Encouragingly, in 2025, wearing a mask in shops, leisure facilities, workplaces or on public transport is for the most part confined to a tiny minority. Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors. While these pockets of fanaticism exist, there is always a danger that – fuelled by the contagion of safetyism – the imposition of mask requirements can re-ignite across all community settings. With this in mind, on this five-year anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, the campaign group Smile Free is about to release a short film, Masking Humanity, in which health and social care experts vividly convey the enormous harms of masks in these settings. Please help to spread the word to assist in the mission to keep blanket masking out of health and social care.
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Samizdata quote of the day – Lest we forgetJune 5th, 2025 |
 21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Lest we forgetLeave a Reply |
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This hysteria was deliberately spread by the authorities – who knew very well that the cloth masks did not stop the Covid virus.
Children denied socialization and coming into school even unable to speak properly.
Older people driven into mental illness – some still wearing the masks even now.
Damn the authorities, damn them to Hell.
It is interesting to think of the Devil wearing a mask. I wonder what he’d do if they tried to make him?
I don’t know about the new video, but there is a video on the web site already that is really quite moving. In it, at 3:33, a doctor describes an docs appointment with a mom and her eight year old son. The doc tells them they can take off their masks, and that it is safe to do so. The mom does, but the son does not. So the doctor asks why? And this little kid says “there are delta variants everywhere and if I take my mask off I might die. And I might kill my mother”.
This story is, to me, so disturbing, but the problem is that it is not an anomaly, it is commonplace. The evil lies and propaganda drilled into this kid’s head and all kids’ heads is so deeply disturbing it breaks my heart, and I feel rage boiling up inside of me when I think of the petty little men who did this to us for their own aggrandizement and profit.
Anyway, the new video referenced isn’t out yet, but the one on the web site is excellent and quite disturbing.
When people hear the story of Anne Frank they think that they would have stood up for what is right and good. The truth is, as you can see with people at the end of the video, most people would be feeling a smug sense of self righteousness when they turned her in to the police. The utter failure to resist all this nonsense does make you despair of the human species.
I might have mentioned this story before, but during the heart of the crisis I was in a gas station store, and there was this woman in line. The cashier had pulled her mask down below her nose — apparently she liked breathing or something like that, the selfish bitch — the person in line just totally goes off on her. Don’t you know you are spreading the virus everywhere? How can you be so selfish? Don’t you care you are killing people? Are you trying to murder me? All the usual. So the cashier dutifully pulls up her mask, and the customer orders three cartons of Marlboro reds. I did nothing but I wish I had been braver and pointed out the utter stupidity.
Ah, but, didn’t you read the Chinese and the French studies that showed that nicotine was a powerful preventative of Covid?
Ellen – the Devil was very much in support of the campaign of the international authorities, on masks, lockdowns, trying to PREVENT people getting effective Early Treatment, injecting people with substances that can cause terrible harm, and all the rest of it.
When I typed “damn them to Hell” I was not using a figure of speech.
I’m in Singapore 🇸🇬 and it seems quite common, still. I think it’s a social etiquette thing: if you feel unwell, you wear a mask to not give your bug to others.
The stewardesses on my flight and some local taxi drivers still wear them or keep a pack of masks with them. It seems to be culturally embedded, like not throwing rubbish on the floor.
Johnathan Pearce – what you describe is not about Covid, it was custom in some parts of the east long before Covid.
As you know – the Covid virus goes right through the cloth masks.
Indeed. I used to spend 2-4 months per year in various parts of the Far East for work, wayyy before Covid, and it was just the done thing. If you’re ill, you wear a mask to protect your fellow humans. Entirely sensible and laudable precautions.
Of all the missteps made by the state during the opening months of Covid, the misattribution of it being “droplet-borne” (wrong) vs “airborne” (correct) ranks amongst the worse for me*
Poor masks – those blue surgical ones, the cloth ones and so on – absolutely will not protect against airborne. However, because people were led to believe it was “droplet-borne”, they wore masks that arguably could protect against droplets, and then when they didn’t work, believed that “masks don’t work”.
Well, yeah. Because you need N95 or better, because it wasn’t droplet borne, it was airborne
Had the WHO made clear from the beginning that it was airborne, people would have (hopefully) made the sensible decision to wear N95s or better, seen the benefit, and we wouldn’t be in this silly situation where people are saying that “masks don’t work”, when they’re looking at poorly suited masks that obviously wouldn’t work given how Covid spreads.
I don’t blame the populace – for my own part, I started with a snood of all things, and upgraded only once it became clearer that wasn’t enough.
