Do masks work? Judge yourself with M.D. exhaling vaped smoke through standard Covid mask):
Video is 2 some minutes. Of course, the vaping particles are as large or larger than the virus. But they DO cause other issues, such as my property manager, who had to have $25,000 sinus surgery for complications from wearing one. And of course, if you don't don or doff it correctly, it is useless (and most people don't even know those are the correct terms for this, let alone actually do it correctly). But worse of all, our young are very, VERY sensitive to micro-expressions around the faces of people. This blocks many of those expressions, and may well - along with the effects from the lockdown itself - be the cause of, e.g., suicides amongst California girls up by 58% in one study a year ago.
Then why do doctors wear them? Answer? to protect open wounds from particles breathed out during surgery. Most of those masks you see have holes ~ 80 to 100 microns, the virus perhaps ~ 0.1 micron... a thousand times smaller. You tell me how much that does.
As most of you know, South Dakota never locked down, and Florida barely so, and neither had any greater incidence of Covid than the fasco-Marxist locked down states like CA, NY, etc.
The largest COVID-19-specific mask trial to date, the Danish study -see here or Annals of Internal Medicine here - found masks may either reduce your risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection by as much as 46%, or increase it by 23%. Either way, the reason for this is because the virus is aerosolized and spreads through the air. Aerosolized viruses — especially SARS-CoV-2, which is about half the size of influenza viruses — cannot be blocked by a mask, as explained in my interview with Denis Rancourt, who has conducted a thorough review of the published science on masks and viral transmission.vast majority — 97.9% of those who didn’t wear masks, and 98.2% of those who did — remained infection free.
And the efficacy of masks? Well, the “science” was self reporting/anecdotal. The CDC's own says 70.6% of COVID-19 patients reported "always" wearing a cloth mask or face covering in the 14 days preceding their illness; 14.4% reported having worn a mask "often." So, a total of 85% of people who came down with COVID-19 had "often" or "always" worn a mask. See CDC here or here.
But if you think that is crazy, watch this sleight of hand: The CDC tells us on their own website that a cloth face mask will not protect against smoke in a wildfire because “they do not catch small, harmful particles in smoke that can harm your health." Those smoke particles range from 2.5 micrometers in diameter or smaller in smoke and haze, to 10 micrometers in wind-blown dust, per the government of Alaska air quality department. SARS-CoV-2, meanwhile, has a diameter between 0.06 and 0.14 micrometers. Even the 2+2=4 is racist types should be able to figure that one out. SARS-CoV-2 is about half the size of most viruses, usually around 0.02 microns to 0.3 microns. WHO tells us respiratory droplets expelled when talking or coughing measure between 5 and 10 micrometers. N95 masks, filtering as small as 0.3 microns, can certainly help the respiratory droplets, but not the aerosolized viruses. Watch yourself in this video (on TikTok - do NOT download or get this app!!! You can watch without getting the app!) Further, a 2009 JAMA study said surgical masks and N-95 functioned about the same. And a Sept. 2018 ruling in an Ontario Nurses Association filed against the Toronto Academic Health Science Network’s mask policy found there was 'scant evidence' that forcing nurses to use masks reduced the transmission of influenza to patients …ONA's well-regarded expert witnesses, including Toronto infection control expert Dr. Michael Gardam, Quebec epidemiologist Dr. Gaston De Serres, and Dr. Lisa Brosseau, an American expert on masks, testified that there was … no evidence that forcing healthy nurses to wear masks during the influenza season did anything to prevent transmission of influenza in hospitals. See ruling here, and here.
Want more? A policy review paper in Emerging Infectious Diseases in May 2020, reviewed "the evidence base on the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical personal protective measures (masks) … in non-healthcare settings" concluded, based on 10 randomized controlled trials, that there was "no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks.” In fact, a 2019 WHO review concluded evidence for mask usage was slim, and improvement might just be due to chance, and a meta-analysis, led by respected researcher Tom Jefferson, on MedRxiv, in April 2020 found mask wearing in the general population or among health care workers did not reduce influenza-like illness cases or influenza.
But if you prefer graphs, Bioengineer Yinon Weiss did that in "These 12 Graphs Show Mask Mandates Do Nothing to Stop COVID"; see also his Twitter thread here.
I found way back that WHO's own mask advisory clearly states twice that masks are not source control! if I could add pictures, I would add a screen shot of the relevant paragraph from page two of their advisory.
There's another reason why surgeons wear masks aside from the drool factor and that's to stop blood splash. Icky.