COVID-19: Face Masks are Not Only Useless, But Harmful (Part 1)

Masks are a commonly recommended measure for prevention of the influenza virus dubbed Sars-Cov-2 or "COVID-19." Despite the fact that studies have repeatedly shown they do little to nothing to prevent the spread of influenza viruses like Sars-Cov-2, authorities in many countries have enforced mask mandates.

Here in Nazi Australia, roving gangs of heavily armed thugs (a.k.a. "the police") are violently assaulting and arresting people for not wearing masks - even when these people have received a medical exemption from their doctors.

Welcome to laidback, happy-go-lucky Australia, where cowardly thugs assault women for not wearing facial chastity belts. Because nothing prevents respiratory ailments like grabbing people by the throat and choking them.

Australia may just be the dumbest country in the world. Several years ago, the country's xenophobes were campaigning to have Islamic women banned from wearing burkas. These are the head-to-toe garments that completely cover a woman's face, save for a cutout around the eye area. Burkas were "un-Australian," a symbol of misogynistic oppression that could also facilitate armed robberies, we were told.

Fast forward a few years, and we have the fat white degenerates that comprise Australia's ruling class demanding everyone wear face masks in order to stop a virus with a 99.85% survival rate.

And what did Australia's largely fat white population do in response? Did they say, "no bloody way mate, that's un-Australian, face masks are a symbol of government oppression that could also facilitate armed robberies"?

Nope.

When asked to wear face nappies, did they retort, "Listen wankers, do I look like I have a problem with shitting in my beard? Instead of issuing halfwit mask mandates, how about you overpaid bureaucrats do something useful, like fixing our broken healthcare system"?

Nope.

Instead, when told to wear useless masks that achieve little except to dehumanize and anonymize, the majority of Australians simply said:

"Uh ... uhkay."

From the Adelaide Advertiser: Some genius called Jamie publicly and proudly declares his unquestioning obedience to the COVID sham and the corrupt degenerates that are perpetuating it. This attitude, in which grown adults refuse to think for themselves and instead adopt the mindset of a naive and trusting child, is frighteningly common in Australia.

Has this brainless and spineless obedience stopped the spread of what they are calling COVID-19 in Australia? Of course not. In fact, since the introduction of the Brave New World clot shots being fraudulently passed off as 'vaccines,' the rate of COVID cases and deaths has jumped markedly - just as has happened in other countries.

But the majority of Australians still don't get it.

Yeah, Nah, Masks are Bloody Useless, Cobbers

Study after study after study after study after study after study has shown that, when it comes to preventing regular influenza and the re-branded version called COVID-19, masks are about as useful as boobies on a bull.

In May 2020, Xiao et al published a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials examining the effect of face masks, hand hygiene and surface/object cleaning on influenza prevention. The researchers received funding from the WHO and the study was published in a CDC journal. The WHO and CDC, as we all know, are two of the biggest names in COVID fear-mongering. But the meta-analysis still found no significant difference in the incidence of influenza events between the mask and control groups. In fact, of the seven studies involving masks only, 4 found higher risk in the mask group. When a further three studies involving masks and hand hygiene were included in the analysis, it was a similar story.

But, just when we thought the debate was settled, along comes a study from Bangladesh that reopens the debate, then allegedly closes it again - this time in favour of masks!

According to the study's head author, Jason Abaluck, the Bangladesh study is the final word on masks.

“I think this should basically end any scientific debate about whether masks can be effective in combating covid at the population level,” Abaluck told the Washington Post. He called the study “a nail in the coffin” of the arguments against masks.

Another of the authors, Stephen Luby, claimed: “We now have evidence from a randomized, controlled trial that mask promotion increases the use of face coverings and prevents the spread of COVID-19 ... This is the gold standard for evaluating public health interventions."

I made a vow some time ago to try and limit the use of profanities in my articles. But, dammit, I'm about to break that pledge again. That's because Abaluck and Luby's claims are, without question, complete and utter bullshit.

In fact, the entire Bangladesh study is a big, steaming, stinking pile of mierda del toro.

Another Load of Caca Being Passed off as a 'Definitive' Study

The Bangladesh study is so heavily riddled with flaws that it's hard to know where to begin. It's another one of those appalling studies that, far from being a definitive case-closer, should instead be used in science courses to show how NOT to conduct a clinical trial.

