Social Distancing and the Mask Masquerade

When The Great Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 hit the United States, many Americans were more than willing to wear masks and maintain social distancing to "flatten the curve."

... Then came protests featuring thousands of activists across the nation -- social distancing be damned.

Not even Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, the pandemic's two most visible experts, initially expressed concern -- let alone alarm -- about the blatant disregard of health protocols when the protests began. Indeed, Fauci waited 12 days after Floyd’s death to comment publicly.

Many Americans now realize that they have been -- and continue to be -- deceived. Meanwhile, their emotional and psychological health rapidly deteriorate because of draconian mandates ostensibly designed to protect them....

So what do "progressives" and their Democratic minions want? At least three things, as FrontPage magazine showed in the article, "Liberal Masquerade."

Social distancing is not about containing the Covid-19 virus. It is about destroying the American people....

... Despite a recent increase in cases, the death toll declined for nine successive weeks as of June 27. On July 3, the Centers for Disease Control announced it would stop classifying the outbreak as an epidemic if the death toll continues decreasing.

Nevertheless, the Democrats demand that every American wear a mask to decrease the risk of transmission. Governors, mostly Democrats, are mandating masks in public....

In April, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study showing that neither cloth nor medical masks can stop Covid-19 transmission. The virus is smaller than the particles that the masks can block....

In 2015, researchers published the first randomized control study about the effects of cloth masks on health-care workers as opposed to medical masks. That study in the British Medical Journal reported that workers wearing cloth masks were 13 times more likely to contract the flu than those wearing medical masks. Cloth masks allowed 97 percent of viruses to penetrate while medical masks allowed 44 percent.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted early in the pandemic that masks have extremely limited utility.

"The masks are important for someone who's infected to prevent them from infecting someone else," Fauci said in March. "When you are in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel better, and it might even block a droplet. But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. Right now, in the United States people should not be walking around with masks."

If that was true in March, why is it no longer true in July?...

Finally, and most importantly, the Democrats are conditioning Americans to accept authoritarianism blindly....

"Mandatory masks are a critical predicate conditioning us to accept abuses of our liberty," said Molly McCann, who joined Sidney Powell in getting Gen. Michael Flynn's perjury case dismissed.

"Mandatory masking provides the foundation on which governments continue to justify emergency measures and rule by executive fiat, and it creates a national mood of consent that America will accept indefinite government expansion because we face a 'new normal.' "

When China first deployed lockdown in January to “defeat COVID-19,” The Washington Post approvingly quoted a Georgetown University professor as saying, “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective…”

In March, Imperial College London's dire projections influenced the White House, but a careful reading of the advice contained in the Imperial College report reveals that its authors knew lockdown alone could not eliminate any infections, only delay them: “The more successful a strategy is at temporary suppression,” it stated, “the larger the later epidemic is predicted to be in the absence of vaccination, due to lesser build-up of herd immunity.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pandemic planning documents state non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing are ineffective once a disease infects 1% of a region's population. Literature on this subject is unanimous worldwide. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control:

“There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread. It is hard to imagine that measures like those within the category of social distancing would not have some positive impact by reducing transmission of a human respiratory infection . . . However, the evidence base supporting each individual measure is often weak.”

... before the big media push for universal masking, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued guidance for respiratory protection for workers exposed to people with the virus. It stated clearly what governments had said all along about other forms of airborne contamination, such as smoke inhalation — "Surgical masks and eye protection (e.g., face shields, goggles) were provided as an interim measure to protect against splashes and large droplets (note: surgical masks are not respirators and do not provide protection against aerosol-generating procedures)."...

In other words, they knew that because the virions of coronavirus are roughly 100 nanometers, 1/1000 the width of a hair and 1/30 the size of surgical mask filtrations (about 3.0 microns or 3,000 nanometers), surgical masks (not to mention cloth ones) do not help. This would explain why experience has shown that all of the places with universal mask orders in place for months, such as Japan, Hong Kong, Israel, France, Peru, Philippines, Hawaii, California, and Miami, failed to stave off the spread of the infection. Surgical masks could possibly stop large droplets from those coughing with very evident symptoms, but would not stop the flow of aerosolized airborne particles, certainly not from asymptomatic individuals....

The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford also summarized six international studies which "showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers."...

Quebec's public health director Horacio Arruda told the Montreal Gazette that masks are counterproductive. Arruda's guidance as given in the article states that masks "get saturated with moisture from the mouth and nose after about 20 minutes. Once they're wet, they no longer form a barrier against viruses trying to come through or exit." ...

Dr. Jeffery Klausner, an infectious disease doctor at UCLA, described mask-wearing in early February as all psychological, not physiological. He told the Los Angeles Times that "fear spreads a lot faster than the virus" and that a mask only "makes you feel better." ...

In reality, these same desperate measures were tried in 1918, and even then, it was understood that they didn't work....