Yesterday we held the first meeting of the Edgar County Retired Teachers’ Association since early December of 2019. Everyone in attendance had been fully vaccinated, and because we did not require it, no one wore a mask. And why should they have? The medical community knows that a small number of people do not respond well to vaccines. For them, instead of full immunity, their bodies may only create enough antibodies to reduce to severity of COVID, not protect against catching it. However, of those individuals, most have had very mild cases with only a few needing hospitalization. And to date, no one, not in the United States, not in Israel, not in Great Britain, all of whom have vaccinated more of their population than other countries to date, none of them can point to a case of someone catching COVID from someone who has been vaccinated! Vaccination protects both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated they encounter! Furthermore, according to the CDC’s own figures, among those who have been fully vaccinated in the U.S., only 0.0058% of them have later contracted the virus. A 0.0058% chance of being one of those in whom the vaccine did not confer complete immunity is a very, very small chance, making such an occurrence very rare indeed.
In their generosity, the CDC just gave the following guidelines for fully vaccinated individuals:
Fully vaccinated people can:
- ·Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing
- Visit with unvaccinated people (including children) from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing
- Participate in outdoor activities and recreation without a mask, except in certain crowded settings and venues
- Resume domestic travel and refrain from testing before or after travel or self-quarantine after travel
- Refrain from testing following a known exposure, if asymptomatic, with some exceptions for specific setting (such as?)
- Refrain from quarantine following a known exposure if asymptomatic
But conservatives have been basically saying this for months! Jayanta Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who also has a Ph.D. in economics, had this to say about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “We had a two-hour conversation, about COVID policies, this is in September of last year . . . and he had read all the papers I referenced and not just my articles, lots and lots of other papers. He knew all the details, it was a remarkable conversation.” And what did Governor DeSantis recently say about vaccinated individuals? “You are immune. Act like it!”
Tucker Carlson of FOX remarked a day before the CDC’s rather obvious new rules, “Masks have always been incompatible with a free society. We used to know that. Masks strip people of their identity as individuals. Mask transform people from citizens into drones. They isolate us. They alienate us. They shut us off from one another. They prevent intimacy and human contact. If I can’t see your face, I can’t know you. Masks are for the guilty. They’re signifiers of shame and submission.”
MIT just published a study in which they discovered that “social distancing” and “masking” are both ineffective against the virus. (How many people do you know who were careful to social distance, rarely went out in public, always wore a mask and still ended up with COVID? I know of several, including my daughter who works at a hospital and wore an N95 mask every day, then stripped and showered as soon as she got home.) MIT researchers found that whether you sit three feet, six feet, or sixty feet from someone, even wearing masks, you have an equal chance of getting COVID. Masks, they explained, force the air the wearer is expelling upward out of the mask and the germs in that breath descend again often many feet away, even across a large room.
I have reported on numerous studies on the ineffectiveness of masks, including one where COVID patients put on surgical masks (the blue ones ) and coughed into petri dishes. Every single petri dish grew the COVID virus. Hence, the masks had done nothing to prevent the expulsion of the viral particles into the air. A study by the CDC in the early 2000s, which I have referenced before, found that surgical masks did not protect against viral infections. Even the FDA says on a website about different types of masks that surgical masks do not protect either the wearer or another individual from viral droplets which are so tiny that they pass through the masks.
More people probably wear cloth masks (Russ got a St. Louis Cardinals cloth mask for Christmas) than wear the surgical masks, and they are even less effective. Studies have shown that they only stop 3% of the viral particles. If you are talking to someone who is infected, even if you are both wearing cloth masks, 94% of the viral particles that the infected individual breathes out are coming right through your mask. Masking, social distancing, and shutdowns have proven to be largely ineffective as many studies have now shown. Compare Florida with no mask mandate and no shutdown with both California and New York state, both of whom have tough restrictions. Florida’s population is higher than New York’s and its number of senior citizens, the most vulnerable to this disease, is considerably higher than either California or New York. Yet Florida’s number of cases is about the same as California’s and far fewer than New York’s.
Nick Silver, a liberal commentator, has pointed out that media coverage of COVID leans heavily on a doomsday scenario, grimly reporting the number of deaths and cases day by day (deaths which are often people who die of other things after having been diagnosed with COVID), and predicting horrendously more deaths from a 4th wave which has never come or from the variants which the vaccines seem to be dealing with effectively. He says, “ One way in which COVID media coverage is skewed is there’s tons of attention to wherever cases are rising but little to where they’re declining. e.g. Cases are “plunging” in NYC right now but there’s almost no stories about that after weeks of scary news about variants, etc.” He goes on to say that as the older population is being vaccinated, hospitalizations among younger people are rising. Still, he points out, “Data on national hospitalization rates . . . for age 19-49 they’ve swayed around a bit but pretty steady and fairly low.”
We are beating this thing, but those who love control do not want to admit it. Look how easily and quickly we all donned masks and stayed home when we were told we could catch this virus easily and if we did we would very likely die from it. Fear is a great motivator, and way too many of us still suffer from fear! But fear robs us of logic and causes us to give up our freedoms without a murmur. It is time to take our freedom back. Don’t wear a mask. You don’t need to. If you have been immunized against COVID, immunization means conferring immunity. As Gov. Ron DeSantis says, “ You are immune. Act like it!”