The Usual Suspects are Involved

Let's start with a little background on the study and the people behind it. Each of the 22 listed researchers hailed from one or more of the following entities: A 'philanthropic' organization called Innovation for Poverty Action (more about them in a moment), Yale University, Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (a major player in this COVID sham), the NGRI North South University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Deakin University in Melbourne, capital of the failed state Victoria, in the failed country Australia (a.k.a. Ausfailure, Auschtralia, Auscatraz and South China).

The study paper lists the funder as "GiveWell.org", while a Stanford media release states "The study was supported by a grant from GiveWell.org to Innovations for Poverty Action."

GiveWell is a large 'non-profit' organization that in fact boasted over $98,000,000 in assets in its most recent (2020) financial report. The COVID pandemic has clearly been good to GiveWell, because in 2019 that figure was only $44,000,000. Given that the world's billionaires grew their wealth during the scamdemic while regular Joes, Janes and small businesses had their livings mandated away from them, it's not hard to work out where GiveWell gets its money from.

GiveWell takes the money given to it by wealthy benefactors, then diverts it to other supposedly worthy causes. In this way, it acts as a clearing house for donations. This is a common practice in the rarified world of billionaire benefaction, where money is shuffled around from non-profit to non-profit, creating layers of separation between the original donor and the end recipient.

While GiveWell doesn't seem too keen to list its benefactors, we do know that its offshoot Open Philanthropy Project (with whom it still shares its offices) was funded largely from the personal fortune of billionaire Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna. Moskovitz is a co-founder of Facebook.

And we also know that Innovation for Poverty Action, the GiveWell-funded funder of the mask study, has a long list of "partners" that includes George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the heavily-left Omidyar Network, and more United Nations agencies than you can shake a soggy germ-infested mask at.

Another partner of Innovation for Poverty Action is the Ford Foundation. I've written about Soros, Gates, and the Omidyar Network previously but haven't yet discussed the nefarious Ford Foundation, which for a long time was the the largest foundation in the US.

Sharing the beliefs espoused by overpopulation alarmists like Paul Ehrlich (a Stanford professor and author of the absurdly shrill 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb), the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations set about creating the infrastructure for large-scale sterilization programs in India. In 1975, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency, seized dictatorial powers, imprisoned her political rivals, and embarked, with the help of her son Sanjay, on a mass, compulsory sterilization program that ranks as one of the most disturbing and vast human rights violations in the country’s modern history.

Sound familiar?

Rather than attract harsh denunciation, the event now known as The Emergency was celebrated by then-president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara: “At long last, India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”

Billionaires, bureaucrats and politicians: They're just c*nts.

So that's a taste of who's behind this new mask study.

The Laughable Results

Before I begin picking apart the appalling methodology of this study, let's cut straight to the results.

The study was reportedly conducted in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021. It allegedly involved 600 villages and 342,126 adult participants. There were allegedly 178,288 individuals in the intervention group and 163,838 individuals in the control group.

The study involved both cloth and surgical masks. The study was not blinded, as you might expect in a study involving the wearing of obtrusive face nappies. The mask-wearing period ran for 8 weeks. At 5 and 9 weeks follow-up, the researchers "surveyed all reachable participants about COVID-related symptoms."

At 10-12 weeks, blood samples were collected from consenting participants and tested for the presence of IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 using the SCoV-2 Detect™ IgG ELISA kit (InBios, Seattle, Washington). This assay detects IgG antibodies against the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.

I know some of you have already spotted some big potential flaws, but for now let's play along.

When the results were tallied, the proportion of individuals with "COVID-like symptoms" was 7.62% (N = 13,273) in the mask intervention group and 8.62% (N = 13,893) in the control group.

In other words, the absolute difference was a piddling 1%. Of the 342,126 participants, there were a mere 620 more in the control group experiencing "COVID-like" symptoms.

This difference could easily be due to chance or reporting errors or methodological flaws (of which this study had plenty).

And of the people who had blood samples taken? Of the 27,166 participants reporting "COVID-like symptoms," only 10,952 (40%) allegedly consented to having blood samples taken. From this truncated sample, COVID seroprevalence among the mask group was 0.68% compared to 0.76% in the control group.

This means the absolute difference between the mask and intervention groups testing positive for IgG antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 was a piddling 0.08%.

These figures also show that, when subject to blood testing as opposed to the farce that is PCR, most people displaying "COVID-like symptoms" do not in fact have COVID-19.

What this all means is that, at best, the study shows masks to be a useless, virtue-signaling wank. In reality, the study doesn't even show us that. It is a poorly conducted and poorly controlled bucket of slop that effectively demonstrates nothing at all, except:

1. COVID-19 is an overblown farce;
2. Modern researchers are exceptional at wasting time, money and manpower.

As you might expect, that is not how the researchers and the mainstream media reported it.

