It's Time to Abolish Mask Mandates, This Time For Good

The Netherlands ended all mask mandates except on public transport yesterday, 25th February 2022. Today I went to a supermarket, for the first time in nearly two years, in which not a single person was masked. Not a single customer, and not a single employee. And it seemed quite unremarkable, and perfectly normal. It was almost as if mask mandates had never existed. Yet they had. For the first time in living memory, people had been ordered by their government to wear face coverings during their everyday business. So what have we learnt from this Great Masking Experiment?

The most important practical lesson from the Great Masking Experiment is that masks have probably played a marginal role, if any, in controlling the transmission of infectious disease.

After almost two years in which a large part of the West was plastered with mask mandates, evidence for the efficacy of community masking remains weak and inconclusive, at best; and jurisdictions that practically prescinded from the use of masks in everyday life, such as Sweden and Florida, fared no worse, and sometimes considerably better, than many other comparable regions that imposed strict mask mandates.

Don’t take my word for it. See what respected medical research organisations have to say about the efficacy of medical masks at preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses:

Cochrane, 20th November 2020

The pooled results of randomised trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.

World Health Organisation, 1st December 2020

At present there is only imited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, 15th Feb 2021

The evidence regarding the effectiveness of medical masks for the prevention of Covid-19 is compatible with a small to moderate protective effect. But there are still significant uncertainties about the size of this effect.

Of course, the dearth of solid evidence for the efficacy of masking does not necessarily mean it is completely ineffective, nor does it necessarily mean that nobody should wear a mask.

But a good principle of public health is to minimise reliance on coercion as much as possible, and instead to harness the goodwill and trust of citizens. In addition, public health officials should not rest their interventions on untested theories, but recommend behaviour that is shown, through best practice and the balance of scientific evidence, to reduce disease and promote human health and well-being.

Community masking is a largely untested instrument of disease control and is not shown by solid scientific evidence to work to stem the spread of infectious diseases. So it is very hard to see how we can justify recommending it even on a purely voluntarily basis, let alone imposing it through coercive mandates.

The fact that governments saw fit not only to advise the use of masks, but to compel people to wear a face covering, especially in circumstances in which we had no solid evidence whatsoever for believing that masking healthy people was going to make any substantial impact on viral transmission, is symptomatic of a worrying shift in the relation between rulers and citizens. In particular, it suggests that the traditional model of public health governance, based on equality, trust and goodwill, has been superseded by a new approach to public health, one that relies heavily on paternalism and coercion.

The zealous reliance by public health officials on coercion seems to be premised on profound distrust in citizens’ intelligence and goodwill. There was a time, not at all long ago, when public health was governed on the basis that citizens could process and apply public health advice freely and in good faith. Public health agencies now appear to assume that citizens will act against their own better interests and those of the community unless threatened, cajoled and intimidated into compliance.

It’s time to abort this harmful experiment in mandatory masking and trust citizens to freely take the steps they consider most suitable to protect their health and that of their families and neighbours, equipped with honest and open information rather than the sort of infantalising propaganda we have seen coming out of health agencies like the USA’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention since early in the pandemic.

Unfortunately, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has not been the only public health agency to misrepresent the evidence on mask efficacy by failing to note the low quality of many studies purporting to support it, and repeatedly suggesting or insinuating, without evidential support, that we know, with a high degree of certainty, that community masking can make a big contribution to the reduction of disease. Just watch how Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the USA’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, made a volte-face on masks early in the pandemic, in the absence of any clear change in the scientific evidence.

---

Thanks for reading!

I depend on readers like you to share and promote my work because I have lost my Twitter account for reporting on the use of Ivermectin against Covid-19 in Mexico and India.

You can support my work in defence of a free and open society by:

• sharing blog posts you like with friends and on social media.

• subscribing to my blog in case you haven’t have not done so already

• upgrading to a paid subscription, giving you access to all of my blog posts)

• subscribing to my Youtube, Telegram, and/or Spotify channels

• becoming a Founder Member for 150 euros per year.

Finally, in case you missed it, here is my latest podcast, “Freedom Convoy Treated as Terrorist”:

Also available on Youtube and Spotify.