Michael Fumento investigates The Myth — and Grift — of Long COVID in his American Spectator article.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Validating people’s fears is a lucrative business.

The would-be monkeypoxalypse isn’t panning out as some would like — no deaths have been reported outside of Africa — and apparently 99 percent of U.S. victims are gay men having sex with gay men.

And, while acute COVID-19 is still spinning off variants and Health and Human Services (HHS) has just extended the public health emergency, people are just plumb tired of hearing about it. But moving in to fill the clickbait quota is the so-called “long COVID” or “long-haul COVID.”

“Do I have Long COVID? As many as 23 million Americans want to know,
as more than 200 symptoms emerge.”

So begins a recent article in Fortune magazine. “It gets stranger,” the piece continues. “Among the 200-plus symptoms identified so far are ear numbness, a sensation of ‘brain on fire,’ erectile dysfunction, irregular menstrual periods, constipation, peeling skin, and double vision.” This is according to a study published a year ago in the British medical journal the Lancet, widely considered the world’s most prestigious medical journal. And, oh yes, “The study identified symptoms involving 10 major organ systems—and the body only has 11.”

If you haven’t recently suffered at least a dozen of these symptoms, it’s bad news for you. You’re dead.

We all know the expression “If it sounds too good to be true ….” Why is there no corollary that says, “If it sounds too bad …”? Do you have to be a genius’ genius, say Albert Einstein level, to recognize that over 200 symptoms in almost all major organ systems have no relationship, that this is just a constellation of symptoms — which has now grown so large that it cannot possibly count as a constellation anymore?

It’s essentially anything bad.  The “search for causes and cures” for “long COVID” will never end, any more than we will ever find Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.

Oh, and this is really important. Official definitions aside, in order to have “long COVID,”
there’s absolutely no need to ever have had acute COVID.

Obviously, some people who contract COVID do have long-term symptoms, as with the flu or other diseases that usually resolve fairly quickly but sometimes have lingering problems.

Yet, as I noted in my first “long COVID” article in The American Spectator last September:

The largest study so far of “long-haulers,” published by researchers at University College London in July, comprised nearly 4,000 subjects from over 56 countries. Participants were over the age of 18 and suffered from symptoms lasting at least 28 days. The researchers acknowledged merely in passing that in the study a mere 27% or 1020 of these “COVID long-haulers” had evidence of exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. That’s whether antigen [during infection] or antibody [post-infection]. The only connection to COVID was the attestation of the sufferers. They “felt” they had COVID, regardless of evidence.

So about three-fourths of the participants don’t fit any of the above definitions. Yet that is the study that Fortune cites.

An August 2021 study of 3,151 British “long haulers” in Pragmatic and Observational Research found that only 17.2 percent were “test-confirmed positive.” A further 12 percent said they were told they had acute COVID, but no test was performed. And over 70 percent admitted it was merely self-diagnosis. An influential and scary article in the Atlantic reported some two-thirds of “long-hauler” patients had negative coronavirus antibody tests without making the obvious inference. An advocacy group study released in May 2020 by the curiously named “Patient-Led Research Collaborative” found that only “[a]bout a quarter of respondents (23.1%) tested positive for COVID-19” but “[i]n our analysis, we included all responses regardless of testing status.”

And the game continues. No, not just with the popular clickbait media. With the vaunted “published, peer-reviewed” medical journals that have names most people don’t even understand, like Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology. A May 2022 issue reports on a selected cohort of 100 “non-hospitalized COVID-19 ‘long haulers.’” Yet these included “50 laboratory-negative” people. Again, they didn’t just not test positive but rather had tested negative. But this time it was made clear they were included because they were negative!

They didn’t read the WHO, CDC, Mayo Clinic, etc., definitions?

Clearly they had. And rejected them. You see, “it has been advocated that a positive test for COVID-19 should not be a perquisite for diagnosis” (emphasis mine). As I noted in my original article, like so many faux diseases before it, such as the CDC-recognized “myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS),” so-called “long COVID” has been co-opted by advocacy groups whose main purpose is to engage in what’s called “beating up the numbers.” That is, making them seem greater. This has been going on since AIDS, when beginning around 1984 AIDS was converted from a disease overwhelmingly afflicting male homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers to “An Equal Opportunity Destroyer.”

