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A Bad Joke from Massachusetts
It [Sen. Josh Hawley’s bill to ban federal mask mandates] would hamstring public health experts who guided our nation out of the pandemic.” –Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA)
A guy walks into a bar wearing a necklace with an absurdly large amulet. The bartender asks why he is wearing it. The guy responds that it keeps elephants away. The bartender says there are no elephants anywhere near here. The guy then says “See, it’s working.” –Ancient bad joke.
We knew at the outset of the COVID-19 outbreak from existing studies about past respiratory pandemics (including some studies cited in email exchanges between Anthony Fauci and senior NIAD colleagues) that mask mandates, closures, and lockdowns would have a very minimal effect on viral spread and would instead impose serious costs. Instead of being honest about the state of the science, a collective decision was made (or drifted into) to impose costly interventions to create an impression of Doing Something. Once the pandemic inevitably receded into an endemic annoyance, the perpetrators could then claim to have won a great victory and to have saved countless lives.
Christopher Columbus pulled off a similar trick in 1504, claiming to control a lunar eclipse to dupe the local tribe. Taking credit for outcomes not under one’s control is a very old con.
No jurisdiction on the planet found a policy combination that affected a departure from its larger regional seasonality COVID case curve. No curves were flattened. COVID rose and fell on its own terms regardless of policy variations. Sweden and Germany had the same COVID fatality rate, rising and falling at the exact same time despite wildly different policy approaches. In the end, the only difference was that Sweden had less collateral damage than mandate-heavy jurisdictions.
“The experts who guided our nation out of the pandemic” is a preposterous phrase by a ridiculous man. But we need to be alert to the depressing truth that not only will such “experts” (and their enablers) make every effort to congratulate themselves for what they did not do while ducking responsibility for the harm they did cause, but they will attempt to mandate enough public amnesia so they can pull off similar cons in the near future. And that’s not funny.
Published in General
There are lots of believers still around. My sister-in-law believed that it might do something, so masks were worth wearing. A friend wore a mask in the grocery store; you just never know. Even my oncologist decided to wear a mask at the office because he knew the data, but he believed it was crucial for him to stay well for his patients. I have a follow-up visit with him next week; I’m curious to see if he’s stilll wearing a mask.
Masks make sense as part of a comprehensive plan to secure a particular area for a vulnerable person but as stand-alone preventative in all spaces a mask is pretty weak choice.
I think a lot of medical offices will be forced to mask up for marketing reasons–a vocal minority of patients believe in The Science(TM) and will be deeply offended if the doc and the staff are infidels.
Masking college kids on campus or toddlers on airplanes is criminally stupid and the response should be merciless.
I was in a busy cardiology clinic in NJ a couple months ago and the sign said masks are optional, but if you request our staff to wear masks we will. I asked the receptionist how often this request was made , she said only once…
The people who know better than anyone are the medical people and they are almost all cynical about the whole thing. Of course all it takes is one mask nazi….
The standard-issue blue masks can prevent staph and strep microorganisms from passing from person to person. My dentist and his hygienists have been using them for at least twenty years.
The problem with the covid microorganisms is that they are half the size and weight of other microorganisms. That’s why they get through the masks.
I may be the only person in the world to understand the joke Trump made about the bleach, but he was trying to say that we need to kill this bug. :) :)
Like MarciN and I from Massachusetts we are used to the dribble coming out of Sen .Malrakey’s mouth.
It isn’t about masks, it’s about control. They don’t want to let go. I will just carry my M&P everywhere then it will be illegal for me to wear a mask. My license to carry states that I can’t have any face coverings.
For those interested:
An important new study over in Germany reveals that masks are a health disaster.
Good decision.
I wonder how many politicians who claim to be all about the concern which they hold for the public’s safety and health are getting kickbacks with regards to vaccine and mask rules and regs.
I can’t stand Calif’s Gov Newsom, but at least it was all out in the open that he was behind a one billion dollar state-tax dollar purchase of masks from China in 2020.
I agree with Old Bathos in everything he has said. I think the country went wrong when we named the agency the Centers for Disease Control. As if we could! Sheer hubris and perhaps a large dose of optimism.
But it was born in a different era: 1946. We were out to kill all the germs. The mothers and grandmothers of the boomers wore themselves out trying to do that. The work they did to protect their families was wild.
