Former Covid overlords are said to be salivating at what they think is coming.
The mask police are talking a return of mandates after the CDC claimed it was monitoring a new Covid variant as the 2024 president election campaigns begin.
The re-masking of America has already begun in some places.
Morris Brown College, a private liberal arts school in Atlanta, is now requiring students and employees to wear face masks in hallways and lecture halls for two weeks due to "reports of positive cases among students."
Morris Brown College officials have also instructed students to maintain social distancing and banned all parties and large student gatherings for two weeks.
Hollywood studio Lionsgate has also brought back mask mandates.
“Employees must wear a medical grade face covering (surgical mask, KN95 or N95) when indoors except when alone in an office with the door closed, actively eating, actively drinking at their desk or workstation, or if they are the only individual present in a large open workspace,” said Sommer McElroy, response manager for Lionsgate/Starz.
The mandate will be in effect until further notice for the third and fifth floors of the five-story building at the company’s flagship office in Santa Monica, according to the email cited by Deadline.
In an editorial published by the American College of Physicians (ACP), government doctors and public health experts in Seattle have called for face coverings to be made compulsory in all healthcare facilities once again.
Seattle officials argue that hospital patients are at a higher risk of dying from or being seriously ill with Covid and, by wearing face coverings, would benefit from the "reduce[d] risk for Covid contracted in the hospital among patients and health care workers."
They are making an argument that has already been debunked.
The CDC knew pretty much from the Covid get-go that masks did not stop the wearer from being infected or reduce any associated risks, Ian Miller noted in an Aug. 26 Substack.com analysis.
"New revelations show that the CDC knew the truth about masks and didn't care," Miller wrote.
"As many of you already know in February 2020, virtually every available piece of evidence had confirmed that masks were not effective against respiratory viruses. Pre-pandemic planning documents created by the World Health Organization and the CDC itself either outright stated there was no evidence for masking, or completely omitted it as a potential intervention."
The lack of evidence that masks work didn't stop the CDC from knuckling under to the Covid overlords and changing their stance by April of 2020.
"If that wasn't embarrassing enough, reports later suggested that the agency felt pressured by, wait for it, a New York Times article written by sociologist Zeynep Tufecki," Miller noted. That's correct; the CDC was pressured into changing guidance by an unqualified New York Times writer. Perfection. To make matters worse, newly released information shows they knew soon afterwards they were wrong. And decided to stay the course anyway."
Newly released emails obtained by The Epoch Times show that the CDC was warned in 2021 that their page advocating for mask usage was deeply, and fatally flawed.
Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, along with seven other colleagues sent a letter to the CDC in November 2021 detailing a series of mistakes and unsupported conclusions the agency made in attempting to promote their agenda. Osterholm and the other experts also highlighted that the CDC was ignoring evidence disproving their assertions.
One such CDC claim highlighted in the letter was that "Masking may reduce viral inoculum when transmission occurs, resulting in more mild disease." Osterholm pointed out that the page cited "highly questionable and misleading commentary" to claim that lower viral load, and thus reduced infection, could result from that had already been debunked.
"We believe human epidemiological and animal experimental data have been misinterpreted," they wrote.
The authors also pointed out that the CDC made inaccurate statements about mask efficacy as a whole and there was no growing body of evidence enhancing claims of mask efficacy over time.
"We also recommend that IDSA reconsider its statements about the efficacy of masks and face coverings for preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2," the letter reads. "We do not agree that the evidence for their efficacy has strengthened throughout the pandemic, as the website suggests."
The authors also cited the Cochrane Library review on masks, which has since been updated and confirmed that there's no evidence for their efficacy.
The CDC was also informed of shortcomings in "studies" it used to promote masking. Shortcomings that, Miller noted, "they purposefully ignored."
"The second of these pieces describes the important elements of a rigorous mask study and critiques several studies as examples of the shortcomings of most such studies to date. One of the critiqued studies is the randomized clinical trial of masks conducted in Bangladesh and released as a preprint by Jason Abaluck; this study is cited by IDSA in support of mask efficacy. This study has many significant shortcomings not described or recognized by the IDSA summary, which were highlighted in the CID RAP commentary. Most important, this study did not consider or measure baseline seropositivity in the study population, but instead concluded that anyone seropositive at the end of the study must have been infected during the study period."
While promoting deeply flawed studies to push mask mandates, the CDC also downplayed results from high quality research.
"The IDSA 'Masks and Face Coverings for the Public' webpage appears to focus on the strengths of studies that support its conclusions while ignoring their shortcomings of study design; studies that do not support its perspective are similarly downplayed."
Miller concluded: "Nothing changed in their recommendations, nothing changed in the winter of 2021-2022 for the CDC to reconsider their guidance or spreading inaccurate, incorrect information. Why? Because they simply didn't want to. The CDC were determined to promote masks, and so they did. Facts and evidence be damned."
They question is, will a large portion of the population which complied the first time around obey if it happens again?
Please Support Real Journalism
Free Press International
[Freedom Is Not Free!]