The difference between AIDS and “long COVID” is that, at the time, you could play games regarding how people contracted the disease, but the definition of AIDS in the U.S. and Europe was quite fixed and absolutely required a positive HIV test. But if we do what “long COVID” advocates want and eliminate the need for a positive COVID test, then, given that absolutely everyone not only has had some of the ever-growing list of 200-plus symptoms but probably still does, we can literally say that everyone is suffering “long COVID.” Of course, that would be going a bit far, as when I saw extrapolations of AIDS cases to a point where people claimed more Americans would die of AIDS than there were Americans. So instead, we see the numbers pumped up to something that’s just on the edge of reason. Or maybe a bit beyond. The Atlantic tells us the U.S. has “at least 56 million long-COVID patients.” Or, as it says, “one for every six Americans.” Do we really believe that?

Disease advocacy groups, of which “long COVID” had at least 50 as of February of last year, have various motives. An obvious one is that more attention means more funding.

Removal of stigma is not universal, but special treatment is. And indeed, in a joint statement last year, HHS and the Department of Justice ruled that “long COVID can be a disability” under the Americans with Disabilities Act, thereby protecting alleged sufferers from “discrimination.” With allegedly over 200 symptoms, pretty much whatever you say your problem is can be protected. The range is broad enough to include demanding more time to take tests. Want a better chance at acing that exam? Claim to have “long COVID.” It does, however, require an “individualized assessment,” which is presumably as easy as calling up a list of alleged symptoms or, actually, just claiming virtually any symptoms.

Advocates also want to make a special exception for alleged sufferers to collect social security disability payments more quickly. As it stands, you don’t need a “long COVID” diagnosis to qualify if your symptoms are among those covered. But there’s a waiting period, and they want that shortened just for those who claim to have “long COVID.”

All that said, the Annals authors’ own data make the case that there’s no such thing as “long COVID.” Table 2 has three separate breakdowns. It kindly separates those who tested positive from those who tested negative, and then breaks them down further into neurologic and other symptoms upon first visit and then upon follow-up. And lo! — it turns out that time and again the ones who tested negative (and, even by the woke standards of the authors, are thereby more likely to never have had acute COVID) are worse off.

So, if nothing else, when you see an article in the popular media cite official or authoritative definitions of “long COVID” and then proceed to discuss what it may be, don’t let them mislead you into thinking they’re going by those definitions. Essentially, they’re going by whatever they think will keep you reading or by what they feel is the “right thing to do.”

But why would there be a difference between the positive and negative groups with the negatives worse off? Because those who actually have had COVID may be suffering extended symptoms from their disease. May. But those who never had COVID, but are convinced they have, are more likely to have psychological problems, and psychological problems are notoriously difficult to treat. Especially if ignored in favor of something else.

That’s why you haven’t seen terminology in this article such as “alleged sufferers.” Because if you think you’re sick, you’re sick. It’s just that, if you had negative tests for acute COVID, you almost certainly don’t have “long COVID.”

Mind, just as “long haulers” who test negative are different from those who test positive, “long haulers” generally have very little overlap with sufferers of acute COVID. While acute COVID is highly contagious and therefore virtually everyone is susceptible to contracting it (some people repeatedly), those who develop severe symptoms fit a very tight profile. Overwhelmingly they are older, with a plurality of deaths over age 80, and have several preconditions or comorbidities such as diabetes and untreated hypertension. According to the CDC, in the U.S. among acute COVID patients, non-Hispanic American blacks are slightly more likely to be diagnosed with the disease, almost three times as likely to be hospitalized, and are twice as likely to have died, compared with non-Hispanic whites.

But “long-haulers,” according to an appendix in the 2021 University College study, “belong to the middle and upper-middle income brackets, with 51.0% of participants in the USA earning more than $85,000/year and 22.5% earning more than $150,000/year.” They are overwhelmingly white and female. In fact, the demographics match pretty well to those diagnosed with the above-mentioned phantom illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), for which coincidentally there’s also no cure. The Veterans’ Department says: “[R]esearch suggests that women are 4X more likely to get [ME/CFS] than men. Statistics also show that people between ages 40 and 59 are most affected by the disorder.”

Mostly, as with so many other “syndromes,” these people suffer from depression. My interpretation? No, theirs. In the Annals study, the majority of the COVID-negative patients actually claimed depression as looming large among their symptoms, both upon initial visit and follow-up. Meanwhile, this being a journal of neurology, any symptom they list, such as shortness of breath, can be associated with depression and/or anxiety.

