On May 1, Let’s All Tear Off Our Masks

Some of you older folks may remember the national 55 miles per hour speed limit on the interstate highways. President Nixon signed it into law in January 1974 to reduce fuel consumption during the Arab oil embargo of October 1973. The embargo ended in March 1974, but the law hung around for another generation, only the excuse became “highway safety” – which as studies found, the law did nothing to improve.

Or more recently, remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? Two weeks in national lockdown to avoid overwhelming the hospitals with Covid-19 cases. Two weeks that turned into a month, then two, three, four months, and more. The hospitals were never overwhelmed – in fact, they were laying off healthcare workers – but state governors continued the lockdowns, only now the excuse was to “slow the spread.” Except that in states that didn’t lock down, coronavirus didn’t spread any faster than in states that did.

And then there are the mask mandates. These, too, are supposed to be temporary. “Until we have a vaccine,” they said. Well, now we have, not one, but three vaccines. So, what are they saying now that people are getting vaccinated? That we’ll have to keep wearing, not one, but two masks – well into 2022, according to Dr. Fauci, even if you’ve had all the vaccinations. Why? “Variant strains,” says Dr. Fauci, except the vaccines so far have been effective against them, too.

There is no science – no real science – behind the mask mandates. The Centers for Disease Control inadvertently revealed the lack of scientific support for wearing masks to avoid contracting Covid-19 in their weekly morbidity and mortality report for September 11 last year. One of the statistics reported was that 85 percent of their sample of 153 symptomatic Covid patients reported wearing masks “always” or “often.”

This percentage does not differ significantly from The Economist/YouGov poll finding (sample size = 1500) that during the same period as the CDC study, 84 percent of all Americans were wearing masks. Plugging these percentages into Bayes’ theorem and performing a little algebra, we find that the probability of contracting Covid-19 while wearing a mask is actually higher than the probability of catching it while going maskless, though not significantly so. In other words, masks – at least the cloth and surgical masks most Americans are actually wearing – are basically useless as personal protection from Covid-19.

As for masks preventing us from infecting others, take a look at this video and this one. As you can see, any breath that does not go out the front of the mask goes out the sides. So instead of infecting the person standing a foot in front of you, you infect the people on either side of you.

What our mask masters don’t seem to get is that our bodies need oxygen, and to get the required number of free oxygen molecules into our bloodstreams, we must inhale a certain volume of air. This means we also must exhale about the same volume (although about 20 percent of the free oxygen we inhaled has been exchanged for carbon dioxide). The only sure-fire way to keep from getting or spreading Covid-19 is to put a tight-fitting plastic bag over your head. After that, you will have no more worries about Covid-19 – or about anything else.

Despite the absence of any real scientific evidence that masks actually work – and spraying aerosol at a mannequin isn’t “scientific evidence” – we are now told that we not only have to keep wearing these medically useless pieces of cloth, but we have to wear them even after receiving a vaccination. In fact, Biden now wants us all to stay masked until everybody has been vaccinated – in other words, forever, since that will never happen.

Even more infuriating about the ongoing mask mandates is that there is a good chance we already have herd immunity. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal back in February, Dr. Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Bloomberg School of Public Health argued that, based on the population fatality rate and the infection fatality rate, it was likely that up to two-thirds of the U.S. population has already had the Covid-19 infection. Add to that the people who have been fully vaccinated, and this should put us very close to herd immunity by early April if we are not already there. That new infections and hospitalizations have been on a sharp downward trend since January provides some pretty convincing evidence of this.

So why do we have to keep wearing masks – especially after the latest CDC report found that fully vaccinated people neither get nor spread the virus?

Here’s a clue: the mandates have nothing to do with the pandemic. There is no valid medical reason for healthy people to keep wearing masks, especially if they’ve been vaccinated. No, the reason is political, not medical. Like the tricolor cockade worn during the French Revolution, a mask demonstrates your submission to your rulers.

There is only one way to end the endless mask mandates, and that is to just stop wearing them. President Biden asked for 100 days of masking. All right, As of May 1, he’ll have had his 100 days. On that day I propose that we all remove our masks and keep them off. It is time the American people let their rulers know they will no longer tolerate arbitrary and useless mandates that seem to be more about controlling them with fear than protecting them from disease. The goalposts have been moved for the last time.

And May 1 is an especially appropriate date for the great unmasking. May Day is the traditional international socialist holiday, and the pandemic has been used as an excuse to deprive us of our freedoms and advance the socialist agenda (e.g., see the recently-passed $1.9 trillion “covid relief” package). What better day to stand up to these would-be Stalins?

So, tell all your friends. Get the message out on social media. Be polite and respectful of others and don’t violate their personal space, but be firm in asserting your rights.