(My mask-wearing had nothing to do with the mandates – I started earlier than recommended and kept on wearing it far later than recommended, I’m not the type to look at a mandate and do the Pingu meme “well now I’m not doing it” thing)
*there were plenty of other fuck-ups that rankle me, to be clear
*sigh…* I’m of two minds about masks (which everybody assures me, is two more minds than I actually have…)
Everything I’ve read, masks are utterly useless – do nothing for nobody – and I stopped wearing mine as soon as I could get away with it; and I’ve never had the ‘Rona. “SHE” on the other hand, swears by them – does not go into work without one, and as often as I tell her they’re no good and don’t do anything, she hotly (“hotly!”) denies it.
Because you see. she works among a lot of people. And they’ve all had COVID multiple times, and keep getting it and getting it again, and swapping it among their co-workers. And “SHE” never had it either – until she stopped wearing her mask; then she promptly got it, and was thoroughly miserable. Now she won’t go in the place without a mask on (and she hates them too), and she hasn’t had it since.
So I’ve got to go with the preponderance of evidence on this one…
@ Y. Knott.
Masks work – as long as they are N95 or above.
it’s honestly that simple. There’s a bit of nuance, but not much, in all honestly.
It works in two ways – if you have Covid (or any other respiratory disease), then it works mainly to prevent you from spreading it to other people*
If you don’t have it yourself, but someone else does in your immediate vicinity, then it works to lower the viral load, which is really important. You absolutely can still contract (in this case) Covid, but it will be a milder version, which you can – hopefully – fight off with no or fewer ill-effects, in the short or long-term.
There’s nuances around the type of mask etc, but the essential takeaway is “masks lower your personal risk” and “better masks lower it further”.
* I leave it up to you as to whether you will wear one to lower “other people’s risks”
I get this, and I appreciate the point, and I did sort of lol.
I smoke, and have done for 30 years or so. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I wish I didn’t (etc etc blah blah whatever) but…I smoke only outside, and away from other people and so on and so forth. But it’s largely a “self-inflicted harm”.
I worked in a garage when I was 20 or so years old to get me through University. If I’d been puffing my cigarette smoke into people’s faces when they were just attempting to pay for their petrol, I think it would have been reasonable for them to crib at me about it. It’s not the same thing.
Masks work – as long as they are N95 or above.
And as long as they are worn properly. During the mask mandate, an overwhelming majority of people I saw wearing masks had their nose exposed. THE ENTIRE *POINT* of masking is to FILTER YOUR FUCKING BREATH!!!!
Oh, 100% agreed. My personal experience was somewhat less than that, fine, but even so – yes, agree. FILTER YOUR FUCKING NOSE, MOTHERFUCKER.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
All of which is fine, but then you end up with this twattishness:
“Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors”
Like, Jesus fucking Christ and all his fisherman friends, what the utter fuck is wrong with you?
there is a reason why healthcare professionals mask, and it’s because they don’t massively want to kill people, mate! And have done since waaayyyyyy before Covid, but noooo….now we’re just going to call them “fanaticists”.
It’s hard to look at that and not think that the supporters of it are supportive of the “well, turns out that Covid only killed vulnerable people, and I’m okay with disabled people being culled, actually” type.
Y’know, the “Ah, but did they have underlying conditions” type of eugenic Nazis
😉
The point was an obedience test, nothing more. So wearing it askew is perfectly acceptable as it demonstrates mindless obedience. That’s like arguing “should the Party-Symbol Armband be worn just above the elbow or half way up the upper arm?”
@neonsnake
there is a reason why healthcare professionals mask, and it’s because they don’t massively want to kill people, mate! And have done since waaayyyyyy before Covid, but noooo….now we’re just going to call them “fanaticists”.
Your argument makes no sense. Medical professionals do not, as a general rule, wear N95 masks. And generally speaking medical professionals wear paper masks for two reasons — to prevent the transmission of bacterial and water borne pathogens and (rather disgustingly) to prevent bodily fluids from their patients entering their mouths. Here is a study on using facemasks during surgery. Here are a few quotes:
Quote 1: it was also found that 20% of responding surgeons wore the mask for the sole purpose of respecting tradition
Quote 2: In the modern era, there has also been a sarcity of experimental evidence to support the effectiveness of facemasks in the prevention of surgical site infections. The earliest retrospective studies failed to demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in surgical site infection rates following the use of masks.
Quote 3: Indeed, the latest National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines on the matter do not require operating staff to wear a mask in theatre.
Take from that what you will. However, the idea that untrained individuals wearing a cloth mask at the grocery story, or toddlers wearing masks at school did anything to prevent disease transmission, especially non water borne viral diseases, is utterly preposterous. They were almost treated like magical talismans, like wearing garlic to prevent vampire attacks. What they did do, as Perry mentioned, is act as a shibboleth to let people know you were not a covid denier.