Even the mainstream media have observed the “long COVID” link to depression, as a Google search quickly shows. But they consistently put the cart before the horse. That is, they blame depression on “long COVID” rather than “long COVID” on depression. A typical headline: “How Long Haul COVID Takes a Toll on Your Mental Health.”

And, sadly, the worst thing you can do with depressives is to patronize them. You should tell them that they are suffering from depression and that it is a very real and serious disease (successful suicide has a 100 percent mortality rate), and then you should refer them to an expert who may be able to treat them.

You do not attribute their illness to something that doesn’t exist. That’s not only uncompassionate, it’s downright cruel. Yet, it’s also a great way to sell them snake oil to cure them.

But how many researchers have dared publish the clear reality? Precious few. Or at least few have succeeded; we have no idea what’s been rejected. It’s treated the same as was the case that said AIDS victims are overwhelmingly gay males and drug abusers, as the data clearly showed. I lost two jobs over that and was unemployable for two years. Likewise, did you know that monkeypox victims are 99 percent male and gay before you read it here?

A commentary last year in America’s most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), actually launched a preemptive strike against those who believe “long COVID” to be “likely to have a non-physiological origin.” The opinion piece, titled “Confronting Our Next National Health Disaster — Long-Haul Covid,” declares the authors to be aghast that “[s]ome commentators have characterized it as a mental illness.”

In late 2020, the godfather of America’s acute COVID hysteria, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci, declared “long COVID” to be “quite real and quite extensive.” That’s the same Fauci who apparently got promoted to that position shortly after essentially kick-starting the “AIDS democratization” campaign in 1983 with an article in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), saying that there was evidence of casual transmission. This was long after it had been made clear it was a difficult-to-transmit disease of bodily fluids.

It’s also hardly insubstantial that Congress is paying bounties for discussing the will o’ the wisp, providing “$1.15 billion in funding over four years” for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support research. And if you think you’re going to get a grant by labeling it as something other than what the former head of NIH, the current acting director, Fauci, the NEJM, and the medical establishment in general has, hopefully you’re living in a state where smoking those mushrooms is legal.

Over a billion bucks is dedicated to the RECOVER program, under which, as of February,
66 hospitals and health systems had launched post-COVID clinics.

So it’s a massive gravy train. There’s much money in spotting Nessie and Bigfoot, less than nothing in denying their existence. In fact, the few who have published in medical journals suggesting it’s not a real disease have been pounded.  There is precedent for this intimidation. My experience with AIDS, for example. Lost jobs, long-term unemployment, books banned.

But there’s also precedent with others and other diseases. About four years ago, Reuters ran a remarkable article called “Online activists are silencing us, scientists say,” regarding ME/CFS. It noted that researchers seeking answers to actual causes of the syndrome and bona fide treatments said they were abandoning the field because of bullying. “Of more than 20 leading research groups who were publishing treatment studies in high-quality journals 10 years ago,” one scientist said, “only one or two continue to do so.” Their sin was in positing psychological rather than organic explanations and, therefore, appropriate treatments. The campaign to have evidence-backed treatments discredited was “doing a terrible disservice to sufferers from this condition,” said another. He concluded, “Patients are the losers here.”

What Ronald E. Gots wrote of an alleged syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), in 1995 in the Journal of Toxicology holds equally true for “long COVID.” It’s “a dangerous diagnosis,” says the executive director of the Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute in Rockville, Maryland, a clearinghouse for scientific data. He continues:

[T]he diagnosis of MCS begins a downward spiral of fruitless treatments, culminating in withdrawal from society and condemning the sufferer to a life of misery and disability. This is a phenomenon in which the diagnosis is far more disabling than the symptoms.

It’s wickedly cruel! We need to really care about these people, not pretend that we do. We need to tell them they need help, that they quite possibly can be helped, but that, even if they tested positive for COVID, what they have is probably not COVID-related, and, if they tested negative, it almost certainly is not.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for an advocacy group or even the medical journal industry — and indeed it is an industry — to take that position. All the money, fame, and fortune are pointing in a different direction.

