O'..."
Children are also gifted at reading facial expressions but they were denied that. Teachers could not rely on giving a child a smile as a reward and children were left dangling, not knowing if they had completed a task to the teacher's satisfaction.
-Joe
These researchers--where did they live? Humans have been breathing through cloth masks for hundreds, if not thousands of years. I do it myself nearly every winter when I have my collar covering my nose. If this was a real problem, our species would have died out during the first cold winter. Am I the only person on the planet who can think?
ReplyDeleteAnthony Fauci's doctoral thesis in college was on how much harm masks did during the black plague.
ReplyDeleteHe literally wrote a fucking paper on how harmful they are.
Then made you wear one everywhere you go.
The V.A. (Veterans Administration) Requires them to be worn in every VA Medical Facility. It is Policy. "No Mask, No Service" I wear one every time I have to go. I joke that the VA will be requiring masks well into the 2050's given how slowly they react to changes in the world.
ReplyDeleteOther than the VA, nobody else in my town seems to want them, although I ride the City Bus, and see a few folks who wear them. Mostly the Elderly.
(although the people I 'want' to see wearing a mask, never do)
Why should we believe this compared to other unsubstantiated so called facts?
ReplyDeleteReading comprehension, folks. They are talking about plastic surgical masks and N95 masks, not the cloth masks many folks were using.
ReplyDeleteAside from the N95 and better types, masks don't protect you. What they can do if fitted and worn correctly is reduce any viral load from you. That's why surgical teams wear them when operating.
What we did was against standard procedure, you quarantine the sick, not the well. Common sense used to be more common.
Throwing the b.s flag hard.
ReplyDelete1) Surgeons, OR nurses, and techs have been wearing surgical masks hours on end for literally a century: kindly cite all the studies that document all those bad effects that date from prior to 2019, and all the health problems for that population, who follow masking regimens with far better reliability than Joe Average ever did, from 2020-2023, ever, even one time in his life.
I'll pay $1 cash for every study before that time to anyone who'll agree to pay me $1 for every study from 2019 or later.
2) Most people in Creation were wearing masks made from ordinary t-shirt cotton, not surgical-grade masks with plastic materials.
3) Most of them were worn poorly and improperly, if at all, and certainly not for 12 hours consecutively. 30 continuous minutes while shopping would be a stretch for most people.
4) Dr. Onugha's comments about "unknown dangers" constitute an Argument From Pure Ignorance, which is a logical fallacy, and scare-mongering based on something normally retrieved from a baby's diaper, or the south end of a north-bound horse. So is the entire source post.
QED
Were - and are - continued masking policies asinine and stupid?
Hell, YES!
Exactly as predicted, from the outset.
But b.s. studies of dubious accuracy and validity that tickle people's confirmation bias are not the antidote to ideas as stupid and unworkable as perpetual masking.
And anybody that still talks seriously about wearing a surgical mask to "protect" the wearer against anything, probably needs a 3-second beeper on their watch to remind them to breathe, and should generally be regarded as too stupid to walk and chew gum simultaneously.
That's literally as stupid as someone seriously suggesting wearing seatbelts is to prevent automobile crashes.
For the 4,000,000 time since COVID became a thing, surgical masks are worn to protect everyone else FROM the wearer, by keeping the wearer's snot inside their own snot locker, rather than spreading viral particles about like Johnny Appleseed with a snow blower, or Typhoid Mary on crack.
They succeed at this 100 to 1000 times better than wearing nothing as measured by actual instruments at a range of 6', if they're worn correctly, but it only takes one idiot not doing it right to drop a Butterfinger in the community pool, which is why the idea that it would ever work at all was doomed to failure from the outset, because people are contrary ignorant jackasses, which has been documented in 100% of the species from Adam onward.
That's before we even get to how much less intelligent and obedient minors (and government officials) are at following this practice than average adults, let alone below-average adults, which is at least 50% of the population, and more than that at any Wal-Mart, as the website People of WalMart should make plain to anyone with functional eyes.
That's always been the problem with such an asinine and unworkable policy.
Stick with that argument, and avoid questionable junk science, and you're on rock-solid ground.
Othewrwise, until you can document surgeons dropping dead in ORs being an actual thing, this is exactly the half-@$$ed "science" best reserved for proving the existence of Bigfoot, interstellar aliens, global warming, and the dangers of second-hand smoke - which is precisely where it originally debuted, as documented brilliantly in the essay below:
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2017/06/aliens-cause-global-warming-by-michael.html
I always wondered why those who tried to use religious exemptions to getting the jab always used the argument that the jabs were developed with human embryo stem cells, or some other similar argument.
ReplyDeleteI was fortunate enough to not be in a position to have the jab mandated, but if I had, my religious exemption would have been based upon the jab being equated to the mark of the beast.
As to Aesop's comment about prior studies related to mask wearing. I actually did find quite a few of them on nih.gov when the whole covid fiasco started. And they all pretty much had the conclusion that masks did not prevent the wearer from getting a virus, but did increase their chance of developing other respiratory illnesses. However, once the frauds in charge started pushing masks, the studies basically disappeared from nih.gov and were replaced with opinions (not actual studies) that declared masks were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
ReplyDeleteMy mother, suffering from dementia, was in a nursing home during the lockdowns. She had a minor fall and was taken to hospital to be x-rayed. Nobody was allowed to accompany her in the ambulance because of covid (not family, nor nursing home staff). Later we get a telephone call because she has nobody to sit with her!
ReplyDeleteSo I go in and was allowed to wear a mask I'd made myself (a piece of gathered cotton fabric). But when I sat with Mum, she didn't recognise me because of the mask, so the nurses were quite happy for me to take my mask off to sit with her. After that I never wore a mask anywhere, so I guess minimal plastic in the lungs for me....
Those studies dissapeared for a host of reasons, not least because studying the effectiveness of simple masks to protect the wearer is like studying lifeboats for their effectiveness in preventing ships sinking.
ReplyDeleteIf someone finds a group gullible enough to provide rent in exchange for promulgating such junk science, it's not a bad gig, other than the obvious drawback of painting the study authors as thorough-going functional retards with delusions of bare competence.
One such is generally enough to doom one to a career solely living off government grant money, and being the butt of professional jokes and derision until death by the actual scientific practitioners in any field.
This is how you get the likes of something as loathsomely stupid and professionally inept as a Fauci, dependent on pure governmental ignorance to fail upwards for forty years.
Just tell everyone you have a disability and cannot wear one. ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act. Record the conversation and ask who they represent so you know who to sue.
ReplyDeleteOne of the NIH papers, about 2012, IIRC, detailed how they concluded that a majority of the worldwide public that died during the Spanish Flu 1918-20 actually died of respiratory system bacterial infections.
ReplyDeleteA second paper, about 2017, concluded that those bacterial infections were a result of WEARING MASKS.
I can't find those anymore. Might be due to the lead author being Anthony Fouci.
One of the documented results of wearing those surgical masks is a lowering of blood oxygen levels. One of the problems they had in studying this is the wide variation of the result from person to person. The conclusion of the researchers was that the supposed benefit of protecting the patient from infection by the surgical team had never been proven, but the mental degradation of the healthcare workers in the OR due to the lowered oxy had been documented. They suggested the masks be tossed, but noted that it would be more practical to supply oxy to the crew rather than deal with the resistance of public perception to the situation.
ReplyDelete