Category: Uncategorized

As I have been doing for months, on Sundays I feature some one who demonstrates courage and principle. Today I am addressing Canadian heroes … the members of the Ottawa Freedom Convoy.

If the elites ventured out and spoke with these people, it would take all of 10 minutes to see that this is a peaceful protest—and maybe there are points aplenty about how Canada’s COVID policy is a disaster. The same goes for the United States. The folks telling these people’s stories can be found on Substack.

 Rupa Subramanya, a freelance writer, had a lengthy post about the freedom truckers. She spoke to some 100 truckers, maybe more, and found that a) they’re not Nazis, b) they have legitimate reasons to be against the vaccination policy, and c) they’re not going anywhere. 

From Subramanya on Substack:

“I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist.

B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the Freedom Convoy, is vaccinated, and he estimates that many—maybe most—of the truckers at the protest are, too. “I’m Jewish. I have family in mass graves in Europe. And apparently I’m a white supremacist,” he told me…

Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.)

So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.

Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Co Kudvid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200.  “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”

Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario, told me that a divide had opened up all across the country. Pointing to the gleaming, ritzy condominiums near Parliament, he said he used to deliver the concrete stairs in those buildings. Since the cross-border vaccine mandate kicked in in mid-January, he’s been out of work. He refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. He refused to give his last name, he said, because he didn’t want the government coming after him, and he wanted to work again. 

I heard this over and over from the truckers. And it was not entirely crazy.

Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. He’d been vaccinated for other things. But he had a hereditary heart condition that, he said, made the Covid vaccine inadvisable—but he couldn’t get a medical exemption. At work, they made him mask up constantly. He felt like he was being publicly shamed. So, he quit.

Matt Sim, 43, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea, is director of operations of an IT start-up in Toronto and came to Ottawa with his wife to join the protests. He’d had Covid, and then he’d recovered, and he was skeptical of all the hysteria surrounding the vaccines. His family, back home in Korea, had lived through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and that had made him skeptical of the media, the government, and powerful people in general. ‘There’s a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds,’ Sim said.”

These people are heroes.

Thank you, Rupa Subramanya, for your effort.

2/13/22

It’s only a matter of time before something bad happens with the Freedom Truckers in Ottawa. The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, is in hiding at some unknown location and continues to call the truckers various names, racists, Nazis, etc. If name-calling is a new twist in the art of negotiation, I must have missed that update.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford did find time during this emergency to go snowmobiling at his cottage four hours north, so at least we know that he is not in hiding. However, it is disturbing that he must have taken the same negotiation seminar that Trudeau has taken, as just said that truckers could lose their licenses if they don’t comply with orders being enacted under a newly-announced state of emergency aimed at breaking up the demonstrations. (Again I must have missed the negotiation update on how using threats is a good strategy when attempting to resolve issues.)

Trudeau insults the truckers while Ford threatens them … “good strategy” … a “my way or the highway” strategy. [pun intended!] And BTW, both Trudeau and Ford refuse to meet with representatives of the truckers.

Rupa Subramanya is a local Ottawa journalist who has taken the time to try to understand who these truckers are and what they want. She first interviewed two local downtown residents, Alycia (white female) and Sloungui (black male), who live in centertown. “Both Alycia and Sloungui were curious about the protests went to check them out and found only love and kindness. Songui brought his mother to the protests. She had only seen the mainstream coverage and she changed her mind.”

Subramanya also interviewed one hundred of the protestors. What she discovered was that most of them were protesting for the return of their personal freedoms. This sentiment was especially apparent in those immigrants from authoritarian countries where personal freedoms were a cherished commodity.

“Long story short, the media have spent a lot of time and energy being scared and outraged over the protests, but they’ve spent very little actually trying to understand how the protesters feel and what they’re trying to accomplish. The protesters aren’t rioting. They aren’t looting. They aren’t setting things on fire. They aren’t beating people in the streets. They just want their lives back.”

Oh yeah, and BTW 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated.

