About Wearing a Mask…

I was blogging about an article, Does Wearing a Mask Protect Me?, and found myself getting angrier and angrier about all the propaganda (deliberate lies) we’ve been fed about how to protect ourselves from COVID.

“It’s been a real deficiency in the messaging about masking to say that it only protects the other,” said Charles Haas, an environmental engineer and expert in risk assessment at Drexel University.

“From the get-go, that never made sense scientifically.”

That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking all along, it seems so obvious. 

Without any special knowledge or a high IQ, common sense would tell us that any barrier that prevents your exhalations from spewing out towards others would also prevent other people’s exhalations from spewing directly onto you.

Even though a simple mask prevents only some of the virus particles from getting into your mouth or nose, it obviously prevents some proportion of them from getting through to you.

But the “experts” have declined to give any advice about that at all because they claim there’s not enough evidence to *prove* that masks reduce the severity of COVID for the wearer. (How about just using common sense until then?)

Mainstream the media stoke our fears about becoming deathly ill from any contact at all with even a single virus particle, and never mention that whether you get sick or not and how seriously also depends on the dosage of the virus you take in.

Instead, they carefully itemize all the ways your own condition (age, high blood pressure, weight, etc) will determine how serious your sickness becomes, but not one word about how simply *reducing* your exposure is could result in a less severe course of the disease.

Instead, they assume that all exposures are the same: whether you’re sleeping every night with someone snoring into your face or whether you crossed paths in the park. (This is the same problem we find in the opioid debate, where there is no nuance, only a rigid stance that “opioids are bad for chronic pain” always and for everyone.)

This whole crisis has been defined by an ALL OR NOTHING approach.

1. First, it was all about touching things and handwashing and never mind the masks, we didn’t need them unless we were sick.

This turned out to be a deliberate lie to distract us from trying to get masks for ourselves. (Nowadays, this kind of “creative messaging” is called “crisis management.)

They said we only needed masks if we were sick so that more masks would be available for health care workers who needed them to stay well because they *do* protect the wearer. Otherwise, hospitals would be full of sick people wearing masks while workers go bare.

2. Then we were misled by our government “experts” to believe that COVID was transmitted by respiratory droplets on surfaces.

The range and duration of droplet potency were discussed everywhere endlessly and we were told to wipe down and disinfect everything that had come within six feet or been touched by any other person.

The hyper-focus on and resulting panic about fomite transmission (by touching things and then touching our eyes, nose, mouth) led to a proliferation of countless (and some questionable) recipes for homemade wipe-down sanitizing solutions and products (some brazenly counterfeit) across the web.

There was a run on disinfectant products in stores and violence ensued as people fought for limited quantities of hand sanitizer.

3. Then, as more and more evidence broke through the shield of denial and lies, it became clear that COVID is being transmitted by aerosols (breathing, singing, talking). Not only that, but there was hardly any transmission by touching things. 

So the “expert” advice changed and they told us that everybody needs to wear masks to protect everybody else, but not themselves. We are urged to wear masks out of the goodness of our own hearts for the sake of “others.”

4. But now this is getting reversed as well and experts are beginning to admit that a mask protects the wearer too.

Scientific studies are just now reinforcing what was obvious by common sense: 90% of the time, a physical barrier is a 2-way obstacle.

Any mask that protects others from us will obviously also protect us from them. Not perfectly, not all the time, not under all circumstances… but anything at all is infinitely (literally) better than no protection at all.

It makes little sense to me that they would have promoted only the masks’ benefits for others, relying on each individual’s altruism (not common in America these days). Since their previous guidance wasn’t particularly realistic anyway, why not tell the public from the beginning that masks protect the wearer, proven or not? Pure self-interest always trumps altruism.

If people had been told they could also protect themselves with such a simple action completely under their own control, they wouldn’t have resisted masks so much and I think almost everyone would be wearing them.

Instead, the government’s confused pronouncements were quickly followed by reversals, corrections, and more changes, demonstrating a disorganized incompetence and a blatant willingness to deceive in order to manipulate us.

I never thought our government would deliberately endanger citizens by intentionally promoting false health information. I even less expected them to openly admit it only a few months later, but I suppose they thought it was OK because they did it to save personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical workers.

After this “corona debacle”, how can anyone still trust in our public health and medical systems?