The researchers did what researchers always do when they need to resuscitate a dying dogma, and employed the "relative risk" ruse. Instead of letting the absolute reductions speak for themselves, the researchers took the individual RRs out of context and compared them only to each other.

This highly misleading charade was able to transform the pathetic 0.08% absolute reduction of COVID seroprevalence in the mask group to a relative risk reduction of 9.3%. In those assigned to wear surgical masks, the "relative reduction" was 11.2%.

In addition to being the product of dubious statistical chicanery, there lies another problem with these relative reduction figures:

They are still pathetic.

Relative risk reductions of 9.3% and 11.2% would be cause for a big yawn and not much else in a tightly controlled, blinded trial. In a non-blinded shitshow like the Bangladesh study, they are an absolute joke.

For media outlets to claim this study "Shows Masks Do Indeed Limit Coronavirus Spread" (as the clueless US News did) is beyond idiotic.

Some of the Many Reasons this Study Sucked Like a Hoover

The COVID status of the participants at baseline was unknown. During the study, the researchers collected "survey data" on the prevalence of WHO-defined COVID-19 symptoms from all available study participants. Symptoms of COVID-19 are almost identical to those of regular influenza and pneumonia, so a more reliable and definitive marker of COVID-19 should have been sought.

But it wasn't.

The researchers did not collect blood samples from participants until the end of the study, and even then it was only from 10,952 (3.2%) of the 342,126 participants!

In a study examining the onset of infection, such factors as previous infection, preexisting immunity or asymptomatic infection at baseline are key variables. Thanks to the conduct of this study, we know nothing about their prevalence at baseline among this sizable cohort.

The randomization process was a joke. In a randomized clinical trial, you test two groups who are as similar as possible. In a clinical trial examining the effect of an intervention on infection rates, this necessitates recruiting people who have a similar exposure to the pathogen in question. In a study involving 600 Bangladesh villages, that means you go to each village, and randomize half the participants from that village to wear a mask, and the other half to not wear a mask.

Well, that's what any sensible group of researchers would do. In this oligarch-funded farce, the researchers instead assigned entire villages to wear masks, and other villages to not wear masks. They then compared villages assigned to the mask intervention with villages assigned to the control arm. In effect, the researchers devolved this study from a clinical trial into a glorified epidemiological ecological study that compared outcomes in different groups, rather than randomized individuals.

This randomization procedure, claim the researchers, "was designed to pair unions that were similar in terms of (limited) COVID-19 case data, population size, and population density." (Bold emphasis added)

The researchers actually admit they had limited baseline data on COVID-19 cases in each village. This confirms they really had no idea how the villages truly compared with each other in terms of baseline risk - even though a fundamental goal of any reliable clinical trial effort is to ensure similar baseline characteristics in the intervention and control groups. We are then supposed to pretend this critical flaw could not have seriously impacted the results?

Even small differences in prior virus exposure could have completely overridden the absolutely laughable relative risk reductions claimed by the researchers.

Whether the researchers wish to admit or not, comparing villages in this manner also seems to operate on the rather insulting premise that Bangladeshis are a very non-diverse group of people. Think about the country you live in: Even within states or municipalities, different towns have varying geographies, infrastructures, soil and air pollution, socio-economic levels, age distributions and local behaviours and customs. Yet in this case, we're supposed to pretend Bangladeshi villages at least 2kms and often more from each other are carbon copies of each other.

Bullshit.

The study was poorly managed. As the researchers note: "Our intervention was designed to last 8 weeks in each village." They then drop the bombshell, "IPA staff travelled to many villages that had low mask uptake in the first five weeks of the study and found that in these villages local leaders were not very engaged in supporting mask promotion. Hence, we retrained mask promotion staff part-way through the intervention to work more closely with local leaders and set specific milestones for that partnership."

And so we learn that 5 weeks into an 8-week intervention, mask wearing in "many" of the villages was "low." This means that during a sizable chunk of the intervention period, many intervention participants were not even using the intervention!

To call this study a useless pile of shit is to be exceedingly polite. It bears reminding this is the kind of crap billionaires - who piously wank on about making the world a better place - are spending their 'philanthropic' funds on.

OBSCENELY WEALTHY BILLIONAIRE: "Sweetheart, I have several million dollars lying around that I would like to put to charitable use. Shall we go to an impoverished country with several plane loads of food and save people from starvation?"