Now back to my initial sentence … “It’s only a matter of time before something bad happens with the Freedom Truckers in Ottawa” At some point the non-negotiators, Ford and Trudeau, will opt to bring in the police, and then perhaps, the military, to “restore order,” … and then bad things will happen.

From an inside source … do not believe all that you read about the truckers in the newspapers, as there is a lot of fake news being printed in, and being disseminated by the liberal Canadian media.

2/12/22

What you are going to read will be called “anecdotal” by the Ivermectin non-believers, but at which point do these continued and repeated Ivermectin “anecdotes” become non-anecdotal? 

From PJMedia:

Florida families of severely ill COVID-19 patients are flocking to Dr. Eduardo Balbona. Balbona is a big believer in ivermectin. He alleges he has saved “dozens and dozens” of people suffering from Covid, using the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) recommendations, with a few modifications based on each patient. The FLCCC treatment calls for, in part, ivermectin.

Hospitals receive federal money for treating COVID patients IF they use treatments outlined in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Ivermectin isn’t a part of that treatment.

Granted the following is just one anecdotal story, but points out the measures that desperate people are willing to take in the face of severe Covid.

An anonymous woman recently contacted Dr. Balbona regarding her husband who was hospitalized with COVID.

“The husband was very ill,”  Dr. Balbona told the Epoch Times. “He’s in his 50s, a big strong guy. She called me desperate because they [the hospital] gave him remdesivir and she made them stop it, and he started getting worse and worse. And his oxygen demand went up.”

Balbona told the woman he could care for her husband once she got him out of the hospital. He wrote her prescriptions for the meds she would need. She filled the prescriptions including the one for Ivermectin, snuck them into the hospital, and gave them to her husband. That was on Friday. By Tuesday he was well enough to be discharged from the hospital. 

Anecdotal ?

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) famously tried to shame people out of taking ivermectin, despite people using it successfully all over the world. They somehow missed that ivermectin is also made for humans.

Last June the American Journal of Therapeutics published a meta-analysis of 15 different clinical studies. That AJT analysis concluded:

“Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”

That doesn’t sound like AJT thinks Ivermectin’s effect is anecdotal.

I did not read about that AJT study in my local newspaper. 

Just in:

News flash out of Japan on Ivermectin:

Anti-parasite drug Ivermectin shows an “antiviral effect” against omicron and other COVID variants according to research released by Japanese pharmaceutical giant Kowa … that doesn’t sound anecdotal.

You will also not read about this in your local paper.

2/11/22

As most of you regular readers should know by now … I am a big backer of the police. I assume if I lived in Canada, I would also be a backer of the Canadian police … until today when I viewed a video of two policemen in Ottawa manhandling a 78 year old very short old man. Not only was the initial pushing of the old man up against the side of his car unnecessary, but the following hammerlock by the Ottawa police officer was also not necessary. The law breaker was 4foot ten inches tall, and his head came up to the chest of the “I am in power here” tall face-masked officer. I watched the video a few times and at no time did I see any hint of resistance from the great grandfather even when his arms were both forced behind his back. The behavior of the policeman was atrocious, but it actually got worse as the retired janitor then was placed in handcuffs with his arms twisted behind his back, by the two young virile police officers. 

The entire episode could have ended reasonably if the second Ottawa police officer had stepped in and brought some sanity to the situation. The behavior of the first aggressive macho police officer was obviously over the top, but what did macho-man officer number two do? He told the crowd (two individuals) to stand back, and then he helped number one secure the two handcuffs on the old man before he was led away.

By this time you may be asking what serious offense did the old man commit to warrant such outlandishly aggressive police response? Murder? Armed robbery? Assault and battery?

Are you ready for this?

According to a report from the Toronto Sun, 78-year-old Gerry Charlebois was driving near the main Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa when he saw a trucker. Charlebois said he honked his horn and showed the trucker the thumbs-up hand gesture out of respect for the ongoing protests.

“I meant no harm,” Charlebois told the outlet. “I just gave the trucker a thumbs-up and a honk.”

