For the past almost three years, I have written several comprehensive scientific articles demonstrating that wearing face masks won’t prevent viral diseases. In spite of the obvious facts presented by myself and other journalists, as well as numerous doctors and scientists, government officials and corporate media pundits continued to drone on about how great masks are.
Last month, the Biden administration announced that on May 11, 2023, COVID-19 national and public health emergency declarations that were put in place under former President Donald Trump in early 2020 will end. Could the reason for this be that the lies and propaganda that permeate the COVID narrative have become so blatantly obvious? It would seem so because former die-hard supporters of COVID restrictions like masks and so-called COVID vaccines have started to change their tune. They are starting to question what’s really going on. And the mainstream press is reporting it.
Example: Washington Post columnist Leana Wen MD, who is also a medical news analyst for CNN and a graduate of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders programme, was a staunch advocate of mandating masks. In February 2022, National Review reported that Wen advocated that people wear triple-ply masks even when outdoors. And that kids in school wear them. She then did a 180 and now advocates that wearing masks should be up to the individual. She also stated that “masking has harmed our son’s language development” as reported in this video and in this article.
Example: Last January, Fox News reported that in her Washington Post column, Wen “admitted…that the medical community is overcounting the amount of COVID deaths and hospitalizations.” Actually, that’s an understatement: the deaths are grossly inflated. Since 2020, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has reported on its website (see comorbidities and other conditions) that only over 5% of all COVID-19 deaths were due to it alone. The other 95% of COVID deaths had multiple comorbidities. In other words, they died of something else. COVID apologists try to explain away this fact by claiming that critics are misinterpreting and misrepresenting the data. But at a press conference in 2020, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of Illinois’ Department of Public Health succinctly states:
“I just want to be clear in terms of the definition of people dying of COVID: technically, even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. Everyone who is listed as a COVID death, doesn’t mean that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of death.”
Example: On his show, Jimmy Dore presented a compilation of newscasters and government officials on TV and, in their own words, falsely claiming that the COVID shots would prevent people from getting COVID-19 and infecting others, but that Biden, Fauci and other notables all got COVID anyway. Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Donald Trump, Deborah Birx MD, best known for wearing a variety of brightly colored scarves, also admitted this when she testified before Congress back in December 2020 and in a 2022 Fox News interview said, “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines.”
And they overplayed the masks. Reason Magazine and the New York Post, along with other mainstream publications, reported on an exhaustive January 2023 review (not to be confused with a systematic review) published by the Cochrane Library, which “found essentially no relationship between mask wearing and disease rates.” The articles, which can be read here, and here, stated in their title that “the CDC Grossly Exaggerated” the effectiveness of “mask mandates.” Both articles went on to say that the CDC “cannot be trusted as a source of public health information.”
The Cochrane review is difficult to read, but it’s not always the fault of the authors. In a February 2023 interview, lead author Dr. Tom Jefferson, MD, explained that in his original 2020 mask review (the 2023 review is an update), his research team was “forced” to “insert unnecessary text phrases in the review” in order to get published. This and other kinds of censorship have become a common problem in scientific journals as explained in this 2020 article in Scientific American.
Dr. Jefferson also explained that Cochrane published an editorial to accompany his original 2020 review, in his view, “to undermine our work.” He described the editorial as a call to action,“you’ve got to do something, you can’t wait for good evidence,” which is “a complete subversion of the precautionary principle,” (the precept that an action should not be taken if the consequences are uncertain and potentially dangerous). Dr Jefferson went on to say:
“…when academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks. We call them ‘strident campaigners.” They are activists, not scientists.” Nevertheless, “…the evidence really didn’t change from 2020 to 2023. There is still no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic.”
Read more: To Those Still Wearing Masks: Throw Them Away. They Don’t Work
