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The Most Powerful Argument Against Forced Universal Masking

That You Won't Read In The Establishment Media

Scott Morefield Posted: Jul 03, 2020 12:01 AM

Anytime things go from widely disputed to sudden, virtually-overnight national “scientific consensus,” it’s probably a good idea to be a wee bit skeptical. So it goes with the forced universal masking issue. We’ve obviously run quite the gamut on this, from being told not to wear them at all while the pandemic was at its peak -- and everyone and their neighbor was crowding and swapping moisture particles in Lowe’s and Walmart aisles across America -- to the now almost cultlike, lockstep message from politicians, the media and every leftist still too frightened to come out of their basement that not wearing masks in every possible setting is pretty much the equivalent to stabbing grandma in the heart.

It’s all a farce, of course -- absurd theater forced upon us by people who would have probably believed in witches a few centuries ago. Now that the Karen-caucus has managed to browbeat most Republican lawmakers and even President Trump into some degree of at least verbal submission, they apparently expect the rest of us rubes to take their word for it and follow along. They think if they condescendingly say the words “I wear the mask to protect you and you wear the mask to protect me” enough, everyone will mindlessly obey. And if you don’t, they want to use the force of law to punish you severely.

No, the ongoing, relentless, unceasing crusade to force every American to wear masks to “stop the spread” of coronavirus isn’t about to end anytime soon, if ever. Even with deaths declining, they keep the pot stirred up with panic porn about spikes in new cases and hospitalizations in southern and western states. Nevermind the fact that the so-called “surge” in hospitalizations in Texas turned out to be, as Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel noted, mostly people getting “elective” surgeries that had long been delayed due to coronavirus. So yeah, if you’re a dishonest media hack I guess you could call those “coronavirus-related.” However, the reality isn’t what the media panic-inducers want to convey, which is probably why you thought the hospitals were getting filled with actual, life-threatening COVID-19 cases until you read this.

As far as whether or not masking actually works to “stop the spread” of coronavirus, I can point to studies (assuming - and this is a big assumption - that Big Tech allows them to remain online), and the masking proponents can as well. We can go back and forth on the potential long-term dangers posed by non-medically trained people wearing, breathing through, touching and constantly fiddling with veritable Petri dishes for several hours a day (I’m right, they’re wrong, but whatever …). We can even debate whether forced-masking is truly an infringement on personal freedoms (it is) or discuss the validity of the view, popular among many go-along-to-get-along Christians these days, that masking is somehow the key to “loving your neighbor” (it’s not).

Does masking work? (Maybe.) How well? (Hard to say.) Is it 100 percent safe? (Doubt it. Even assuming you’re getting enough oxygen, how can breathing in your own germs all the time be ‘safe’?) Does God say one must put on a face diaper to properly “love your neighbor”? (LOL Uh, no.) Should freedom-centric societies force it on their citizens who aren’t obviously sick? (Hell no!) Certainly, we can argue over any of those issues and maybe never come to an agreement. I’ll admit it has become a politicized issue. Either position can sound convincing when considered without looking at the other side, and people generally have by-and-large made up their minds before even weighing the other side of their own view.

However, what most advocates ignore is one key observation that makes forced universal masking an insane and unnecessary policy choice in most situations, and that is this: even if masking worked, wasn’t dangerous at all and was not seen by millions as a pernicious tool of social control, I see no valid reason why we would want to stop the spread of the virus at this point.

There, I said it. The most powerful argument against universal masking is that it could in fact work to slow the spread of coronavirus. Please stay with me. I’m not saying we shouldn’t protect those who are vulnerable to the virus. Had we properly protected those in nursing homes, for example, we could have saved half the people who actually have died from this thing. Nevertheless, the facts are these: the virus is spreading at a rapid rate, but deaths have not spiked and have even decreased. The average age of those who are getting it is significantly younger than it was two months ago. And we’re not sure about this yet, but it also seems to have mutated into a weaker version that is more transmissible but less lethal than the version we saw in April.

The fact is, for all the suffering COVID-19 has caused among the elderly and immunocompromised, the actual death rate currently stands at less than half a percent and is declining rapidly as antibody studies come to light. The CDC recently estimated that 10 times the known cases have likely had the disease already and recovered. That’s probably a lowball estimate, but it equates to upwards of 10 percent of the U.S. population. As young people spread this seemingly milder version around while older folks take precautions, we’re ever closer to reaching herd immunity, which one recent study said can be attained with as little as 43 percent contracting the disease. That may still be a few months away, but in all honesty, it could be our only way out of this. They keep talking about vaccines, but no successful coronavirus vaccine has ever been produced and there’s little reason to think it will be now, nor that anything they roll out this quickly will be truly safe anyway.

So, if we aren’t overwhelming hospitals and people aren’t dying in droves, community spread is actually a good thing, especially when most cases are either mild or asymptomatic. Yes, it would take several months to get any degree of herd immunity, but that would surely be better than living forever like we've been living the past three months, no? What’s the alternative, living with this virus on the prowl for years, even decades? Masks forever? Endless, rotating shutdowns? The end of mass gatherings and sports? And if Democrats win, God forbid, an ever-encroaching police state hellbent on using this virus to torment us and our liberties until their Bolshevik dreams become a reality?

Dr. Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, also made the case during a recent Fox News appearance: “We like the fact that there’s a lot of cases in low-risk populations because that’s exactly how we are going to get herd immunity, population immunity. When low-risk people with no significant problem handling this virus, which is basically 99% of people, get this and they become immune ... they block the pathways of connectivity to more contagious, older, sicker people.”

