It’s Time to End the Mask Madness

An intervention for these crazy face-obscured times, with strategic memes to take the edge off

I don’t particularly want to write about masks again. There are far more important issues to be getting emotionally worked up over at the moment.

Regrettably, however, we do seem to be at a bit of a crossroads. The shine has worn off — just like the jibby jabs, but that’s for another time — and it is starting to seem like perhaps masks weren’t quite all they were cracked up to be. The reality is really starting to sink in that for most of us — some of my fellow introverts notwithstanding — we would rather not have to wear them unless really necessary. But, yet, masks still linger — not unlike gas in an enclosed room with the windows closed, restricting breath and causing discomfort in a way that could be easily avoided with a full assessment of the situation.

Our society appears to be suffering from an acute case of Mask Madness: and now we are getting the children involved as well. This time however, rather than being the silent source of this aforementioned creeping discomfort, they are the ones suffering most: being subtly conditioned into a masked social reality, believing they are walking disease vectors needing to be separated. An intervention is clearly needed.

So I have to write about masks again. But if I’m going to do it, there has to be memes. This time: The Princess Bride memes.

The last time I wrote about masks, I tried to be as charitable as possible. I stayed firmly on the fence with splinters entrenched in my backside, without committing firmly to their effectiveness or otherwise. My main point was instead this: the scientific support for the effectiveness of masks and mask mandates against the spread of respiratory illness is nothing like we are lead to believe. As such, we are wearing and mandating them largely as an article of faith, rather than of science. 

So where exactly are we in Mask Madness atm?

Well, basically, the mask debate is a hot mess. Far too many of my fellow conspiracy folk chose mask mandates as their hill to die on, thus spending valuable conspiracy capital that would have been better saved for the jibby jab fight. Claiming that masks are useless, disease-carrying, oxygen-depriving face diapers is also alienating and entirely unhelpful when a decent proportion of the population has no choice but to wear masks in their professional lives.

To be fair, on the advocacy side, things are little better: the discourse has been poisoned by moral pandering (i.e. sacrificing comfort to wear a mask makes me a better person than you); emotional fear-mongering (i.e. only a grandma-killer would think they are above mask mandates) and the aforementioned faith based-based policy making (i.e. putting a miscellaneous face covering over our ‘Rona germ holes must automatically equate to improved public health outcomes).

This latter point is central to understanding the nature of the madness we have arrived at. What seems to be happening, in short, is that we are normalising mask wearing to an extent not actually supported by The Science. Ahh, The Science! But which science?

Yes, The Science provides clear evidence that masks of different varieties can effectively stop respiratory particles, including (depending on the type of mask) these strange things we call viruses. Who woulda thunk? But what The Science also says is that, time and time again, studies have found mask wearing and mask mandates to have no impact on reducing the spread of respiratory illness. Hmm? Truly, a revelation that might just make a discerning person question the role of viruses as a vector of disease in the way we have been demanded to believe — but that wombat hole is for another time.

This latter contribution of The Science needs to be reiterated, as it is the only one that matters from a public health standpoint. As such, it is the fundamental starting point for dipping your toes into the Mask Madness waters. If we look back to before this pandemic, before the issue of masks was insanely politicised, there was virtually no scientific support for such mandates: numerous controlled population studies found no decrease in infection/illness rates from mask wearing.

With this in mind, the burden of proof is quite clearly not on us narrative challengers to show beyond reasonable doubt that masks will all of a sudden serve any purpose beyond comfort, symbology and identity — not to mention a healthy dash of virtue signalling. It is up to those who still advocate for mandatory masks in any type of public setting — especially when applied to children — to show that this is a scientifically valid position. And this is where things get awkward.

Look, let’s not be too harsh on ourselves. The scientific landscape is not as it was in the BC (Before Covid) Era. Real time evidence has been flying at us, pointing in both directions — or no direction — making for a confusing situation for anyone except the most hardened expert or objective researcher. 

For example, we have this creatively designed narrative review, which overcomes the lack of well-designed studies showing the effectiveness of face masks by coming up with its own model to do just that! Someone needs to tell these scientists that if they want to be creative, the Humanities building is over the other side of the campus. 

