Just In Time For Christmas, The Mask Fanatics Are Back

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While millions of Americans are celebrating Christmas, one of the most important days in Christendom, there remains a contingent of people whose faith remains firmly in the camp of mask zealots. You might spot some while shopping at the market for your Christmas dinner – four years after our very own high priest of masking, Anthony Fauci, pushed them on the country.

They will never stop trying to push masks. It’s a fanatical, religious obsession.

It’s an obsession that started in 2020 when The Science™ decided that decades of research into masking was somehow irrelevant and inaccurate, despite no new studies or evidence suggesting otherwise.

Throughout the pandemic, there were several attempts by the High Priests of The Science™ to justify masks. All were embarrassingly inept.

There were mannequin studies, where experts tried to use dummies to say that masks would stop respiratory virus transmission when worn by humans. There were phone surveys, where conflicted researchers tried to say that masks made people less likely to get COVID based on self-reporting. That study even tried to incorporate non-statistically significant results out of desperation, and they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for outsiders pointing it out.

But a study published this year went a step further, at least incorporating human beings in an attempt to promote masks. Predictably, it’s gotten attention from observants of the mask faith. Though, as with every piece of mask propaganda, it’s misleading.

Very misleading.

Pro-Mask Researchers Try To Create Pro-Mask Study

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that scientists, academics and “experts” are more than happy to incorporate their own wishes, desires and political beliefs into ostensible objective scientific research.

That’s dangerous for a discipline that requires dispassionate observation and study.

But it’s to be expected from what the modern scientific community has become. This does not apply to those looking for the truth, whatever it might be, but those looking to secure grant money from other ideologically-aligned individuals in the federal government. Groups like the CDC, which spent the pandemic deliberately lying to the public about the efficacy of masks. Or from outside ideologues like, say, Bill Gates, who spent the pandemic lying to the public about the efficacy of masks. And a whole host of other “interventions.”

Gates is relevant here, because this study, which has been widely shared across social media, was funded in part by none other than the Bill Gates Foundation. And the CDC. Which is supremely unsurprising.

In the disclosure section, they admit that funding came from the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and The Flu Lab.”

Gee, wonder what these agencies want to hear?

As if there were any doubt of where their allegiances lie, the authors write, as undisputed fact, that masks are effective at stopping COVID.

This is, of course, not true. Masks have never been demonstrated to significantly reduce aerosol emission of respiratory viruses. There is not a single high quality study saying this is true. There is not a single high quality evidence review that says this is true.

There is, however, many studies that prove it isn’t true, and the best available evidence review proves it isn’t true either.

Not to mention that the UK’s pandemic planning document in 2011 specifically states that masks do not provide protection against aerosols.

Which is why they specifically recommended against the widespread wearing of masks in public.

So the study is already misrepresenting evidence in order to fulfill their ideological goals. Not a great start!

Their goal was to test the efficacy of different types of masks against viral load by measuring it in the exhaled breath of patients with SARS-CoV-2 with and without face masks. Sounds reasonable, right? It isn’t.

Plenty of issues with what went wrong with COVID masks

Here’s an example of where they went wrong.

“In a controlled trial, loose-fitting face masks reduced the viral load (as measured by qRT-PCR for viral RNA) in fine and coarse aerosol samples by 48% and 77%, respectively, when worn by mildly symptomatic COVID-19 patients while singing and shouting.”

The main issue here is that there is no relevance to this reduction in viral load. We simply have no idea how much viral load is required to become infected in the first place. Some studies have suggested it is a lot, some have suggested it’s very little. They’re apparently just guessing.

The other issue here is that aerosols were still being released by those wearing masks. As the UK’s HSA reported in 2011, masks do not stop aerosols. And because respiratory viruses are transmitted via aerosol, it makes masks functionally useless. They ignored the most important variable in favor of one that still likely makes masks useless.

Here’s another problem: they focused on “outward leak fraction” in their measurements.

“We used forest plots to show effect estimates, the ratio of masked to unmasked viral load. We defined source-control factor (SCF%) as a percentage reduction in viral load released into the environment when wearing a mask similar to a fit factor, computed from the outward leak fraction (i.e., masked/unmasked viral load)”

But aerosols don’t just leak outward, they leak up and down, thanks to gapping around the edges of the mask. Measuring outward leak just measures forward breathing. Except transmission can occur from aerosols in breath expelled in any direction. They’re measuring something that doesn’t fundamentally matter. And it still didn’t matter.

For example, they claim that the most effective mask is the “duck bill” N95. Which makes sense when you’re only measuring forward outward leak.

Here’s an image from the study suggesting that masks were effective at reducing viral load.

The first thing to notice is that these confidence intervals are absolutely massive. Take the Total EBA among the “no mask” sample in the KN95 group, for example. The confidence interval stretches from 1,300 to 51,000. That’s so large as to be functionally useless.

Same thing with the N95 group, where it’s 290 to 7000. And the confidence interval almost crosses over with the mask group, which reached 280. Cloth masks did crossover, where the mask CI is 6.7 to 480, while the no mask CI is 38 to 3600.

These results are useless. And goes to show why masks don’t work. The measured viral load is wildly variable based on fit, measurement, and equipment. In the real world, these variables become even more compounded. And again, they’re measuring viral load, when any amount of viral load might be enough to lead to COVID-19.

The authors relied on one estimate, which suggested that it would require a 1200 RNA copy number to be infected. But their own study shows how useless these results are then, because the group that wore surgical masks had an estimated RNA copy number of 210 when they weren’t wearing a mask.

So according to their own estimates, not wearing a mask, in that group wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Pointless.

What they actually measured is how pointless viral load is, how pointless masks are, and how to do bad science. All of these individuals, they say, had mild symptoms. Yet supposedly confidence intervals for detected viral load copies reached 51,000 in one instance, and 36,000 in another. If viral load is related to severity of illness and 1,200 is what’s needed for an infection, those people must have been on death’s door, not with mild symptoms. Right?

They then go on to claim that higher quality masks are necessary, but then say that cloth masks were actually better than surgical and KN95’s.

“The source-control factors for total viral RNA aerosol that we observed for cloth masks were superior to those for both surgical masks (p = 0.027) and KN95 respirators (p = 0.014), when including the unknown brand KN95s.”

COVID studies on masks have wild result conclusions

Another obvious critique is that the real world results during study period disproves their claims.

The study started in 2020 and continued into 2021 and early 2022…which is when masks were mandatory almost everywhere. If masks were as effective at reducing transmission in the real world as these hopelessly biased authors claim, why didn’t it work.

Not to mention one of the other, ignored, hilarious parts of their study. As one example, of the 13 participants who wore KN95 masks, all 13 were boosted. So 13 participants got boosters, still got COVID anyway, and were still emitting aerosols with detectable viral loads. They accidentally debunked everything the “experts” said about vaccines stopping the spread and that layered interventions, i.e. wearing a high quality mask AND getting vaccinated and boosted would be most effective.

“Conversely, most KN95 and N95 pairs were collected during the Delta and Omicron waves from volunteers who had completed the initial vaccination series (fully vaccinated) and/or had received at least one booster dose.”

Outstanding work guys.

As usual, biased observers, funded by biased individuals, tried their best to show masks work. And as usual, they showed the opposite. It’s bad science, by bad researchers, being used by bad people to justify more bad policy. COVID in a nutshell.

Nobody deserves coal in their stocking as much as these folks.