Truly, is there any logical reason why those who are elderly, immunocompromised or even frightened about the virus couldn’t wear a mask that really protects them, like an n95, and let everyone else live their lives? Like it or not, herd immunity could be our only way out of this mess, our only way back to any sense of normalcy. The quicker that arrives, the safer those truly vulnerable to this epidemic will be.

Masks Will Save Lives! (Fact Check: Mostly False!)

Ted Noel - Posted: Jul 03, 2020 12:01 AM

Almost every MSM “expert” is loudly and proudly claiming that if you wear a mask in public, you’ll save lives. In fact, by wearing a mask, you are probably endangering your own life.

Before you tar and feather me, note that I am a physician. I do not play one on TV like Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx. I spent thirty-six years wearing a surgical mask on a daily basis. And it always felt so good to take it off when I left the operating room. I didn’t realize why until recently.

We wore masks in the OR because they were supposed cut down on wound infections from pathogens in our mouths. This turns out to be false. But when my partners were presented with the evidence that we should stop wearing masks, they demurred. Masks were still useful virtue signaling. And they all still ripped their masks off the moment they could.

Then Lincoln Park, New Jersey, police reported on a driver who passed out and crashed while wearing a mask. Low oxygen and high carbon dioxide levels were blamed. As an anesthesiologist, this was right down my alley. So I did some grade school arithmetic informed by detailed knowledge of respiratory physiology.

Your lungs are attached to airways that conduct nice fresh air into the alveoli (air sacs). The trouble is that some of that fresh air never gets to the lungs to do its job because it’s in that “anatomic dead space.” And when you breathe out, you fill that dead space with used air, so that’s the first air back in. (The physics of fluid flow is a bit more complicated, but you get the picture.) In your next resting (tidal) breath, you have to start with old air, then get fresh air, and then fill the dead space as you move that fresh air into the alveoli. For a “standard” 150 pound adult, the numbers look like this (ignoring water vapor, which makes it worse).

Normal tidal breathing
Tidal volume (resting breath)                   500 milliliters
Subtract stale dead space                      -150 ml
Subtract end-tidal dead space                -150 ml
           Net fresh air                                  200 ml

If you’re wearing a close fitting mask (surgical, cloth, N95) the picture changes because that mask will not allow free exchange of air with the room. If we assume that the volume between your face and the mask is 50 ml, then this volume becomes a mechanical addition to your anatomic dead space. (Before you skewer me, remember that this discussion involves a daily issue in my medical practice for 36 years.) The numbers look like this.

Tidal breathing with close fitting mask
Tidal volume (resting breath)                   500 milliliters
Subtract stale dead space                      -200 ml
Subtract end-tidal dead space                -200 ml
         Net fresh air                              100 ml

Not good. It’s much like breathing in the paper bag to get your CO2 up when you’ve been hyperventilating. But this time you started at normal and added the paper bag, which has 16% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide instead of 21% oxygen and 0% carbon dioxide. Your CO2 starts at normal and goes up. Your O2 starts at normal and goes down. Now you are smarter than Facebook’s fact checker. But what should we expect from a “journalist” who’s trained in “political science?”

What happens with low oxygen? You get air hunger and breathe harder unless you’re one of the ten percent with Altitude/Mountain Sickness, which lets your oxygen keep falling. Air hunger isn’t comfortable, and getting that mask off relieves it. High CO2 also creates air hunger. It dilates blood vessels in the brain, causing the headache so many mask wearers complain about. At high levels it can cause drowsiness, which is probably why that lady in New Jersey served up a sheet metal salad.

If the only thing that masks did was cause headaches, we might write them off as worth the trouble. But we already know that they don’t do anything to protect us from getting sick. That alone should be enough to reject them. But the two types of mask that supposedly filter out bad stuff – N95 and cloth – can give you Wuhan Flu. You heard me right.

Go to your air conditioner and pull out that filter you forgot to change two months ago. The front side is covered with gray stuff. Now turn it over. Do you see all that crud coming out the back to fill your ducts with mold? That’s your face mask, just bigger. N95s, cloth masks, and your A/C filter are “depth filters.” When they get full, crud “spills over” to the back side where you are. If that crud is SARS CoV-2, then you just got more virus exposure than walking into the ICU without any PPE at all.

N95s take a while to load up, but they still have to be discarded or re-sterilized at least daily. Cloth masks are worse. They let up to 97% of virus particles through. The other 3% take up residence on the fibers, accumulating as the day goes on. You can wash a fabric mask, and your eight dollar N95 can be cleaned by hanging it out in sunlight for a couple of hours. Solar UV works wonders. But how many people are going to do any of those things?

Why does the CDC still pound the table with the idea that we should all wear face coverings? When you read the literature, and then examine the CDC website, one thing jumps out. Every pro-mask author brushes aside all the negative data with “masks may help.” MAY help. This is wishful thinking. The data that they will help doesn’t exist.

In the scientific literature, this would be called a “Class D” recommendation. It is “expert opinion,” supposedly based on first principles. When there is no literature support, professional society guidelines will normally state that “expert opinion suggests… but we can make no recommendations.” Properly understood, this means, “We have no opinion.”

But the basketball player and scarf queen seem very adamant that we should wear masks. One must ask why they are so sure. Since nothing either one has recommended has been correct, it seems that they have decided that virtue signaling will keep their fifteen minutes of fame going. They have chosen a “Scientific Wild-Assed Guess” as their foundation.

It’s time to cut America free from the shackles imposed by a “scientific” priesthood of bureaucrats.