NEWS FLASH: Wearing Masks Reduces Racism!

What's next? Wearing a mask promotes hair growth or prevents constipation?

Allison Dinner/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Courtesy Carol Markowicz, New York Post:

Is there anything masking can’t do? Except for control COVID spread, of course.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine purports to show that mask policies in schools work to contain COVID. But that’s not all: The authors conclude, “We believe that universal masking may be especially useful for mitigating effects of structural racism in schools, including potential deepening of educational inequities.”

• The study centers on two Massachusetts school districts that didn’t remove their mask mandates as soon as the state allowed, in March 2022, but kept them until June. A few months later, they saw slightly lower COVID rates than the other districts.

• It’s amazing that COVID could lay in wait like that, ready to punish those who behaved badly months earlier. What’s even more startling: COVID rates in all the schools were higher before anyone took off their mask — but that uncomfortable fact goes unmentioned in the write-up.

• Plus, the study doesn’t look at actual mask use, just the mandates. Nor does it account for any differences in behavior, income level, lifestyles and so on. (Which also means it can’t show a thing about masks and “structural racism,” whatever that is anyway.)

More than 150 studies that show masks don't work and their harms

Courtesy Brownstone Institute

Dr. Paul Elias Alexander at Brownstone Institute has compiled more than 150 comparative studies and articles on mask ineffectiveness and harms:

• My focus is on COVID face masks and the prevailing science that we have had for nearly 20 months. Yet I wish to address this mask topic at a 50,000-foot level on the lockdown restrictive policies in general. I build on the backs of the fine work done by Gupta, Kulldorff, and Bhattacharya on the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) and similar impetus by Dr. Scott Atlas (advisor to POTUS Trump) who, like myself, was a strong proponent for a focused type of protection that was based on an age-risk stratified approach. 

• Because we saw very early on that the lockdowns were the single greatest mistake in public health history. We knew the history and knew they would not work. We also knew very early of COVID’s risk stratification. Sadly, our children will bear the catastrophic consequences and not just educationally, of the deeply flawed school closure policy for decades to come (particularly our minority children who were least able to afford this). Many are still pressured to wear masks and punished for not doing so.

It would be a waste of time to look at any references in the New England Journal of Medicine study that comes to such ridiculous conclusions. While conducting their “scientific research”, I would bet they didn't bother to read, quote or dispute any of more than 150 proven studies referenced by Dr. Paul Elias Alexander.