Masks worked. They just didn't stop covid

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out what was obvious three years ago: masks don’t stop viruses. Nothing short of a hazmat suit does. Viruses make their rounds every few years, eventually deteriorating into a strand of the common cold. They are deadly at first. Indeed, this manmade concoction has killed 1.12 million Americans.

But that is less than 1% of the population; in fact it is 1/3rd of 1% of the population.

99% of those who caught it survived.

To call it a pandemic insults real epidemics. The Spanish flu killed 50 million people worldwide, which is also 10% of those infected.

Smallpox killed 33% of those infected — which happens to be a fatality rate 100 times covid 19’s. George Washington and other patriots fought a revolution anyway. As Revolutionary General General John Stark wrote when he was 81, “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.” He made it to 93.

I was sanguine about the virus. The masks and social distancing were medical theater just as TSA is security theater. Both make the public feel safer, and as an added bonus they give the Karens on the left a reason to feel morally superior to those of us who realize it is all for show.

The Los Angeles Times ran a letter on July 25, 2020, under the headine, “Mask deniers are a loud minority. Stop giving them attention.”

Well, no one denied the existence of masks. We just said they don’t work on viruses. But we now live in a world where if you don’t wear a mask, they won’t let you in the bank. Jesse and Frank James were vindicated.

At the height of the mask hysteria, Kyle D. Killian wrote in Psychology Today, “This week, on social media, I reposted a photo of a white woman carrying a sign that reads ‘I’d Rather Bury My Family From COVID Than See Them Enslaved to the Fear of It.’ Why? I was curious about others’ thoughts on it.”

Interesting that he identified her as a white woman.

He wrote, “Highly educated intellectuals—people literally paid to type and talk—must resist the urge to make fun of this person or to lecture down to them about virology, science, etc. What is key, crucial in fact, is not dismissing or mocking this person, but interpreting the signage as an indicator of a fear-based response.

“In this case, masking requirements have been equated in this person’s mind to a fundamental loss of freedom or liberty. Fear has clouded this person’s thinking; instead of seeing social distancing and masks as a way of caring for others, putting the Golden Rule into action, or acknowledging that some folks feel just fine but are actually asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus, she sees them as a threat.”

Blah-blah-blah.

The problem with Mister Know-It-All is that he was wrong. The masks he defended did not stop viruses. How do you get a doctorate and a license as a therapist without knowing this? Obviously we have abandoned biology as we pretend men can become women with just a change of pronouns. I don’t expect an apology from Killian or any of the other masked holes because the emperor continued his parade even after the little boy said he was naked and the crowd laughed.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of FactCheck.org.

She wrote in Scientific America, “I have spent much of my career studying ways to blunt the effects of disinformation and help the public make sense of the complexities of politics and science. When my colleagues and I probed the relation between the consumption of misinformation and the embrace, or dismissal, of protective behaviors that will ultimately stop the coronavirus’s spread, the results were clear: Those who believe false ideas and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines are less likely to engage in mask wearing, social distancing, hand washing and vaccination.”

But Miss Fact Check was all wrong.

The virus really was manmade in a lab in Wuhan, Red China. Masks really didn’t work. Social distancing also didn’t work. And the vaccinations are nowhere near the level of effectiveness of other vaccines.

Which brings me to Mister Stephens, who occasionally is an isle of sanity in that Sea of Craziness that calls itself the New York Times. He has taken shots at the Pandemic Panic amid the screeching of the baboons who run that zoo.

On April 24, 2020, barely a month into the two weeks to flatten the curve, he wrote, “America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules. A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.”

He was half-right on the second line. It was bad medicine, but it was excellent politics for the opponents of Making America Great Again who wanted to get rid of President Trump. Stephens’s heart was in the right place in 2020.

He wrote, “I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.”

His latest column is “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?”

In it, he wrote, “when it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as misinformers for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

“Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.”

Why would Walensky resign? She did what she was told. She helped destroy the Trump presidency. His 50-year record low unemployment ballooned to an 80-year record high in one month. The stock market crashed. We ran out of toilet paper. The devil laughed and Biden became president. Mission accomplished.

The Pandemic Panic changed life for the worse for most Americans.

In his 2020 column, Stephens wrote, “No wonder so much of America has dwindling sympathy with the idea of prolonging lockdown conditions much further. The curves are flattening; hospital systems haven’t come close to being overwhelmed; Americans have adapted to new etiquettes of social distancing.”

But the rest of the media sold the virus as a plague and pushed the narrative that we must shelter in place if we were going to live. They solemnly warned that if we did not take these precautions, a million Americans would die. We took the precautions. A million Americans did not die. 1.12 million did.

Michelle Cottle, also of NYT, in a column on May 12, 2020, offered an insight into who the real target of masks was. It wasn’t covid. It was you-know-who.

She titled her piece, “Trump’s Barefaced Deceptions. He won’t wear a mask, fearing it will project weakness and defeat. Who does he think he’s fooling?”

Cottle wrote, “Aides have said that Mr. Trump’s resistance stems in part from not wanting to look ridiculous. From a health standpoint, this is ridiculous. But it comports perfectly with the warped logic of Trumpian machismo: Masks are for the weak — read: losers — and he is all about strength.

“The president’s apologists are happy to peddle this line. ‘What Trump is really doing is projecting American strength and health at a time when strong leadership is needed,’ The Federalist proclaimed. Noting the importance of optics, the article contended that a single photo of a mask-clad Mr. Trump “would signal that the United States is so powerless against this invisible enemy sprung from China that even its president must cower behind a mask.”

“But in fact Mr. Trump is increasingly desperate to project strong leadership because he has so utterly failed to provide strong leadership.”

Three years later, the mask on her face has turned into an egg. But she won’t wipe it off. None of them will. They wear the egg on their face with pride because covid — and the ballot harvesting it spread — allowed her and all her fellow media pundits and the Democrat Party to rid the White House of Trump.

We all know this.

The lesson learned is never trust Washington. The American people can be fooled — but only once. It is time to live the words of General Stark, who fought for the freedoms we have. There are worse things than covid. One is masks. Another is suffering the self-righteousness of the ignoramuses who pushed masks.

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Trump no longer plays by their rules.

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