Honking, however — as the officer in the video made painfully clear — is not permitted and, in Charlebois’ case, resulted in a $118 bylaw ticket for “unnecessary noise.” Thus far marginally reasonable, but the assault the followed, not even close to marginally reasonable!

Charlebois said he suffered several abrasions and contusions as a result of the detainment.

“I’m so sore,” he told the outlet, showing off cuts and bruises across his arms, hands, shoulder, and knee. “It hurts so much.”

Canadian journalist Joe Warmington shared footage of the exchange and tweeted, “I spoke with him. He’s in pain. He’s 4 foot 10. A retired janitor with 11 grandkids, 4 great grandkids. If this disgraceful treatment of a 78 year old for honking his horn and a thumbs up to a trucker is acceptable to @JustinTrudeau @fordnation @JimWatsonOttawa no one is safe.”

2/10/22

From Blaze media:

Looks like GoFundMe (GFM) CEO Tim Cadogan can’t take the heat after his crowdfunding platform shut down the “Freedom Convoy 2022” fundraiser for Canadian truckers and refused to distribute thereported $10 million raised on their behalf. Cadogan apparently decided to lock down his Twitter account, which is such a shame because now he might miss out on all the “nice” things folks are saying about him.(Actually just of number of different ways to rightly accuse Cadogan a being a “coward.” One of the more astute comments said, “If he believed he was doing the right thing he wouldn’t be hiding like this.”)

When the trucker convoy comes to Washington, D.C. I will be contributing to the trucker’s cause via GiveSendGo, and certainly not GFM.

Protest organizers say they are willing to talk with the government, but so far no government representatives have contacted them.

“The first thing they’ve got to do is call us. … We’re sitting here, we’re waiting by the phone,” protest organizer Benjamin Dichter said in a press conference in Ottawa on Feb. 6.

Similarly, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who after smearing the truckers as extremists, went into hiding, and said that he has Covid. Okay if someone has Covid, isolation is appropriate … but isolating in an unknown locale?  for an unknown period of time ? …  Hmmm! Trudeau has said he won’t be meeting with the protesters.

Looks like Cadogan isn’t the only coward that knows he’s on the wrong side of history.

FYI : Following the lead of Canadian truckers in Ottawa, a growing number of trucker-inspired protests appear to be gaining momentum worldwide—with groups forming in the Netherlands, Austria, the United States, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Based on the behavior of Justin Trudeau, I anticipate a deluge of “Covid diagnoses, and the subsequent isolation of many in charge in the above noted countries.

BTW: I am sure that everyone hopes that the Prime Minister escapes unscathed from his bout of yellow fever … err from his “Covid,” and consequently the weeks of isolation for the pretty boy will soon be over!

2/9/22

I recently spoke to a middle-aged non-vaccinated woman who just had  Covid. Doctors in her midwestern state were forbidden from prescribing Ivermectin, but she was able to obtain prescriptions for Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, which she was advised to take along with Zinc, and vitamins. She started taking everything immediately. After having been sick for five days, shortly after her second dose she felt impressively better. 

Coincidence ?

Hydroxychloroquine ? I thought the word was that Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was a verboten treatment for Covid. How did that malarial medicine get that reputation, and is it justified?

Many doctors around the world started using the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) early on in the COVID-19 pandemic. Among them is Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a practicing physician in a Jewish community in Monroe, New York. He garnered national attention in March 2020 when he said that he’d had a near-100% success rate treating COVID-19 patients with HCQ, azithromycin and zinc sulfate for five days. “I’ve seen remarkable results; it really prevents progression of disease, and patients get better.”

A lot of the following comes from an Epoch Times interview with Dr. Zelenko in which he said the following,

“When we have a large population of people that need to be treated, it has to be oral, cheap, safe and effective. By the way, this is not new. This information was known in 2005 — even before.

There are papers with [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’s name on it, calling [HCQ] a miracle drug. Fauci called HCQ a vaccine. There’s a paper in which he called it an absolute dream treatment and vaccine. So, it’s conveniently forgotten but that’s what it is. It’s a matter of scientific record.”