But then we have the counter analyses. For example, a more recent meta-analysis that concluded: “there is limited available preclinical and clinical evidence for face mask benefit in SARS‐CoV‐2”. Other analyses are not so lenient, including this exhaustive and particularly convincing effort from Swiss Policy Research.

Truly, who does one believe in these scientifically-schismed times?

At this point, it is worth reiterating that this diatribe is not about categorically proving that masks are useless at best and harmful at worse (yes, there is evidence that mask wearing comes with health risks). I mean, I still lean towards them doing ‘something’ — a fairly unpopular conclusion for a conspiracy theorist. But there is no reason to believe they do enough to conclusively outweigh the potential risks and additional social drawbacks of normalising mask wearing.

This is especially the case when you start to see how just how desperate mask advocates have to get to make their case. 

One of the best sources of truth on such divisive issues is to look to official sources. No, not in that way: rather than just taking their directives as an accurate reflection on the science, we can look at just how tortured and tenuous the evidence is that they present to support their directives. 

This was what originally woke me up to the truly dire state of the pro-mask case: just how weak the original arguments were in official reviews of the evidence. Many of the most trumpeted studies concluding for mask effectiveness have been widely and often savagely dissected by armchair science researchers (see this example from one of my favourite writers on Covid science). 

The most notable example however was the study undertaken by the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in America. The CDC had at their disposal all the accumulated data from almost a year of the pandemic. If the media would have you believe it, the results were beyond argument: the science was now officially settled, mask mandates are saving lives, and those advocating for their removal are nothing short of grandma killers.

What they actually presented was a cherry picked analysis of selected supportive case studies that still only showed a modest decrease in areas with more strict masking requirements.

Credit where credit is due. The CDC study did its valiant best to work with the available data to make the case for mask wearing. That is essentially the best they have. 

Since its release, the evidence has continued to pile in from real world settings, essentially presenting a series of randomised control trials between comparative jurisdictions with and without mask mandates. You can go to this blog (called ‘Unmasked”: zing) that shows with monotonous repetition almost identical Covid trajectories across dozens of individual case studies. 

Most humorously (and the main reason why this blog has become so popular) is the juxtaposing of these trajectories against the failed predictions of public health ‘experts’. It is truly uncanny how many times case lines have skyrocketed just after major proclamations about the effectiveness of masks, and how doomsday prophecies on the lifting of mandates have failed to materialise. 

Just for good measure, the comparative analyses in this blog also clearly show, virtually beyond reasonable doubt, that mask wearing has not been responsible for the apparent miraculous disappearance of the ‘flu. There’s another porkie they still want you to believe.

How much more obvious does it need to get? These examples are clearly more convincing against the effectiveness of masks than any data-based case for them, and they show time and again the people making these arguments are wrong time and again in reality.

I would suggest that the accepted narrative — masks actually are a legitimately effective public health measure in a pandemic remains — only remains locked in place, despite the contrary evidence, by the toxic ego of Scientism: we couldn’t possibly have got this one wrong! Inconceivable! The mandates must continue, now for children!

So that’s why I’m calling it now: the maskers have had long enough. Long enough to make their case, to crunch the wealth of controlled and real world data from around the world and put forward their evidence to convince us that mask wearing for healthy, asymptomatic people should be a thing. Especially when it is now encroaching dangerously on children. 

So the gloves are off. It’s over, mask bros. This rubbish has to stop. We got it wrong. 

Sure, there are lessons to be learned. Maybe there is some underlying desire in many people to have their face covered — something that might even cause a second thought about the reasons why certain people do so for reasons of faith. Maybe the fact that masks can simultaneously stop ‘viral’ particles while not stopping the spread of respiratory illnesses would suggest ‘viruses’ aren’t the major factor in these illnesses than what we have been lead to believe? 

But they are deeper questions. Let’s get back to the point at hand. 

If you want to keep wearing a mask, then go ahead — particularly if it makes you feel safe. It may even do something to ‘stop the spread’, you never know; science can always end up being wrong. But leave the rest of us out of your beliefs, please. Mainly the children.