New Study: Face Masks are Still Useless and Counterproductive
Here in Australia, masks are like our ex-politicians: They just won't go away.
A surprising number of people persist in wearing masks, despite clinical trials consistently showing they confer no benefit in the prevention of respiratory infections. They do not protect against influenza, including the re-branded "COVID" version allegedly caused by someone, who has never been identified, who ate a bat or pangolin purchased at a Wuhan market that did not sell any bats or pangolins.
Elderly people seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to masking, proving advanced age is no guarantee of wisdom. Unless they exercise and maintain a high level of fitness (and rest assured, the overwhelming majority of Australians don’t), the elderly suffer a marked decrease in lung function, which means they need all the fresh, oxygen-replete air they can get. Many Australian seniors, however, instead choose to place a covering over their mouths in 30C+ heat and rebreathe their stale, exhaled CO2-rich breath.
Just brilliant.
And that unique brand of paranoid nutter - the masked car driver, sitting in his sealed mobile chamber, diligently protecting himself from himself - can still be seen with disturbing frequency here in the sunburnt colony.
In several Australian states (Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Northern Territory, South Australia and Tasmania), it is still mandatory to wear masks in hospital and health care facilities.
This is despite yet another respected research group concluding there is no clinical evidence to show masks prevent respiratory infections.
Yet Another International FAIL For Masks
Recently, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews published an updated analysis of the efficacy of several measures, including face masks, for the prevention of respiratory infections.
The review, titled "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses" was conducted by a collaboration of researchers hailing from the UK, Australia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Belgium and Canada.
The updated Cochrane review once again confirms what many of us so-called 'conspiracy theorists' have been saying all along: There is no evidence to support the claim masks can prevent or even slow the spread of respiratory infections.
These infections, remember, are supposedly caused by viruses so infinitesimally small we need an electron microscope to view them. Yet we are supposed to believe a porous piece of fabric will effectively block these submicroscopic particles and stop people from getting sick.
It should come as little surprise to anyone with a functioning cerebrum that the Cochrane review found "Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness/COVID‐19" when compared to not wearing masks (bold emphasis added).
Medical/Surgical Masks
For their analysis of medical/surgical masks, the Cochrane reviewers found wearing a mask "may make little to no difference" in how many people developed a flu/COVID-like illness and "probably makes little or no difference" in how many people have flu/COVID confirmed by a laboratory test.
N95 Masks
As for the supposedly superior N95/P2 respirators, four studies in healthcare workers and one small community study found that, compared with wearing medical or surgical masks, use of N95/P2 respirators "probably makes little to no difference" in how many people have confirmed flu, how many people develop a flu-like illness, or respiratory illness.
Side Effects of Masks
Adverse events were not reported consistently and could not be meta-analysed. In studies that did bother reporting them, side effects of medical/surgical masks included warmth, discomfort, respiratory difficulties, humidity, pain, and shortness of breath, in up to 45% of participants.
Only one N95 mask trial reported detailed adverse events: Discomfort was reported in 41.9% of N95 wearers versus 9.8% of medical mask wearers; headaches were more common with N95 masks (13.4% versus 3.9%); difficulty breathing was reported more often in the N95 group (19.4% versus 12.5%); and N95 masks caused more problems with pressure on the nose (52.2% versus 11.0%).
The appalling oligarch-funded Bangladesh Mask Study, where over 178,000 participants were randomized to the mask intervention, claimed "No adverse events were reported."
Sure.
The Bangladesh Mask Study, by the way, was the only mask trial that scored "high risk" by the Cochrane reviewers on 5 of six measures of bias. It should be noted the Bangladesh Mask Study also failed to show efficacy for masks, however the results were shamelessly distorted by both the researchers and an ever-compliant mainstream media into appearing supportive. The study has been roundly debunked by those outside the corporate media; my own explanations of why this study was a complete farce can be found here and here.
In contrast, the higher quality Danish Mask Study - which authorities and media robots attacked after it failed to support the mask thesis - rated "low risk" for 3 measures of bias, "high" for 2 measures, and "unclear" on the remaining measure.
