CDC Finally Admits Cloth Masks Were Always Political Theater
By: Elle Purnell
January 17, 2022
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/17/cdc...itical-theater/

Mask mandates have always been more about showing compliance than keeping people safe, and the CDC’s latest embarrassing disclosure further proves it.
Elle Purnell



For two years now, to walk into a grocery store barefaced has been to risk soliciting dirty stares, at least in some parts of the country. But walk in with your face covered by a thin piece of fabric, preferably with some vaguely woke slogan, that you got overpriced on Etsy? You’re golden.

Masks have been obvious political theater from the start, back when Anthony Fauci et al. promised we didn’t need them and then flip-flopped and promised we did. But when sensible observers tried to point that out, the Big Tech-media cabal gleefully slapped them with “fact” “checks.”

When The Federalist ran the headline “Many Studies Find That Cloth Masks Do Not Stop Viruses Like COVID” in November 2020, Lead Stories attempted to “fact-check” the piece, slapping a red “masks work” label over a screenshot of the original article.

The “fact-check” even cited data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19, where the CDC insisted, “Cloth masks not only effectively block most large droplets (i.e., 20-30 microns and larger), but they can also block the exhalation of fine droplets and particles,” and “cloth mask materials can also reduce wearers’ exposure to infectious droplets through filtration.”

Yet the same CDC quietly admitted on Friday that the thin cloth masks the agency and its corporate media allies spent the last two years cheering actually “provide the least protection” against COVID-19. It was “the first time the C.D.C. has explicitly addressed” the relative ineffectiveness of cloth masks, according to The New York Times.

The agency’s concession comes on the heels of admissions from people like CNN’s Leana Wen that “cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic.”

This latest reversal in a long line of trust-eroding flip-flops means a victory lap is well deserved by people like Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who was censored by Google-owned YouTube for suggesting that cloth masks don’t work and N95s do. It’s also deserved by everyone who refused to hang a piece of useless fabric from their ears at every restaurant, store, and airport for the sole purpose of fitting into the popular political narrative. -- excerpt, rest at link above --

Are Face Masks Effective? The Evidence.
https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
Updated: July 2022
Published: July 2020


An overview of the current evidence regarding the effectiveness of face masks.
Contents

A) Studies ⇓ B) WHO review ⇓ C) Real-world evidence ⇓ D) N95/FFP2 masks ⇓ E) Additional aspects ⇓ F) The aerosol issue ⇓ G) Contrary evidence ⇓ H) Mask-related risks ⇓ I) Conclusion ⇓
A) Studies on the effectiveness of face masks

So far, most studies found little to no evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in the general population, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.

A May 2020 meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the US CDC found that face masks had no effect, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control. (Source)
A WHO review of ten randomized controlled trials of face masks against influenza-like illness, published in September 2019, found no statistically significant benefit. (Source)
A Danish randomized controlled trial with 6000 participants, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in November 2020, found no statistically significant effect of high-quality medical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 infection in a community setting. (Source)
A large randomized controlled trial with close to 8000 participants, published in October 2020 in PLOS One, found that face masks “did not seem to be effective against laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections nor against clinical respiratory infection.” (Source)
A February 2021 review by the European CDC found no high-quality evidence in favor of face masks and recommended their use only based on the ‘precautionary principle’. (Source)
A July 2020 review by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine found that there is no evidence for the effectiveness of face masks against virus infection or transmission. (Source)
A November 2020 Cochrane review found that face masks did not reduce influenza-like illness (ILI) cases, neither in the general population nor in health care workers. (Source)
An August 2021 study published in the Int. Research Journal of Public Health found “no association between mask mandates or use and reduced COVID-19 spread in US states.” (Source)
An experimental study using virus aerosols, published in May 2022 in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, found that only professionally fit-tested N95/FFP2 masks, but not surgical masks or non-fitted N95/FFP2 masks, reduced viral loads in nostrils. (Source)
A large Spanish school study, published in March 2022, found that “mask mandates in schools were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission.” (Source)
A May 2020 article by researchers from Harvard Medical School, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that face masks offer “little, if any, protection”. (Source)
A 2015 study in the British Medical Journal BMJ Open found that cloth masks were penetrated by 97% of particles and may increase infection risk by retaining moisture or repeated use. (Source)

For a review of studies claiming face masks are effective, see section G) below.
B) WHO review of face mask trials (2019)

In September 2019, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a comprehensive report on “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza”.

The report reviewed ten randomized controlled trials concerning the effectiveness of face masks against influenza-like illness (ILI). As the following table shows, none of the trials found a statistically significant benefit of face masks.-- excerpt, rest at link above --