Update July 17, 2022

As we approach autumn in the NH, already the medical-governmental complex is gearing up for another takeover of individual rights and freedoms.  New medications (pale, dangerous ivermectin imitations) and more experimental shots have been approved in readiness for imminent mandates requiring their use,  This is a time to remember, not forget, how a fake pandemic was foisted upon the world.  Yes, runny nose coronaviruses are real and have been in circulation worldwide for decades. But the threat was never great for the large majority of populations,  and anti-viral treatments were available despite intimidation against them.  Like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, four myths are saddling up again to ride over our peace and harmony.

Myth: Sars-CV2 is a new virus and we have no defense.
Fact: Sars-CV2 has not been scientifically established as a virus.

Myth: Testing positive for Sars-CV2 makes you a disease case and a spreader.
Fact: PCR tests say nothing about you being ill or infectious.

Myth: Millions of people have died from Covid19.
Fact: Life expectancy is the same before and after Covid19.

Myth: Wearing masks prevents viral infection.
Fact: Evidence shows masks are symbolic, not effective.

Jack Kerwick has written a series of articles at FrontPage Mag over the last year discussing how facts have been overwhelmed by fears, a mythology replacing scientific knowledge and reason. From the beginning this contagion was different, being the first one in an age of 24/7 cable news and rampant social media. So emotion and exaggeration were spread and political leaders pressured to act as protectors, clamping down on social and economic transactions. This post provides a synopsis of what went wrong, based on Kerwick’s recent essay Masks and Stopping COVID. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

What the science – lots of science – really tells us.

In previous essays, I argued for three theses against the prevailing COVID Orthodoxy:

(1)SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, and extracted in accordance with the scientific method that has long been in place for isolating, purifying, and extracting other viruses (like bacteriophages and “giant viruses”), and neither has the scientific method been observed with respect to establishing whether this virus is in fact the cause of a disease called “COVID-19.”

Discussion:

Has the existence of “the Virus” been established according to a universally acknowledged set of scientific procedures that must be observed to establish the existence of any and all other viruses?

From the sounds of it, the answer is a resounding no.

Dr. Tom Cowan, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and Sally Fallon Morell, are among those who have noted in a paper published last year that in demonstrating the existence of a new virus, samples must, firstly, be taken from the blood, phlegm, or other secretions of hundreds of people exhibiting symptoms that are “unique and specific enough to characterize an illness.”

Then, “without mixing these samples with ANY tissue or products that also contain genetic material, the virologist macerates, filters, and ultracentrifuges, i.e. purifies the specimen.” This, the authors explain, is a “common virology technique, done for decades to isolate bacteriophages [viruses that infect bacteria and reproduce within them] and so-called giant viruses [a virus larger than typical bacteria].”

Thirdly, once virologists perform this procedure, they are then able to “demonstrate with electron microscopy thousands of identically sized and shaped particles.” The latter are “the isolated and purified virus.”

Fourthly, upon determining the purity of these particles, virologists are able to examine their “structure, morphology, and chemical composition [.]”

Fifthly, “the genetic makeup” of the particles [the virus] “is characterized by extracting the genetic material directly from” them and “using genetic-sequencing techniques” that have long been in existence.

Finally, an analysis must be conducted to prove that “these uniform particles are exogenous (outside) in origin” as viruses are held to be and not just “the normal breakdown of products of dead and dying tissues.”

The authors conclude: “If we have come this far then we have fully isolated, characterized, genetically-sequenced an exogenous virus particle” .
They add that nowhere in the literature does it show that any of these steps have been taken with respect to SARS-CoV-2.

Neither—and this is crucial—have the scientific steps for determining that SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of a disease, COVID-19, been taken. What are these steps? There really isn’t much to it:

A group of healthy subjects, typically animals, is first exposed to “this isolated, purified virus in the manner in which the disease is thought to be transmitted.”

Subsequently, virologists will wait to determine whether these subjects fall ill with “the same disease, as confirmed by clinical and autopsy findings [.]” If so, “one has now shown that the virus actually causes a disease.” In other words, the “infectivity and transmission of an infectious agent” will have been demonstrated.

Again, according to the authors, nothing like this has been performed to show that
there is a virus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes what has become known as COVID-19.

An ever growing number of citizen journalists in over ten different countries from around the world have, via the Freedom of Information Acts of their respective homes, requested from scores of health agencies an account of the process by which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated (i.e. separated out from all other stuff). To date, no account has been provided.

