MASKS: not science forcing us to wear them, it’s politics

In the name of Covid, the State has already thrust itself into every corner of the existence.

It has come between husbands and wives at the ends of their lives. It has forbidden the old to embrace their grandchildren. It has denied funerals and weddings, locked the churches, silenced the ancient monastic music of cathedral choirs and prevented the free worship of God for the first time in 800 years, and banned people from holding or attending public meetings. It has ordered to ‘stay at home’, scolded or fined people for sunbathing, going on country rambles or even entering their front gardens. It has forced millions of people to stop working, sabotaged the educations – at school and university – of untold numbers of young people and has become our boss and paymaster in the biggest state takeover of life and work ever attempted by non-Communists.

Soon it will be discovered that it has also wrecked an already wobbly economy and separated untold numbers of the people from jobs and businesses they thought were safe. Soon, too, it will also separate people from their savings, through punishing tax and savage inflation, to pay for the disaster it has caused. It presumes to tell people what to wear. And what they want people to wear is a soggy cloth muzzle, a face-nappy that turns its wearer from a normal human into a mumbling, mouthless submissive.

Why is this frenzy taking place?

On July 12, 2020, Deborah Cohen, the medical correspondent of BBC2’s Newsnight, revealed an astonishing aspect. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had reversed its advice on face masks, from ‘don’t wear them’ to ‘do wear them’. But the key fact was that it had not done so because of scientific information – the evidence had not backed the wearing of face coverings – but because of political lobbying.

She revealed on Twitter that: ‘We had been told by various sources [that the] WHO committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks but they recommended them due to political lobbying.’ She said the BBC had then put this to the WHO, which did not deny it.

In March 2020, the WHO had said: ‘There is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting, including universal community masking, can protect them from infection with respiratory viruses, including Covid-19.’

The American TV news channel CNN reported on March 31, 2020, that Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies programme, had said at a briefing in Geneva: ‘There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.

‘In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.’

After that, the WHO changed its advice to say it ‘advises that governments should encourage the general public to wear masks where there is widespread transmission and physical distancing is difficult, such as on public transport, in shops or in other confined or crowded environments.’

Earlier that same month, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had said that wearing face masks would do little to combat the outbreak. While noting that if someone was infected, they might reduce the danger of spreading the disease by covering their faces, Prof Whitty said wearing a face mask had almost no effect on reducing the risk of contracting the illness. He stated: ‘In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.’

Also in March 2020, the Advertising Standards Authority banned two firms’ advertisements for masks, saying that the adverts were ‘misleading, irresponsible and likely to cause fear without justifiable reason’.

At about the same time, Dr Jenny Harries, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer (UK), warned that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing muzzles. She said masks could ‘actually trap the virus’, and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in. She explained: ‘For the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good idea.’

On April 3, 2020, the other Deputy Chief Medical Officer (UK), Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the UK.

The British Government has also zig-zagged. On June 24, 2020, in a series of official pamphlets for reopening shops and services, the Department for Business and Enterprise said repeatedly: ‘The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.’

This was true at the time and it is still true. The evidence is indeed weak. There is plenty of research showing that the case for muzzles is poor, especially a survey done for the dental profession four years ago, which quietly vanished from the internet after mask opponents began to cite it. The scientific papers in favour of muzzling are full of weak, hesitant words such as ‘probably’, ‘could’ and ‘may’ – which can equally well be expressed as ‘probably not’, ‘could not’ or ‘may not’.

The truth is that the muzzle policy is all about power and fear. The UK Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands. By time, as many people found that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways were necessary to be found to keep up the alarm levels.

One was exposed by the superb scientists of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Puzzled by the way that Covid death figures in England continued to pour in, while they had all but ceased in Scotland, they looked at the figures from Public Health England (PHE).

And they found, in their own devastating words: ‘It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not.

‘PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community. Anyone who has tested Covid positive but subsequently died at a later date of any cause will be included on the PHE Covid death figures.

‘By this PHE definition, no one with Covid in England is allowed to ever recover from their illness. A patient who has tested positive, but been successfully treated and discharged from hospital, will still be counted as a Covid death even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.’

This problem would be avoided by having a simple cut-off, where those who tested positive more than 28 days ago were no longer counted as Covid deaths. Scotland does this. That is why its figures are lower.

Findings were also pouring in which suggested that a horribly high number of the excess deaths during the last few months were not caused by Covid, but by people failing to seek treatment for heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

Despite the propagandists of the BBC, which has tried as hard as it can never to mention the legions of dissenting scientists who dispute the Government’s policy, people were beginning to wonder, in increasing numbers, if they might have been taken for a ride.

This Government (UK) has no great authority. It is a Cabinet of undistinguished, inexperienced unknowns, headed by an exhausted and empty Prime Minister whose sparkle, such as it was, is fast fading.

In a few weeks’ time, the Government faced the onset of what could be the worst economic crisis since 1929. It needed to keep the fear levels up to maintain its authority. One way of doing this was the ceaseless promotion of an alleged ‘second wave’ of Covid, for which there was no evidence. Another was to undertake a ferocious testing policy. This occured in Leicester where testers went from door to door to discover people who are ‘infected’ with Covid, even if they have no symptoms (which is usually the case) and are perfectly healthy. Then they could raise the alarm and close down the city.

But muzzling the populace was even better. People who thought Ministers’ response to the virus was wildly out of proportion, had been able to live amid the propaganda, aiming to stay sane. But the muzzle is a badge of subservience and submission. Anyone who dons it publicly is agreeing to the Government’s crazy assessment of the level of danger.

Societies in which citizens are discouraged from speaking out against the regime, as this has become in most of the world, are pretty disgraceful. But countries where the citizens are compelled to endorse the opinion of the state are a serious step further down the path to totalitarianism. It is even worse than that.

Look at the muzzled multitudes, their wide eyes peering out anxiously from above the hideous gag which obscures half their faces and turns them from normal human beings into mouthless, obedient submissives. The psychological effect of these garments, on those who wear them, is huge. And it also has another nasty result for society as a whole.

Dissenters, who prefer not to muzzle themselves, are made to stand out from the surrendered majority, who then become quite keen on pressuring the non- conformists to do as they are told, and on informing against them.

The same outcome was predicted during the House Arrest period in April 2020 (UK). When all this began, some felt fear. But it was not fear of the disease, which was clearly overstated from the start. It was fear of exactly what is occuring, the final closing down of centuries of human liberty and the changing of the countries into regimented, conformist societies, under perpetual surveillance, in which subservient people scurries about beneath the stern gaze of authority.

 

yogaesoteric
May 27, 2021