Robust Findings that Masks Don’t Work are Ignored by News Media

Imagine that a newly published comprehensive review of mask-wearing by a prestigious medical publication concluded that mask wearing offered us significant protections from COVID. You'd see those findings echoed by most major news organizations. Biden's attorneys would trumpet those findings in Biden's attempt to reverse the 11th Circuit ruling, so that he could make better arguments requiring airline passengers to put their damned masks back on. Well, the opposite has happened.

I personally know Dr. Kristen Walsh. She is a dedicated pediatrician. She is one of the many practicing physicians who read the January 30, 2023 Cochrane Library review of evidence as to whether masks prevented the spread of COVID. Walsh's Feb 1, 2023 article is titled: "New meta-analysis should end discussion of mask mandates in schools." An excerpt:

From where I sit, as a primary care doctor practicing in an academic clinic setting, this review was big, huge science news. It gathered and studied 78 randomized controlled trials, both pre- and mid-COVID, and addressed COVID, flu, and other respiratory viral illnesses. I was surprised (and not in a pleasant way), therefore, to see almost complete media silence after the review was released. I didn’t see anything about it on cable news; no articles in well-known newspapers. The tweet from the Cochrane Database announcing the review only had 68 likes and 24 retweets after 24 hours. “How is this possible?” I thought. “Why does no one care whether masks work or not?” Probably because the answer was pretty much: not.
Upon reading Walsh's Substack article, I did my due diligence, searching the websites of the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC and NPR. As of today, you will not find a single word about the Cochrane Review declaring that there is no evidence supporting the use of masks to prevent COVID.

Why the silence? I would start my answer with the COVID edition of the Twitter files. I would add that we are looking squarely at a sad example of the sunk costs phenomenon: Most legacy news outlets (and their pals in the U.S. Government) are determined to keep riding their severely flawed COVID narrative because they fear the ridicule they would face if they did an about-face. They have shown themselves to be obedient servants to the stern dictates of the Trusted News Initiative, to the Biden Administration and to the U.S. Security State, which has dedicated at least eighty FBI agents to the task of making sure that highly decorated doctors and researchers (and ordinary people) stop thinking for themselves for safety's sake. We are being protected from facts regarding the failures of masks for the same reason that we are being protected from other COVID-related facts and opinions, including the recent shocking revelations of Jordon Walker, Pfizer's Worldwide Director of R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning.

Walsh is not alone in recognizing the import of this comprehensive Cochrane review. Dr. Vinay Prasad's Feb 2 article is titled: "The Cochrane Review on Masks is Damning: Masks have no good data to support them: It is a religion, not a science." Here is an excerpt from Prasad's article:

Let me be clear: The science did not change. Public health experts started lying. We never had good data that mask mandates help, or that mask advice (a softer policy) improves outcomes. Yet it was widely pushed— most likely to distract from true federal failures. After vaccination, not only do we not have evidence. . . Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza like or Covid like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone cold negative. . . . This is why Fauci said what he said initially on 60 minutes. He wasn’t lying. The best evidence showed no benefit. That was before we saw a concerted campaign to promote cloth masking— a bizarre way to treat anxiety. People routinely wore cloth masks outside— something that was less 21st century and more 3rd century, akin to animal sacrifice, and dancing to make the rains come.

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Project Veritas Undercover Pfizer Video Fails to Ignite News Media Interest

You might not like any of the players featured in this episode of Tucker Carlson, but the topic should be drawing a massive amount of media inquiry. Unfortunately, it is getting zero coverage at the NYT, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC or CNN (based on my website searches in the past 5 minutes). Total radio silence, while the Project Veritas video has been played more than 12 million times on Twitter, FOX and Rumble. It appears that our left-leaning legacy "news" outlets are trying to "protect" us from this story much as they tried to "protect" us from every story that has strayed from the official COVID narrative for the past few years (as clearly shown by the Twitter files and elsewhere).

At first, I had trouble believing that, Jordon Triton Walker, the man featured in this secretly-recorded video was really a doctor employed by Pfizer, but screenshots of documents taken prior to massive ongoing Internet scrubbing suggest that he is, indeed, a doctor and that he, indeed, has been working for Pfizer. There are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Good luck getting answers.