In all, Zelenko had only had 15 patients out of over 3,000 treated, who ended up requiring hospitalization, four of whom were intubated. All were eventually successfully extubated and have recovered. The remaining 11 were admitted for intravenous antibiotics for pneumonia. In all, only three of his high-risk patients died from COVID-19, which puts the mortality rate for this treatment at just 0.3%.

“Hospitals were near capacity and all the outpatient services were closed. Half my staff was sick and all of a sudden I had a war zone. I basically started learning triage medicine, trying to save as many people as possible. At that time, the whole world had been focusing on building respirators and hospital capacity [instead of putting] emphasis on prehospital care. I found that bizarre because that’s never what we do in medicine. We [use] common sense and intervene in the earliest stages.

“It’s much easier to fix a small problem than a large problem. For example, someone has cancer, we don’t wait for it to become metastatic disease. We treat as soon as possible. Someone has a small infection. We put the infection out.”

Why HCQ?

Zelenko goes on to describe how he settled on HCQ, a so-called zinc ionophore, meaning it shuttles zinc into the cell. He likens HCQ and zinc to a gun and a bullet. HCQ is the gun that shoots the zinc into the cell. Zinc is the silver bullet that kills the virus by inhibiting an enzyme associated with viral replication inside the cell. 

So although it seemed that Zelenko’s treatment regime was effective, it was vilified and mocked. The question is why? One obvious reason was that it was a presidential election year, and then-president Trump came out in support of HCQ in March 2020. His announcement sparked immediate backlash from a chronically hostile media. “There were plenty of people willing to use every possible way to vilify the president and to discredit anything that might give him a win,” Zelenko says.

Then, of course, there were financial interests at play. Millions of dollars were being invested into new drugs like remdesivir, for example — a drug that costs more than $3,000 per treatment and is only for in-hospital use.

Hospitals were also paid tens of thousands of dollars more for COVID-19 patients, so there was no lack of incentive to get people into the hospital and keep them there either. Meanwhile, Zelenko’s early outpatient treatment costs about $20.

At this point from my perspective there are only two possible explanations to explain the apparent HCQ dilemma.

One – Dr. Zelenko is a liar and a fraud.

Or two – Dr. Zelenko is right on, and the deceitful behavior and lies by those who know best were because of political and monetary reasons.

I would put my money on the credibility of Dr. Zelenko any day of the week!

BTW: I just spoke to the Wisconsin woman who had Covid and was treated with the “Zelenko” protocol. Now about two weeks out, she is feeling wonderful with only a mild residual cough.

2/8/22

Oftentimes in the practice of medicine the question arises as to whether or not A led to B or whether B occurred coincidentally after A, but not in a cause-effect relationship. This A-B juxtaposition question came into my mind today because of something that occurred to me about six weeks ago in conjunction with something I just read.

On December 17 my wife and I both received our Moderna booster shots. Although I was not an enthusiastic fan of boosters, we did this because we were going to an out of state wedding in early January and would be commingling with some senior citizens who were at high risk for Covid. Exactly fifteen days after my booster, I came down with Covid confirmed by a PCR test. At that point we cancelled our wedding trip, and after my ten days of isolation, and then quarantine, I was back to normal. I thought that the relationship between my booster and my Covid was serendipity  … that is until I read about the present situation with Covid in Israel. For those not aware, Israel had a very high percent of their population vaccinated early, and is not only one of the most boosted countries, but has also started to administer second boosters.

The perplexing part of the Israeli story is that as of Feb. 1-2, both the new Covid ICU admissions and the new confirmed Covid deaths have skyrocketed. However, perhaps not really so perplexing if the relationship between the boosters and the dramatic increase in the number of sick Covid patients in Israel is not mere serindipity, but rather a cause-effect relationship. In other words could the increase in the number of Israelites now with boosters be the cause of the proliferation of new Covid ICU patients and new Covid deaths? 

“Impossible,” you say! To that I would respond, “Not so fast, Lefty!”

While it is true that Israel, with its younger population and lower obesity rate, has fared better than many other Western countries throughout the pandemic, why is it experiencing its own worst wave now – much worse than before any of the shots were administered?