OBSCENELY WEALTHY BILLIONAIRE'S WIFE: "Dahling, don't be so silly! Why don't you instead funnel the money through a network of shady non-profit organizations, who will then use the money to conduct atrocious studies on mask-wearing?"

OBSCENELY WEALTHY BILLIONAIRE: "What an absolutely sterling idea, sweetheart! I knew there was a reason I married you!"

In addition to the half-assed implementation, the study was a mish-mash of conflicting methods. Get a load of this passage from the study:

"Within the intervention arm, we cross-randomized villages to four village-level and four household-level treatments to test the impact of a range of social and behavior change communication strategies on mask-wearing. All intervention villages were assigned to either the treatment or the control group of each of these four randomizations."

So within the intervention group, there were a further eight sub-intervention groups (and accompanying control groups)!

At the village level, these four further strategies were as follows:

1. Within villages, some of those in the intervention group were randomized to either cloth or surgical masks.
2. Some intervention villages were randomized to "public commitment" in the form of providing households signage declaring them to be "a mask-wearing household" and requesting the signs be placed on doors. This signage "was meant to encourage formation of social norms through public signalling."
3. Randomization of treated villages to 0% or 100% of households receiving twice-weekly text message reminders about the importance of mask-wearing.
4. In some intervention villages, no monetary incentive was given to village leaders, while in others US $190 was given to the village leader "for a project benefitting the public." The researchers "announced that the monetary reward ... would be awarded if village-level mask-wearing among adults exceeded 75% 8-weeks after the intervention started."

Hmmm, offering money to people in an impoverished country - that wouldn't encourage the recipients and underlings to tell the researchers what they want to hear, would it? If spoiled Westerners from affluent countries will bend the truth for a few extra dollars, what's to stop people who need the money even more from doing so? As another commentator aptly pointed out:

"If you’ve been co-opted to 'lead by example' and put up signage etc or are being paid to mask you may change your attitude about reporting symptoms ... people want to please researchers and paymasters and this is a classic violation of a double blind system ... so maybe [participants] think 'I don’t not want to tell them I’m sick' ... especially if 'being sick' has been vilified."

"[O]r maybe they fail to focus on minor symptoms because they are masked and feel safe or were having more trouble breathing anyhow."

Then there were the four extra household-level randomizations, involving "messages emphasizing either altruism or self-protection," "twice-weekly text reminders" and "making a verbal commitment to be a mask-wearing household."

And even though it was not one of the interventions, physical distancing was also analyzed during the study by gawking observers, to see if mask wearing had any effect on how far people positioned themselves from others.

This study was the scientific equivalent of going to an all-you-can eat buffet, gorging to the point of distension, then violently puking all over the table. In this case, the researchers crammed a boatload of interventions into what should have been a straightforward mask vs no-mask comparison, enacted them with an appalling array of deficient methods, then puked up their results in a 94-page study that contributes absolutely nothing of value to the scientific debate on masks.

Yes, you read that right: The study document is 94 pages long. It's a rambling, disjointed testament to just how utterly farcical the field of science has become.

To promote this puddle of puke as evidence that masks prevent COVID-19 shows just how desperate the liars-in-charge are for supporting evidence.

You Don't Need Oligarch-Funded Pseudoscientists to Show You Whether Masks are Effective or Not

It's often been said a picture is worth a thousand words. The following video is undoubtedly worth a damn sight more than the thousands of words that comprise the 94-page waste of space that is the Bangladesh mask paper.

It's a must-watch extract from an Asia Pacific Today interview with Melbourne anaesthetist and medical educator Dr Babak Amin. During the interview, Babak explains why masks are useless for preventing the spread of COVID or any other respiratory virus. To visually demonstrate his point, Babak dons a cloth mask, inhales non-nicotine vapour, pulls the mask down over his mouth and chin, and then exhales. As he does so, you can see the vapour escaping around the edges of the mask in abundance.

He then repeats the procedure with a surgical mask. The exact same thing happens. The vapour escapes and proceeds to float all around the room. It's a highly illuminating visual demonstration as to why mask mandates are a farce. A mask can obstruct forward flow of exhaled air, but it achieves this by instead forcing the exhaled air to move laterally. It's a classic two-steps forward, two-steps backward scenario. Except in this case, the whole caper can deliver some highly undesirable side effects.

In Part 2, I'll explain why masks aren't just useless, but harmful.

Until then, stay sane,

Anthony.

Updated 7 Nov 2021 to include discussion of Xiao et al mask meta-analysis.

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