I guess the lesson here is that when ‘authorities’ and the media tell you something, you should strongly consider the opposite may be true.
An Update on the Update
The Cochrane review incorporated studies whose results were available as of October 2022. Since that cut-off point, one of the mask trials the researchers noted was in progress has now been published.
Loeb et al 2022, involved 1,009 health care workers from Canada, Israel, Pakistan and Egypt. The participants were randomly assigned to medical masks or N95 respirators. After a mean follow-up of nine weeks, "RT-PCR–confirmed COVID-19" occurred in 52 of 497 (10.46%) medical mask participants versus 47 of 507 (9.27%) in the N95 respirator group.
There were 47 (10.8%) adverse events related to the intervention reported in the medical mask group and 59 (13.6%) in the N95 respirator group.
Once again, 'superior' N95 masks failed to evince any superiority over ineffective surgical/medical masks.
And what about those patently ridiculous ‘face shields’?
Windscreens Are For Cars
A small trial in Colombia involved 316 people randomized to wear either a surgical mask, or a surgical mask together with a face shield. After attrition, which was higher in the face shield group, 285 participants remained, with data from 283 being used for the efficacy analysis.
The researchers claim “no competing interests,” but that's a stretch given they are sponsored by the United Nations and some of their employers include the United Nations Development Programme in Bogota and the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation & Design, New Haven, USA. In 2020, these two entities collaborated with the Colombia Makers community to develop a closed face shield prototype to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection called “Cascos de Vida."
During the 21-day follow-up period, the primary outcome (a positive SARS-CoV-2 test result) was identified in 1 participant in the shield+mask group, versus 3 of the mask-only participants. The numbers were so small as to be largely meaningless, and to their credit the researchers reported the results in absolute percentage terms: A piddling 1.4% difference.
Not so admirable was their insistence on trying to salvage this meaningless outcome into something it wasn't. The study, they kept writing, demonstrated the "non-inferiority" of face shields. And while admitting "no statistically significant differences were observed," they wrote "we believe that there is a clinical, social, and public health significance if at least three COVID-19 cases were prevented with this intervention, especially if these cases would have had a severe or even fatal outcome."
We can safely dismiss this as barrel-scraping, given that the survival rate of the disease formerly known as influenza, now routinely dubbed COVID-19, is 99.95% in under 70s and that the median age of the Colombian subjects was 36.
To learn why you'd pretty much need a sealed, full face helmet to protect yourself from someone's sneezed and airborne droplets, Japanese researchers explained the fluid dynamics that render face shields ineffective in a 2020 paper and an accompanying video.
In Conclusion
The first Cochrane review analysing the efficacy of masks for the prevention of respiratory infections was published in 2007. The evidence back then failed to show any efficacy and, despite a host of new trials since then, there is still no evidence. To the contrary, masks have repeatedly shown themselves to be a dismal failure in preventing influenzas, including the 2019 sham known as "COVID-19."
This of course, has done nothing to stop our inherently dishonest health authorities, governments and mainstream journalists from falsely claiming masks are an effective measure against “COVID.” A prime example of the latter is the shameless Guardian writer Sisonke Msimang, who in July 2022 - some fifteen years after the first Cochrane review found no efficacy for masks - wrote an article titled:
"Australia needs mask mandates again – they’re based on science, not populism."
Her evidence for this patently false claim?
She has none, of course. Despite her headline featuring the word “science,” there is no attempt whatsoever to discuss any mask research in her article. Instead, we are treated to the usual anti-US rhetoric, along with the left's trademark derision of people who "don’t do the right thing" ("the right thing," of course, being determined by clueless lefties). Trump also gets a few mentions, although it remains unclear just what a former Epstein associate who repeatedly makes creepy remarks about his own daughter and wears a mask has to do with mask science?
My guess is that, like most press robots, Msimang doesn't have a clue.
Msimang and her ilk claim to be adhering to the science, but in reality they wouldn't know a peer-reviewed paper if it crawled up their keester and launched a symposium. These mainstream hacks are the epitome of anti-science, nothing but compliant regurgitators of utterly false, agenda-driven hogwash.
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