(2) The explosion of COVID “cases” is an illusion generated by a combination of two things: (a) the redefining of a “case” from meaning “infection in need of medical attention”—which is how it was defined in the pre-COVID era—to meaning “anyone who is presumed to have, or to have had, COVID and/or anyone who tests positive for COVID” plus (b) an intrinsically limited PCR test that is deliberately run at a number of cycles guaranteed to produce a tsunami of false-positives.

The official case numbers, in other words, are meaningless.

Discussion:

Right from the jump, it’s crucial to take note of the fact that for the first time ever, beginning just last year, “cases” was radically redefined in such a way that would have been unthinkable in just February of 2020 (one month before The Virus Apocalypse engulfed the universe).

For starters, as indicated above, many of these “cases,” per the CDC, included those patients who were labeled as “probable” carriers of the virus. This means that they were diagnosed as “cases” in the absence of any “confirmatory laboratory testing.” And yet they were identified as COVID “cases.”

Moreover, even when testing is figured into it, with respect to no other virus or disease has the CDC ever counted as a “case” a merely positive test. A positive test, in other words, has never been regarded by the medical establishment as sufficient grounds upon which to determine a “case.” Rather, in order for something to count as a “case,” a person had to have been sick and in need of medical attention like, say, hospitalization.

In the COVID era, however, the CDC began accumulating positive PCR test results (about more of which will be said below) from people the vast majority of whom are “asymptomatic,” meaning they feel just fine, and combining them with positive antibodies tests from people who also feel just fine: The final sum, this compound, comprises all “cases.”

Now, as for those PCR tests: There are two problems.

First, as Karry Mullis bluntly remarked: “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.” Who was Karry Mullis? He was the inventor of the PCR test. And he won a Nobel Prize in Science for this achievement. What did the late Dr. Mullis mean by his characterization of his own invention?

“PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers [of viruses]. Although there is a common misimpression that the viral load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV. The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves” (emphases added).

Lauitsen explains further:

“What PCR does is to select a genetic sequence and then amplify it enormously. It can accomplish the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack; it can amplify that needle into a haystack. Like an electronically amplified antenna, PCR greatly amplified the signal, but it also greatly amplifies the noise” (emphases added).

What this implies is that given that “the amplification is exponential, the slightest error in measurement, the slightest contamination, can result in errors of many orders of magnitude.”

There is still another problem with the PCR test as it is currently being used that guarantees its utter worthlessness. More exactly, that guarantees that the “case” numbers built upon it are wholly inaccurate and, hence, meaningless.

This past fall, none other than the New York Times noted that possibly as high as 90% of all positive test results are false.

Per the CDC and FDA guidelines, the vast majority of PCR tests are run at a threshold of 40 cycles. Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist from Harvard who is quoted in the Times piece, notes that when PCR tests are run at 35 or more cycles, they “may detect not just live virus but also live fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risks—akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.”

The French researcher Didier Raoult has shown that when the PCR test is run at 25 cycles, about 70% of samples were genuinely positive—meaning infectious. However, when the test is run at a threshold of 30 cycles, only 20% of samples were infectious. At 35 cycles, but three percent of samples were infectious.

And when the test was run above 35 cycles? Zero samples were infectious.

(3)People are getting sick and dying from all manner of things from which people get sick and die each and every year. Only throughout this past year, these causes of sickness and death have been repackaged as COVID sickness and death.

Discussion:

Think about it: a cough, running nose, sore throat, chills, chest congestion, fever, loss of taste and smell—these are all symptoms of a plethora of things, from the common cold to seasonal influenza and a whole lot else. Particularly since the vast majority of COVID cases are “mild,” it’s with the greatest of ease that any single one of these symptoms or any number of combinations of them can be used as a pretext by which to establish a “COVID case.”

This is not necessarily to say that the symptoms in question are not signs of COVID or the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is claimed to be its cause. It’s only to note that in the absence of scientifically confirming definitively that (a) there is a unique strain of a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, (b) that it is the cause of something called COVID-19, and that, (3) given the scandalously unreliable PCR test, people do in fact have COVID, symptoms that are associated with the latter are more economically, more plausibly explained by way of reference to illnesses that have long been with us.

The Principle of Parsimony—better known since the 14th century as “Ockham’s Razor”—applies: When confronted with two or more explanatory hypotheses, all things being equal, reason dictates that we opt for the one that is simplest.

