With the recent changes in advice about masking, our “Covid Response Team” should be called out again – particularly those with medical or microbiological training. They advise a government with much ado about misinformation and disinformation and yet are culpable of the same thing.
In September 2020 the following letter was published in the Howick and Pakuranga Times – the matter obviously being of insufficient public interest to be printed by the New Zealand Herald despite it being an informed response to an NZH article:
As a tutor of microbiology at Otago University one of the first experiments we would have pre-med students do was cough through a tissue onto a petri dish. Then fold the tissue and cough again, finally fold it again and cough. The dishes would be incubated, and students could then see the increasing efficacy of the layers of tissue. One layer of tissue is ineffective and even with four layers bacteria could get through. Viruses are about a thousand times smaller than bacteria.
With this in mind I read with interest the NZH article “technology shows not all masks cut from the same cloth”. And I asked myself, as did the University of NSW researchers in a 2015 paper, “Cloth Masks: Dangerous to your health?” Is the advice being given in the article helpful?
Cloth masks retain warm moisture, providing ideal conditions for both bacterial growth and viral survival. They do a poor job of filtering, worse than tissue paper. Respiratory infection risks are much higher in people who wear cloth masks than those who wear medical masks. Risk factors for Covid-19 include respiratory infections. NZ already has a problem with respiratory infections over-represented in Pacifica, M?ori, and young people.
If we have thousands of people wearing cloth masks, particularly these DIY masks, are we creating the conditions for a further increase in respiratory infections?
The government should provide safe masks for the disadvantaged and vulnerable.
The gist is obvious and those advising the government know through basic 1st-year biology, that cloth masks don’t work, surgical masks will work poorly and people need more guidance. Rather, there has been a constant barrage of warnings about misinformation, along with disinformation and confusing signals regarding masking.
The consequences of the government and MSM not being consistent and transparently informative are many:
- People, believing themselves to be safely masked, compromise social distancing and are less diligent with sanitary measures.
- Respiratory infection rates are higher among people wearing cloth masks compared to medical masks. The cloth masks can act like home-made facial petri dishes.
- Eye infection rates are higher among those that wear cloth masks than those who do not.
- Because the authorities themselves have delivered confusing messaging, people have lost trust in “the science”. For example, both the WHO and Dr Fauci at one point claimed that masks were ineffective, then changed their minds, then changed their minds again. The New Zealand government, once a stalwart of all masks, and herald of “trust the science”, is now ‘walking back’ its claims of mask efficacy and, as of February 3rd, is asking people not to wear ‘cloth masks’ but rather to wear surgical masks.
- Social distrust
- People have treated each other badly, out of fear of infection – masked vs. unmasked.
Changes in mask wearing policies can also be used to provide cover for changes in general Covid policies using explanations like: “we understand more now…” For example, mixed among the current policy changes, Jacinda says: “Overseas evidence showed that mask-wearing slowed the spread of Covid,” hence the change in policy. An intriguing justification for change: Have studies been ‘cherry picked’ to support walk-backs on policies now inconvenient to a government needing to avoid responsibility? For example, those mandatory and divisive masking policies enthusiastically promoted by the government and MSM – that included cloth masks.
The information was out there but shrouded by the battle against any other narrative than that approved by the government or MSM. Two of the best performed and most notable studies to date are from Denmark and Bangladesh – two very different communities and broadly representative of the efficacy of masks.
The large study in Bangladesh, which included a control group, examined the ability of masks to reduce community-wide infection rates. Six hundred cluster-randomised villages were studied between November 2020 and January 2021. Including the data of only the 40% of those reporting symptoms who consented to blood collection, the laboratory-confirmed SARS CoV-2 rate was 0.76% in control villages (n = 146,783) versus 0.74% in villages cross-randomised to wear cloth masks (n = 54,122), a difference of just 0.02% that was not statistically significant. In surgical mask villages, there was a statistically significant difference (p = 0.043), but it was tiny, just 0.09%.
From April to June 2020 in Denmark, a study found 42 (1.8%) of 2,392 subjects provided with more than four dozen three-layer surgical masks reported SARS-CoV-2 infection, versus 53 (2.1%) of 2,470 in the control group. That is a difference of only 0.3%, which is not statistically significant.
“Meta analyses” are those studies that collect many research studies and try to tease out a common theme or result. A meta-analysis by Jingyi Xiao et al., supported by the WHO and available on the US CDC website, concluded that “evidence from RCTs (random controlled trials) of … face masks did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.”
Under direction from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine considered the benefits of homemade fabric masks in the COVID-19 context, concluding that the “level of benefit, if any, is not possible to assess”.
So why did we have, and why do we still have, mask mandates?
I can specify ‘why we should not’. I apply the “Precautionary Principle”: That masks might help and are unlikely to harm. But we find that this principle fails the test. In a (2012) study led by researchers at Columbia University of 2,788 people in 509 households, those in the no-mask group included significantly more members without any reported upper respiratory symptoms compared to the mask group. Further, a 2015 study by the UNSW involved 1607 hospital healthcare workers across 14 hospitals in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. The study found respiratory infection was much higher among healthcare workers wearing cloth masks than those either unmasked or using other masks.
Mask-wearing is an example of how, for 2 years, we have “trusted in the science” and “trusted in the government” while debate has been censored and discussion chilled.
We have been fed a diet of ‘beware “misinformation”’ and ‘deny “disinformation”’ only to find that we have been either regularly misinformed or disinformed by our own authorities regarding matters around Covid – and they wonder where our distrust comes from?
How Effective Are Cloth Face Masks? | Cato Institute
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150422121724.htm
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/cloth-masks-%E2%80%93-dangerous-your-health
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32027586/
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-591241/v1_covered.pdf?c=1631870455
