In December of 2020, I wrote a blog entitled “To Mask or Not to Mask” in which I laid out some truths about masks that Dr. Fauci and the CDC have decided to ignore. Since then, the vaccines, first Pfizer’s and Moderna’s and eventually Johnson and Johnson’s have rolled out with swift efficiency in red states and slow, laborious, and seemingly political inefficiency in most blue states. In Illinois, for example, vaccine destined for less populous, conservative counties like ours was given instead to more populous counties. Many residents of our county found places in other counties or even In Indiana to get their shots rather than wait and wait and wait.
Still, as of five days ago, 58.1 million people had been fully vaccinated with vaccinations now being given at the rate of nearly two and a half million doses a day. But 58.1 million people is not a huge number in a country of over 330 million citizens. So what is the verdict, do we still need to mask?
Let’s look again at mask data from clinical trials. Two trials reported by the CDC itself prove the ineffectiveness of masks against viruses. The first, a 2015 study conducted in Vietnam on both cloth and surgical masks, warned healthcare workers not to use cloth masks because they only stopped about 3% of viral particles. The second was a compilation of data from every study that seven scientists in Hong Kong could find about the effectiveness of masks. Their conclusion, again published by the CDC was: “We did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission (influenza is a virus), either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility,” (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article).
Even more damning for masks is a paper published by Danish researchers on November 18, 2020, on a clinical trial that tested the efficacy of masks as protection specifically against COVID-19. The trial consisted of 5,000 Danes, half of whom wore high-quality surgical masks and half of whom were asked not to wear masks. They concluded that wearing masks “did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, the incidence of Sars-Cov-2 (COVID-19) infection” (qtd. by Alex Berenson “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns, Part 3: Masks.” https:www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMCc7357397/).
Yet President Asterisk has ordered us to continue wearing masks, even after we are vaccinated. Wearing a mask, he says, is the patriotic thing to do.
But it is neither patriotic nor helpful. And neither are lockdowns. Some states are seeing a spike in COVID cases, and the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky says she is scared and feels a sense of impending doom about the virus. But the spikes are all in blue states where lockdowns and mask mandates are still in effect. As columnist Wayne Allyn Root explains, “Even though Florida has been wide open (without masks) for almost a year now, even though the state has millions of retired senior citizens, it still has less deaths and hospitalizations right now than most of the know-it-all liberal states that are locked down and run by authoritarian Democratic governors. Florida’s numbers are better than those of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois”(Root, Wayne Allyn, “Why Isn’t Everyone in Florida Dead or In a Hospital.” 21 Mar 2021).
If you compare Florida, a densely populated state, with New York, another densely populated state, you find that Florida, with an open economy and no mask mandate but a much larger senior citizen population, had far fewer COVID deaths than New York with its shutdown and mask mandate. Comparing Florida to California gives you the same results. California has a mask mandate and has been locked down, yet they have slightly more COVID deaths than Florida. Governor Abbott of Texas cancelled the mask mandate and opened the economy fully at the beginning of March to dire warnings of a horrid spike in COVID cases. Instead, the number of COVID cases in Texas has continued to go down for the last month. One writer did a private study of counties in his state with a mask mandate and counties in his state without one. His findings were in line with everything else we have seen. Counties with a mask mandate actually had more COVID cases than counties with no mask mandate. In an interview with Larry O’Connor, Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force said that “Florida did better than 2/3 of the states, and the states that they did better than all did the lockdowns.”
Why? Setting aside the fact that the masks are in and of themselves largely ineffective in protecting either the wearer or someone else from the tiny COVID virus droplets, those who wear a mask tend to feel more secure. They may not wash or sanitize their hands as often. They may not social distance (although since social distancing has now been reduced to 3 feet for school children, it too, comes into question as a reliable deterrent). Those who don’t feel well may go out anyway, thinking their mask will protect others from whatever ails them. And worst of all, cloth masks which should be removed without touching the outside and immediately washed are simply snatched off, stowed somewhere, perhaps in a purse or pocket, and donned again over and over. Likewise, single use surgical masks are reused as well, time after time, instead of being carefully discarded. Mistreatment of masks and reliance upon them, which studies show do not in fact protect against COVID-19, may well be the reason that areas with lockdowns and mask mandates are doing more poorly that those areas without them. In addition, lockdowns force family members together 24 hours a day. If one contracts the disease through contact outside of the home, it will no doubt spread through the household. Another point is that if younger, healthy people have the opportunity to get COVID (in non-lockdown, no mask mandate areas), they develop anti-bodies which then make them immune for perhaps as much as two years. Dr. Markle of Johns Hopkins feels that perhaps two thirds of the population has had and recovered from COVID, which, added to older Americans who have been vaccinated, puts us well on the way to herd immunity.
Herd immunity, which is scoffed at by some Americans, is exactly what has virtually eradicated such diseases as tuberculosis and polio. Because most people are vaccinated against these diseases and thus are immune to them, they cannot contract them and pass them on to others. Thus because the “herd” is immune, everyone is safe. Diseases such as measles only spread in communities where the people are anti-vaccine, a problem which we are now seeing to some extent, thanks to the Democrats’ inability to give credit to President Trump for fast-tracking the development of COVID vaccines. Since they have convinced so many people that the vaccines were developed and given emergency approval by the FDA, they are questionable and perhaps dangerous, Democrats are now struggling to convince people that the vaccines are, in fact, safe (as they always were!) and should be taken.
Despite some spikes in blue states, COVID cases all over the country have fallen by over 70% in the last few weeks. But there is even better news. The national health department of Israel has been keeping a close watch on their population as they have been vaccinated. They are somewhat ahead of us, having vaccinated over a third of their citizens compared to our just under 18%. Their study shows that four weeks after the first shot of Pfizer’s vaccine, an individual is “virtually bulletproof” as far as the virus is concerned. Looking at the data from vaccinated Americans, the CDC determined that individuals are 80% protected a mere two weeks after their first shot with both Moderna and Pfizer and have 90% protection after the second shot. Real life data from Israel shows that the protection is actually the 95% that Pfizer found in their clinical studies. Since Moderna is so similar to the Pfizer vaccine, it is likely that the protection rate from Moderna as well may be closer to the 95% that to the 90% that the CDC has conservatively estimated. Even with those few who happen to get COVID after being vaccinated, they rarely get very sick and no one has died, not even those in nursing homes who have been vaccinated. The virus in their bodies it they are infected is so little that there is very little likelihood that they would spread it to others. In fact, contrary to their call for continued mask wearing, Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the CDC announced “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” she said. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” The CDC was quick to walk back her statement, saying it is possible for someone to contract COVID after having been vaccinated, but as Dr. Walensky said, the data so far show that they don’t get very sick and that they don’t appear to be contagious.
So why wear a mask that studies have shown do not protect you against viruses, especially after you have been vaccinated and are very unlikely to catch COVID and even less likely to spread it to others? Despite the millions who have been vaccinated in Great Britain, in Israel, and in the U.S., not one person has yet been identified as having caught COVID from someone who had been vaccinated! I intend to buy some lace and make myself a mask out of a single layer of lace to wear in those stores that refuse to let me shop unless I wear a face covering. None of their signs define what a face covering is as long as it covers your nose and mouth. My lace mask will do that and drive home my point at the same time. Democrats have spent a year controlling our every move and so indoctrinating people about a virus that kills less than 1% of those infected, that 80% of Americans say they will voluntarily continue wearing masks after they have been vaccinated. I won’t be one of them!