This would be disturbing enough if we were still dealing with the Delta variant, but presumably almost all the cases in Israel are from Omicron. How in the world is the most vaccinated country on earth worse off than ever before in the pandemic with the mildest variant? After all, a study from the Kaiser Permanente Southern California hospital system found that Omicron had a 74% lower ICU admission rate and a 91% lower mortality rate than Delta.

According to professor Yaakov Jerris, director of Ichilov Hospital’s coronavirus ward in Tel Aviv, “most of our severe cases are vaccinated.” “They had at least three injections,” Jerris said in describing the typical COVID patient. “Between seventy and eighty percent of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just twenty to twenty-five percent of our patients are unvaccinated.”

Could the reason be ADE? “What is ADE?” I asked myself, as I was unfamiliar with the term.

What follows is a simplified explanation from Dr. Dan Stock (Dr. Stock coauthored a more in-depth article explaining the concerns of original antigenic sin at Trial Site News several months ago.)

“ADE (antibody dependent disease enhancement) is characterized by much higher levels of antibody production than is seen with natural infection, and a much lower Tc response. Thus, the more the virus changes, not only will this particular vaccine lose its efficacy, but it will go negative because the body won’t produce as many T cells in the parts of the body that are infected.”

So in essence it appears that due to ADE, boosters can actually lead to increased susceptibility to different Covid variants. Also infection with a different variant can be more deadly because as the virus changes, the boosters cause a diminutive T-cell response.

Ergo, in actuality, my coming down with Covid fifteen days after my booster could have been cause->effect due to ADE, rather than serendipity. 

2/7/22

As is a custom on Sunday, I take my hat off to someone who should be deserving of our respect. Today that person is Ian Smith – truly a man of principle, courage, an fortitude. Back in May 2020 Ian Smith, the owner of the Atilis gym in  Bellmawr, New Jersey, refused to close his gym.

The defiant gym owner was fined $1.2 million for his noncompliance but he never backed down, going so far as to remove the gym’s doors so police couldn’t lock them.

In December, 2020 he said, “We have been open against unconstitutional shut down orders since May. Not once have we flinched, and the petty tyrant of New Jersey governor Murphy has tried everything he could possibly think of to ruin us. Over seven months later we opened our doors every single day. No government official will ever tell me that I am not able to provide for my family. I do not answer to public servants – no matter what threats or punishments they impose. I am a free man. I do not ask for permission. I do not ask for forgiveness. You work for us. The only way you’ll ever close these doors is when you close my casket.”

After the sentencing,Ian Smith tweeted, 

“Thanks to all who joined in on our sentencing hearing. So many came that the server crashed. We got one year probation for the crime of taking our doors off to prevent government goons from locking us out of our gym.”

He closed with:

@theatilisgym is open and will remain open at any cost.

There is a “rest of the story”:

Ian Smith, owner of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, posted on Twitter on 1/30 that he will seek to oust Democratic incumbent Rep. Andy Kim to represent New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District in Washington, D.C.

“I am truly excited to have the possibility to serve the people of [New Jersey] with a platform focused on liberty, small government, and America First policies,” Smith wrote.

2/6/22

Up to this point I have not written anything about the Canadian truckers and their “march” across Canada and their present encampment in the Canadian capital of Ottawa to protest vaccine mandates. For a while I considered praising them in a Sunday essay, but today I read something written by a Canadian, Kennedy Hall, that was just too good to pass up. Too good to pass up because it got me thinking that Canada is like California, Ottawa is like Sacramento, and Justin Trudeau is like Gavin Newsom. (When you read the following excerpts from Hall’s piece, just substitute Newsom for Trudeau, etcetera.)

Hall starts, 

“In our day, and in my country of Canada, the virtue of patriotism seems to be forged in a furnace of hope and despair. It is like a war of attrition between the two sides of the human heart—one telling you to flee or give up and the other telling you to stay and fight.”

Hall then goes on to describe the courageous and brave men and women who were there in the beginning of Canada. “This land was formed by missionaries, explorers, and some of the most industrious men who have ever lived.”

