Masks have become the yellow stars, the keffiyehs and the awareness ribbons, all rolled into one, of the Wuhan plague.
Despite the spurious appeals to “science” (the evidence has been and remains at best equivocal, most reliably negative), the real reason for mask mandates has at last been laid bare: even as vaccinations have been rolled out, Democrat voters in America were adamant that they would keep wearing their (now more useless than ever) masks. Why? So they wouldn’t get mistaken for Republicans.
That’s it in a nutshell, folks: masks were only ever a symbol.
For years leading up to, and even during the first stages of the pandemic, the unequivocal advice from experts, health bureaucrats and politicians was that mass mask-wearing was not only unnecessary, it was positively harmful. There was no evidence to support simple cloth masks (the best evidence remains negative) and high-quality masks were desperately needed for frontline health workers.
There’s only one reason all that changed: symbolism. Masks are an instantly-identifiable symbol of compliance.
One of the main reasons mass mask-wearing is such a waste of time and resources is that most people don’t even know how to wear them properly. I’m not just talking about Joe Biden wearing his mask pulled down under his nose: even nurses, as it turns out, are prone to not fitting masks properly.
Even then, they may just be wasting their time.
One-third of supposedly highly protective N95 masks used by hospital and hotel quarantine staff exposed to COVID-positive patients have failed government testing, putting the frontline workers at risk of coronavirus infection.
Healthcare workers have spent much of the pandemic fighting to get N95 masks – meant to filter out 95 per cent of airborne particles – for dealing with people who have tested positive to coronavirus.
Fighting to get them, because supplies have been panic-bought by millions of compliant sheep.
But government testing results leaked to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald and confirmed by three separate sources indicate the N95 masks frontline workers are supplied with are often flawed.
Of 263 respirators and surgical respirators – including N95 and P2 masks – reviewed by Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration, about a third failed the particle filtration efficiency test.
About half of 78 surgical respirators tested failed to meet fluid-resistance tests to ensure the masks block any bodily fluid – like blood – from a patient.
So who do we have to blame for this? In the early months of 2020, when the Chinese government was still denying any pandemic at all, its armed forces were caught buying up Australian supplies by the pallet-load. Later, China tried to big-note itself by flooding the world with badly-made crap.
A flood of faulty masks has entered Australia since the start of the pandemic, many of which have been cheap masks sold to the public, not high-quality N95s supplied to doctors and nurses on COVID-19 wards.
The N95 testing showed the problems were worse than expected, said Jane Whitelaw, director of the occupational health and safety program at the University of Wollongong[…]
In the 12 months since concerns about faulty masks were first revealed, the government has been forced to issue a defect warning about masks on its own national stockpile, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines have been handed out, 48 product defect alerts have been issued and 1022 masks have had their registration cancelled.
That covers about half of all masks registered in Australia since the pandemic began, said certified occupational hygienist Kate Cole, who first blew the whistle on the scandal.
A flood of sub-standard, untested masks has had potentially deadly consequences.
The Victorian government long denied healthcare workers were getting infected with COVID-19 at work during the state’s second major outbreak in 2020 but has now admitted that 2599 doctors and nurses did catch the deadly disease in their workplace.
Healthcare workers campaigned extensively for N95 masks to be rolled out, first in high-risk areas, then across hospitals as more workers fell sick. Late last year, the state government agreed to roll them out in hospitals and then in February to hotel quarantine workers after some who were wearing surgical masks fell sick.
MSN.com
But sure, Karen: tell me again how your dinky little floral cloth mask is going to save you from the big, bad ’Rona.
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