I love this quote in the OP:
That describes much of the world of disinfectant chemicals and practices–all done on a wing-and-a-prayer. :)
I had a great talk with my pediatrician forty-four years ago (1977, so 30 years after the CDC had been set up) that has stayed with me. I was nursing my baby, and the time had come to wean her. I asked him about sterilizing the bottles. He said, “We used to do that, but where do you put them?” :)
There are some who think we’ve gone too far in our sterilizing practices. Years ago there was an interesting study in one of the Scandinavian countries–Denmark, perhaps–in which researchers found that the children who grew up in homes without dishwashers had no allergies to peanuts and fewer allergies in general. The theory at that time was that we were oversterilizing our personal environment to the point that it was actually harmful. Bacteria and viruses interact with each other, and some make an environment inhospitable to others. The researchers said that our immune system was not as robust as it should have been given normal exposure to viruses and bacteria. There’s a reason the immune and allergy systems are studied by the same scientists–these work horses function similarly and share the same management. :)
We all operate in a superstitious mode when it comes to protecting ourselves and others from “germs.” We do it all in hopes that together they might work, and then when they don’t, we just sigh and take our medicine and go back to bed. But we keep doing this cleaning work in hope. :)
The entire story of the covid pandemic was a lot like the bed bug scare that preceded it. The steps people took when they were traveling were crazy. :)
As my Irish father-in-law used to say, “Live in hope. Die in despair.” :) :)
I work at an urban university in a blue state, and I have never been asked to mask after the mandate lapsed. This includes times I asked lab staff who were masked if they wanted me to mask up.
It was the addition of the words ” and Prevention” that was such irrational, propagandistic hubris.
Which one this time?
The one about Senator Malarkey.
Not every disease is Wuhan Coronavirus, Marci.
For example, you can control Hep A, cholera, and other diseases with clean water. We have diseases we control reliably with vaccines – Hep B has gone from a major problem in healthcare workers to a rare occurrence (without using a vaccine mandate – the standard allows opt-out for any reason)
More to the point, use of quarantine stopped SARS cold. That’s right – an Asian respiratory coronavirus, stopped by public health measures. The same measures well understood for years to be near useless against something that spreads rapidly with a long incubation period and mild symptoms. The CDC can’t stop every disease, just like firemen can’t save everyone. When they can act to control disease, they should do so.
All excellent points. :) I stand corrected. :) :)
All good.
The problem was not that CDC could not stop it but that they conspired to endorse false premises for bad policy with enormous economic, health, political and cultural costs–including loss of faith in the professionalism and integrity of the CDC. A conceptual reverse quarantine (Great Barrington approach) to focus on the vulnerable (similar outlook to that of firemen) was the better, saner option. Instead, they continued to pretend that there were effective measures against the spread apparently just to provide cover for bad governors.
I don’t understand how anyone came up with an incubation period estimate for COVID-19 when it seems that so many of us were asymptomatic and modes of transmission seem poorly understood. When 50% of white-tailed deer are testing seropositive and outbreaks seem oddly uniformly delayed (the southern US four months after NY, MA, NJ and the Midwest not until eight months) when we knew with certainty that the bug was already widespread, maybe is was time to rethink the MERS, SARS approach.
From what I understand, masks are somewhat effective at preventing the spread of bacteria, which are hundreds of times larger than viruses. So they might make sense in the case of a dentist who is literally breathing down into your throat.
I am a firm believer in that.
I purposely don’t go out of my way to avoid “dirt,” knowing that a little exposure is beneficial. I’ve never had an infection from cuts in my life.
An extreme example – I once decided to run out to the lighthouse in Cleveland’s harbor. It is not connected to land. I always run barefoot when possible. So on my way to the breakwall along the shore, I got a bee sting on my foot (I must have surprised the bugger by stepping on or near him). I had been planning this for some time so I continued on. I climbed into the water and felt something severely scraping my feet. Little did I know that the zebra muscle shells that had recently invaded Lake Erie, were sharp and anchored to hard rocks under the water. I swam the 75 feet or so to get to the breakwall leading to the lighthouse, scraping my feet again climbing out of the water. Noticed several open gashes on my feet, a couple pretty big. They didn’t hurt at the time so I pushed on. Had to run about 1/4 mile along the huge boulders that constituted the breakwall on which the lighthouse sat. Discovered quickly that the boulders were nearly completely covered in white seagull pooh, as if they had been carpet-bombed. My poor feet. Persisted on, ran down to the lighthouse, took a good look, and ran back. Climbed back into the water, more careful than before, but still getting zebra muscle scrapes. Swam back to shore, walked barefoot in the park back to where I stored my gear, and voila! Got one more bee sting on the other foot!
Two of the gashes on my feet seemed like they would need stitches, so I put butterfly bandages on them intending to go to a doctor in the morning. To my great surprise, both wounds’ opposing sides had fused together during the night. Still got no infection…………
Masks are for the dentist’s benefit. He’s using a wet highspeed drill that spits clouds of fine moisture mixed with and fine tooth particles into the air.