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We Have Ended the War on Obesity. We Are Declaring Ourselves Healthy Fat and Moving On

Dr. Vinay Prasad reports on the insanity. Here is is in a nutshell (this is my mini-summary):

Mount Sinai School of Medicine: Striving for a healthy weight is racist. NYT: Stop worrying about losing weight. This is part of the new American ethos: This bad thing that is happening to you is not your fault. In fact, nothing is your fault. And there is no need to work hard to achieve anything.

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Federal Court Issues Preliminary Injunction Against California Regarding Law that Punishes Doctors who Stray from the COVID “Consensus.”

A federal court has issued a preliminary injunction against the state of California regarding California's new law that attempts to require doctors to adhere to COVID orthodoxy when they discuss treatment with their patients. Here is an excerpt from an article by FOX News:

A California judge issued a preliminary injunction against a state law that empowers the Medical Board of California to discipline physicians who support opinions about COVID-19 that are not in line with the "consensus," according to reports.

The law, known as Assembly Bill 2098, was set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023. Under the law, the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California could discipline physicians who "disseminate" information about COVID that is not in line with the "contemporary scientific consensus.""

Doctors said the law violates their First Amendment rights because it impedes their ability to communicate with their patients during treatment. . . .

Doctors also argue that "contemporary scientific consensus" is "undefined in the law and undefinable as a matter of logic."

I checked each of the following websites and you won't read a word about this important court ruling in the NYT, MSNBC, CNN, NPR or the Washington Post.

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Our Rational Distrust of Public Health Officials Based on COVID Pronouncements

Our public health officials have earned our distrust. Vinay Prasad John Mandrola, writing at The Free Press:

We believe the feverish speculation that Covid-19 vaccines have led to increased sudden deaths is largely due to a trust problem with our public health leaders. And Americans have good reasons for their skepticism.

For example, when the evidence emerged that myocarditis in young males was linked to the mRNA vaccines, the Biden administration denied it: We have not seen a signal and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given,” Rochelle Walensky, CDC director, said last April. This was despite the fact that it had been reported by researchers in Israel two months earlier.

When further studies confirmed a link to heart inflammation in younger males, instead of acknowledging that the evidence was concerning and requiring changes to vaccination recommendations to protect this group, officials pivoted. They asserted that vaccine-related myocarditis was not a big concern. Walensky described the myocarditis findings as “these mild, self-limited cases.” They also pushed the line that infection with Covid-19 itself—as is true of many viruses—can cause myocarditis, and that this was a far bigger danger.

We dispute both claims. The majority of young people with vaccine-related myocarditis are hospitalized, and then given long lists of activities to avoid. That is serious. And the evidence for the assertion that a Covid-19 infection is a big heart risk for young people is unconvincing.

Another front on which the government has not been forthcoming is the question of whether or not the vaccines actually prevent the spread of the disease. Last January, Walensky finally acknowledged what millions of people who had gotten the shots, then came down with Covid-19, could have told her—that the vaccines do not prevent people from getting or spreading the illness. Walensky herself contracted the virus for a second time last October, a month after she was boosted with the new bivalent vaccine she wants everyone to take.

People expect leaders to incorporate changing information into their messaging. For instance, since the vaccine does not prevent transmission, there was no longer a societal benefit in getting vaccinated. It should have become a personal health decision. But this message never came—just the opposite. Our health officials have been pushing boosters on everyone from kindergarten on up.

Even worse, many colleges, following CDC guidance, are mandating the new bivalent booster for all students. That means that these schools are violating the rights of bodily autonomy in young people, and increasing their risk of a vaccine side effect for no purpose.

Yet another unanswered question is why U.S. public health leaders, unlike many others around the world, do not consider natural immunity from contracting Covid-19 when making vaccination recommendations. Our officials simply ignore the growing evidence that a Covid infection confers resistance to reinfection as effectively, or even more so, than vaccines.

News this week about the FDA indicates that a change is coming to the current vaccination recommendations. Officials are expected to call for an annual dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, similar to the flu shot schedule. But there is no indication this guidance will be accompanied by the long-overdue studies looking into whether these vaccines provide sufficient protection to make any risks worthwhile.

Trust, once lost, is hard to regain. People feel that their medical leaders are withholding basic facts, denying reality, disregarding new information, or worse, causing them harm.

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