Masking the Right Questions

I’ve just got back from a trip up to Manchester with my daughters. We went to see my mum for a few days. Mum entertained us all.

She offered us some plums. I thought I’d bought plum tomatoes, she said, but when I got home I found out they were just plums.

At the Italian restaurant on Saturday she decided she didn’t want a starter and just ordered a pizza for a main. Me and the girls decided to order some starters to share. One of them arrived, the goat’s cheese baked in a very light filo pastry with tapenade and chilli salsa and crystallized beetroot, and ended up being placed in front of mum. She looked at me and said “this doesn’t look like pizza” and then proceeded to tuck in and eat the whole thing.

Mum’s a treasure, and takes the subsequent affectionate teasing with good grace, although she does give as good she gets. There were quite a few incidents like this over the weekend and much fun was had by all.

It reminded me of masks. We were sold one thing, or we thought one thing, only to subsequently discover we’d been fooled, or were wrong.

The issue of masking is (yet another) one of those things I can add to the growing list of stuff that triggers a kind of WTF response in me. We shouldn’t be here, in 2023, still having to argue about the (alleged) effectiveness of masking to prevent the spread of an airborne aerosolized respiratory virus.

Despite the authors of the recent Cochrane review saying (and I paraphrase somewhat)

We looked for evidence that masks work
We couldn’t find any

there are still a number of people, and mainstream publications, who cannot bring themselves to “follow the science” and maintain what can now be seen to be their religious faith in the efficacy of masks.

I’m going to try to convince you, not that any of you need convincing, that for surgical masks at least, we should have been astonished had we found them to be effective.

The right questions, like so much regarding the CoronaDoom, were never asked at the beginning.

Why should we expect (surgical) masks to work at all?

The answer is - we shouldn’t.

Let’s outline the case (again) why, from first principles, masks should never have even got off the ground (or out of the box and on your face).

In order to understand why masks became the 2020 equivalent of a religious talisman to ward off evil we have to start with some model, some basic idea, of the how; how do we think people transmit respiratory viruses and how others become infected?

This understanding can essentially be summed up in a simple graphic

I’m trying not to giggle as I write this, but it really does seem like some people (including some scientists) pretty much had this kind of idea in mind.

God help us.

A more “sophisticated” model was adopted by most

These simple graphics, together with the simple transmit/infect model, demonstrate the property that masks MUST have if they are to be effective (assuming the model is in any way representative of the reality of transmission/infection)

The first misconception, shared by many (on both sides of the ‘debate’), is that (surgical) masks act as some kind of filter which the exhaled breath passes through.

This is simply not true.

They act, as can easily be demonstrated¹, primarily as a barrier. Even air molecules have difficulty in passing through a typical surgical mask.

A barrier can also have filtration properties. Here we would have to imagine the air particles bouncing off the barrier and the “bad” particles sticking to the surface of the barrier.

That this doesn’t happen to any great extent can also be easily demonstrated by employing the services of a friendly vaper.

This is a picture of yours truly back in 2020, before the depression-induced years long burger and pizza (and booze) fest had blobbed me out a bit.

Of course, virions are not vape, but neither are they some magical entity with special, otherworldly, physical properties. The vape ‘home experiment’ does show 2 things very effectively

(a) how the mask changes the airflow of the exhaled breath
(b) that most particles are not going to be absorbed by the mask

Even if we accept the (more than slightly) wonky idea that people in front of us will be protected from infection by the mask, you’re going to be giving everyone behind you and to the sides a face full.

Masks of the surgical variety are not significantly reducing the viral load in the atmosphere.

And that’s all there is to it.

You don’t need to pore over reams of ‘evidence’, you don’t need to conduct a zillion (mostly seriously flawed) studies of either the observational or RCT kind.

Having said that, we can’t afford to rely on our predictions and intuitions because they sometimes fail us and so we do need to do some work, some collection of evidence, just to make sure something non-intuitive (and therefore interesting) isn’t happening.

If we had found (good) evidence that surgical masks work to reduce the spread of the CoronaDoom it would have been baffling in the extreme².

But, or course, no such evidence exists.