“However, this great people has largely been lost and replaced by acollection of effeminate and soft lemmings who are addicted to welfare checks and creature comforts. Gone are the days when the average Canadian would expect to actually suffer through the elements—save for that brief moment when they roll down their frosted windows to order a Double Double coffee.

“Justin Trudeau is the archetype of what an effeminate man is, and he is the perfect representation of what has happened to the grit and manfully cultivated virtue that was once common in this nation. But it is not all gone. Our nation has been beaten, our nation has been abused, and many have forgotten how to fight. But out of nowhere have come the most unlikely of heroes who are set to stare down Trudeau and his bastardly henchmen in Ottawa.” … the truckers!

“Justin and his ministers said ‘take the jab, truckers, even if you don’t want it,’ and the response by the Canadian people has been predominately pro-truckers. One repeating sign in particular along the truckers route to Ottawa and in Ottawa itself seems to sum up the feelings of a lot of the Canadian people …”Truck Trudeau.”

Hall continues, “I have never seen such unity between so many Canadians. Videos of families and communities preparing food for the drivers and showing up at truck stops nationwide are going viral. Police officers are coming out in support, and even feckless conservative politicians have finally grown a spine and stood up like real boys and girls, trumpeting the cause of the Freedom Convoy.”

I just loved Hall’s characterization of Trudeau, and when I read it, I immediately had a picture of Gavin Newsom in my mind. However then similarities between Canada and California come to an abrupt end.

Whereas Canada has its truckers, and can be proud of them, mostly in California we have “cluckers.” For those not up with the term popularized by one of my daughters, “cluckers” are an inane group of n’er-do-wells who show no initiative or thought, but merely go with the flow. [For those who want to get a better understanding of what a “clucker” is, read my latest book entitled “Charles Hyde and the #7.”]

2/5/22

Last week I was briefly talking to my next store neighbor, and I asked him if his two little ones were back at “school.” The two little twins are about two and a half years old and “school” is actually daycare as both he and his wife work. His initial comment was that they “tested negative,” and had gone back just that morning. Now this guy had always impressed me as being fairly intelligent until that balloon burst with his next string of comments. “Lucky the masks protect them.” My initial instinct was to laugh, but in trying to be neighborly, I merely said something to the effect that the pre-school masking didn’t work so well for the twins. When I further said that I didn’t think that masks worked very well at all, he responded that they wore masks in hospitals. When it then became apparent that his level of basic scientific knowledge concerning masks, bacteria, viruses, etcetera, was minimal, I ended the conversation … “Have a nice day.”

The more I thought about masks and Covid, the more convinced I became that … (get ready for some pure heresy!) … the more I became convinced that masks and the push to wear them just about everywhere, has indeed made this pandemic worse. Follow me logically here.

Forget the fact that in the beginning we were told that masks didn’t work for Covid, and then suddenly they did. Forget the fact that we are now being told that cloth masks are of no value. Forget the fact that some of those in the know are recommending double and triple masking. Forget the fact that N95s are now being recommended instead of the surgical masks that have been worn in hospitals. 

When you put this string of “forget the facts” together, logically, it means that the mask recommendations changed and evolved because the prior advice did not work. For example why advise double and triple masking if single masking worked just fine?

To my way of thinking, what these mask mandates (with what are now being acknowledged are substandard and inefficient masks) has done is to encourage a misplaced sense of individual confidence that as long as a mask is being worn, the individual is safe.

If you have any doubt that this has occurred, go to Costco where everybody is masked and standing relatively close together, especially in the six feet or so around the chickens. I believe that it is because of the false sense of security that the wearing of a mask provides. Consequently most everyone feels comfortable crowding together … as long as masks are being worn.

Now this contrary opinion of mine on masking is without pointing out how a significant number of adults wear masks wrong. Why would anyone think that the wearing and the mis-wearing of inefficient masks that do not form tight seals would be expected to work any better than the masking of preschool aged children?

BTW: Surprise, surprise, the twins are home again with another cold.

2/4/22