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Trying to defend the obvious absurdity of so many covid rules, a convinced Covidian of my acquaintance (finally, reluctantly) admitted that they were obvious nonsense, but, “Well, the government has to do something”.
To which I replied: “No, they don’t. They just think they do.”
Governments think they have to be seen to be doing something, anything. In a way, they’re right: the know-nothing media savage any politician who admits that some things are beyond government control. Even when the light-touch governments produce markedly better results than the micro-managing totalitarians, the mainstream media simply lie and claim the opposite. Just look at the media attacks on Ron de Santis and Kristi Noem, and their feting of Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo; not to mention the feral #IStandWithDan media in Australia.
The same illusion of control applies doubly to health bureaucrats. These are people of decidedly mediocre ability (which is why they didn’t go into private practice) who nonetheless imagine themselves to be omnipotent technocrats. No matter how often the real-world evidence proves them wrong, they naturally gravitate to useless measures that, just coincidentally, amplify their unelected power.
Lockdowns are a paradigmatic case of heavy-handed interventions that are proven to not work. So are mass-mask mandates.
University of Oxford Professor Jim Naismith asserts that despite England dropping its mask mandate in July and Scotland keeping its rules in force, official data shows this “has made no meaningful difference” to infection rates.
Naismith goes on to argue that new face mask mandates imposed in England today are “unlikely to have much of an impact” in fighting off the spread of the Omicron variant […]
According to Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute and Professor of Structural Biology at the University of Oxford, masks are largely pointless.
“The ONS survey results on prevalence shows that the Scottish and English approach to masking, although formally different since July, has made no meaningful difference to Delta,” writes Naismith.
“In both countries very high levels of prevalence have continued for months. Thus the new changes announced are unlikely to have much of an impact if Omicron does indeed spread rapidly,” he added.
As the graph above illustrates, despite England dropping mask mandates and Scotland keeping them in place after July, infection rates were similar or indeed higher in Scotland […]
A comparison between case rates in Sweden (which never legally imposed face masks) and the rest of Europe is also very revealing.
But the totalitarian insanity of health bureaucrats means that they’ll adamantly cling to what we know doesn’t work.
Despite flatlining case numbers and declining deaths, partly achieved because England chose to lift lockdown restrictions in the summer unlike many European countries, mask mandates are once again back in force.
Face coverings are compulsory in shops, on public transport and numerous other venues arbitrarily chosen by the government.
Highlighting the absurdity of the rules, face masks are mandatory in takeaways but not restaurants, meaning you have to wear one if picking up a takeaway but not if you stay inside the restaurant for a sit down meal.
To any sane person, this is obviously absurd. But, as Theodore Dalrymple has said, the object of totalitarian rules is not to inform or persuade, but to enforce complicity.
Naismith’s verdict on face masks is backed up by UK government SAGE adviser Dr Colin Axon, who dismissed masks as “comfort blankets” that do virtually nothing.
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Nothing, that is, except signal to the world that the wearer is complying with authoritarian rules. Police have to actually stop people and demand to see “Papers, please!”; they can see at a glance who’s wearing a mask and who isn’t.
And everyone who wears a mask is reinforcing their fear of covid.
And that, we might begin to suspect, was only ever the point.
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