Nada, Zip. Nothing.

The only ‘medical’ knowledge input here is in the model of transmission/infection, which hardly requires 6 years of intensive medical training to grasp, does it?

Armed with this model it’s all about the physics from thereon in. The physical properties of airflows and the behaviour of aerosols in the air³ are the key things to understand.

In summary, then, there is no good a priori reason why we should expect (surgical) masks to work at all.

A SIDE ISSUE

There is a firmer a priori basis for supposing that N95 masks will do a better job. When properly fitted, these kinds of masks are acting as filters and you breathe in and out through the mask. The real-world evidence (for example, from Germany where such masks were mandated) suggests that these have not been at all effective either. This is consistent with several previous RCT’s which also found little evidence that N95 masks had a significant impact.

A BIGGER SIDE ISSUE

The idea arose, quite early on, that there was a significant number of people walking about infected with the CoronaDoom, who displayed no symptoms whatsoever. These people, despite having none of the symptoms that arise when the immune system kicks in to fight off a respiratory infection that is getting ‘out of control’, were imagined to be producing enough virus to have a significant chance of infecting someone else.

And thus the myth of asymptomatic transmission as a significant driver of the CoronaDoom was born.

The consequence of this unevidenced and pseudo-scientific bit of tomfoolery was that, it was said, you couldn’t tell the difference between a healthy (safe) person and a healthy⁴ (unsafe) person, according to the official Science™.

It was this bit of pseudo-scientific sleight-of-hand that was primarily responsible for turning so many people into mask junkies.

On the one hand we had this (supposedly) terrifically deadly and super-contagious virus floating about, but on the other, there was a significant number of people walking around infected but wholly unaffected by it.

There was one “expert” interviewed on MSM in the UK - a scientist from Oxford - who imagined she could ‘see’ the diseased breath of one of these alleged walking biohazards if they weren’t wearing a mask outside. This was all part of the criticism of the UK government who, in a rare moment of sanity, did not mandate masks outside.

The UK government was bonkers enough, but what can we say about the astonishing level of idiocy displayed by some governments elsewhere who mandated (and rigorously enforced) the wearing of masks outside?

The outside masking mandates were moronic beyond belief. Masking indoors was moronic enough, but outside masking was a whole new level of moron.

Of course, the outside masking measures were nothing to do with health but were part of the program of population control; masks were the visible manifestation of the ProjectFear™ psy-op.

Thankfully, in the UK, pretty much everyone has given up being afraid of the CoronaDoom and, apart from a few dedicated mask junkies who still cling to their sacred talisman, mask wearing has died a death. Nearly three years too late, but we got there in the end.

The morons running hospitals still require them, though, for some utterly inexplicable reason. I think they just enjoy wasting our money and playing god.

Asking the Right Questions?

Throughout the whole farcical pantomime that has been the CoronaDoom we (the collective ‘we’) got out of the habit of asking the right questions.

Those who did ask those questions got booted off their social media platforms and were prevented from ‘infecting’ too many other people. It was a kind of media ‘masking’ that, unlike the useless things we had to wear on our faces, was effective.

Let me know in the comments what questions you would have asked.

The whole manipulation surrounding the pandemic that never was has been by far and away the most damaging thing. The things our governments did have harmed us massively more than the CoronaDoom itself.

The only good thing that has come out of this is that, in the process, our governments have unmasked themselves.

We see you for what you are much more clearly now.

1. A simple home “experiment” to demonstrate this is to try and blow out a candle with and without a mask. You will immediately notice a significant difference.

2. Or it could point to a re-investigation of the ‘model’ of transmission and infection. In my view, the model predicts that surgical masks won’t work and so the lack of evidence that they do tends to provide (weak) confirmation of that model (or at least it demonstrates that the model is consistent with the observed result).

3. It’s worth mentioning here that a typically-sized aerosol ‘particle’ can stay in the air for weeks. They don’t just get emitted in our breath and fall to the ground within six feet!!!!

4. A person who is ‘infected’, but has no symptoms of anything whatsoever, can hardly be described as being in a state of ‘unhealth’, can they?