I also wanted to say in some sort of weak defense of masks, I think in the early days of Covid when the disease was not well understood there was some justification in excessive safety measures. All that hand sanitizer, and extra cleaning crews everywhere, Perspex shields and maybe even paper masks. But it was known very early on that the virus was transmitted in the air and so all of those measures were completely useless.
The challenge though is that the government and news media had instilled such a sense of panic and fear in the public that people needed something to give them a sense of control over this insidious illness. Much like that 8 year old kid I referenced from the video “there are delta variants everywhere and if I take my mask off I might die. And I might kill my mother”. If you really think this, and why wouldn’t you given that every source of information drummed it into your head, and any source that questioned it was censored, then having a paper mask and a bottle of sanitizer offered you a little comfort, a little sense of control. The fact that they did nothing at all was irrelevant, in fact something you didn’t want to know, it was a psychological comfort, like sucking your thumb.
In that sense they really were like garlic to prevent vampire attacks. There is this insidious force out there over which you have no control, out to kill you and your children. You are told that garlic chases them off, and so you put garlic everywhere in your house. It gives you a tiny sense of control over something terrible over which you have absolutely no power or control. Or like the mom giving her son a St. Jude pendant as he goes off the war.
It is why the people on that train in the video were pushing that kid off. They thought their masks gave them protection and to have a heretic question that attacked the very core of their belief system that offered them comfort in a time of terrible fear.
Of course the solution to fear is often good information, clear understanding and appropriate precautions and preparations. It is why what the government did to the people is amongst the worst abuses of government power in the past fifty years. The people who did it should probably be in jail for their malfeasance and fecklessness. Instead they got million dollar book deals, huge pensions and sinecures at prestigious universities.
Correct. Listening to authority figures pushing masks in a non-clinical setting during COVID was when I realised we’d reached a civilisational inflection point
Oh, I agree, but that’s not my point – my point was that medical professionals have always *masked* regardless of the type of mask, for all of the reasons you say. But now we’re in a stage where wearing a simple blue paper mask is “political”, and frowned upon, so even those small measures have now gone backwards, so we’re all worse off for it. An N95 is clearly better than a paper mask, but we’re at a stage where *any* mask is considered, I dunno, “woke” or something, despite it being proven “best practice” for absolute donkeys*.
I just find it all a bit sad.
I saw your second post, and I don’t disagree – I have huge grievances over the whole “sing happy birthday twice whilst washing your hands” thing. It might well have been well-meaning advice during the beginning, but it’s pretty well-known now that the WHO *absolutely* knew by late March/early April 2020 that it wasn’t droplet-borne, it was airborne, and yet kept that to themselves. Why? I don’t know. I can speculate that it meant that the whole “six feet” thing was bollocks, but I can’t prove that in any way.
I can certainly speculate, with some confidence that the initial “don’t wear a mask” thing was a lie made up because it was more important to keep masks and other PPE for healthcare workers – but again, I can’t 100% prove it.
All I can say with any confidence is that the WHO knew in March/April 2020 that Covid was airborne (not droplet-borne), because we have evidence for this, and therefore cloth masks were ineffective, but N95s *were* effective; but that information was buried. I can speculate as to why (my guess is that it was to prevent panic; potentially to prevent the realisation that the only real measure was around clean air, which was costly), but I don’t know for certain, and can’t.
——–
As for the whole idea about it being a “plandemic”, or the idea that mask mandates were an “obedience test”, that’s a difficult thing to argue against. There’s no plausible way that it’s true, but anyone who is convinced it was is going to look at all evidence to the contrary and say “well, that’s what they want you to think.”
*apologies for the reflexive cockney rhyming slang. When I say “donkeys” I mean “years”
“Years and years, and donkey’s ears.” That one I had to look up.
Y’all talk weird. Again, two peoples separated by a common tongue. 😉
Donkey’s ears – years – indeed!
I sometimes surprise myself by how much cockney rhyming slang has inserted itself into my day to day.
I regularly use “scooby” for “you haven’t got a scooby” for “you haven’t a scooby-doo” for “you haven’t got a clue”
“Butchers'” for “butchers’ hook” for “look” – “let me take a butchers’ at it” (let me take a look) – I do use.
To the best of my remembrance, I’ve never used “plates” to mean feet, or “apples” to mean “stairs”. I could be wrong though.
——
Also, aren’t you Minnesotans famous for using “Welp” as short-hand to mean “Actually, this has been lovely and it’s been great to see you, but I’d quite like you to leave now so I can go to sleep? It’s getting late and you’ve drunk more of my whiskey than I was quite prepared for”?
😉