Since many of the symptoms now being associated with COVID until recently were explained in terms of, say, the flu, and, given the foregoing facts regarding the science—or lack of science—behind the COVID Narrative, it makes better sense to continue explaining those symptoms in terms of the flu.

Indeed, there is no doubt that a great shell game has been transpiring for a year now as cases of various illnesses have been re-labeled as COVID cases.

For example, over at John Hopkins University, Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s program, used data from the CDC to analyze the effect of COVID-19 deaths in America on all other deaths. Reasonably enough, she had expected to witness a substantial number of excess deaths in 2020, i.e. deaths by all other causes plus the orgy of COVID deaths with which politicians and those in the media had been singularly preoccupied.

She was mistaken. Sorely mistaken. Yanni Gu, a writer for the university’s student newspaper, reports: “Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19.”

This was surprising because COVID (not unlike virtually everything else) overwhelmingly affects elderly people. Thus, “experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data.” Furthermore, “the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same” (emphases added).

Whoa. Briand would soon discover that the plot was just beginning to thicken. What the “data analyzes suggest,” Gu writes, is “that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States” (emphases added).

There is a perfectly rational, and simple, explanation to account for the unbridgeable chasm between the media-concocted perception of COVID and the reality that Briand discovered:

Deaths from all other causes were being re-classified—misclassified—as death from COVID.  And how did Briand determine this?
For the first time ever, deaths from all other causes—heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza, and pneumonia—decreased.

Especially shocking was the realization that heart disease, which has always been the number one killer in America, appeared to have suddenly lost that distinction with the onset of COVID.

Moreover, deaths from all other causes decreased just in proportion to the extent to which COVID deaths increased. “This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly…the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19.”

Within 24 or so hours of the publication of the article relaying Genevieve Briand’s discoveries, the student paper at John Hopkins University retracted it. They never, however, denied the truth of a single syllable of either Briand’s analysis nor its summary of it. That it was political pressure, and not shoddy scholarship that informed its decision is clear, for the school paper saved its article in a PDF file (to which I link above) for all of the world to read.

Wearing of Masks is Not Supported by Scientific Evidence

In this essay, we will revisit the topic of masks. I’ve already written about the psychological, moral, and social costs of mask-wearing. Here, I will focus specifically on the science—or lack of science—behind it.

Scientists recognize that the RCT—Randomized Control Trial—is the “gold standard” as far as “effectiveness research” is concerned. Drs. Eduardo Hariton and Joseph J. Locasio explain that randomization “reduces bias” while providing “a rigorous tool” by which “to examine cause-effect relationships between an intervention and outcome.” RCTs eliminate the risk of confirmation bias, something that is “not possible with any other study design” (emphases added).

This is critical for our purposes, for the largest study of the effectiveness of mask-wearing by the general public to thwart the transmission of COVID utilized not one, not two, not three, but a staggering 14 randomized control trials.

The study was performed at the University of Hong Kong. What Dr. Jingyi Xiao and her team of researchers there concluded will doubtless be written off as the stuff of “conspiracy theorists” by Mask Nation. So be it. But those on the editorial board of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the widely esteemed journal of none other than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), determined that the findings were worth publishing.

The verdict: Masks are ineffective.

The authors of a review of studies on face masks published last year by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine determined that there is no evidence indicating the effectiveness of cloth masks when it comes to COVID. They lament how the “abandonment of the scientific modus operandi and lack of foresight has left the field [of science] wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence.”

The authors, one an epidemiologist, the other a professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, do note that all randomized control trials that have been conducted over the last decade or so have demonstrated that “masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI [Influenza-Like-Illness] or influenza” in neither “the general population…nor in healthcare workers” (emphases added).

We could continue in this same repetitive vein. Readers who are interested in pursuing this topic further can check out this piece of mine from October of last year. I review still other studies there, including remarks from such media-adored “Experts” as Anthony Fauci that dovetail seamlessly with these findings on the essential uselessness of masks with respect to COVID. More research confirming these findings are here, here, here, here, and here. Neither have we yet touched upon the numerous studies showing that countries and states with mask mandates did no better and, in some instances, worse than those places that had no such mandates. Nor have we looked at those studies demonstrating that those who faithfully wore masks were not less likely to contract COVID than those who did not wear masks, with some of these—like this one from the CDC—showing that most people who became infected with COVID wore a mask “always” or “often.”

The science, it should now be obvious, does not support Mask dogma.