Public health experts have been advocating masks for the general public ever since Covid began to spike in the United States in mid-2020. Masks soon became the non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) of choice, despite there being a dearth of pre-Covid pandemic documents advocating them as meaningful tools to stop the spread of coronaviruses.
Even as critics have constantly poked holes in masks as a nearly useless and potentially harmful tool for fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, the public health industry has stuck to their guns and insisted in the face of mounting evidence of their ineffectiveness that the American people should continue to wear them (even toddlers).
A new study has blown the debate wide open: It shows that masks are not only worthless against Covid-19, wearing them might potentially be harmful for people’s physical and mental health and for society in general.
A peer-reviewed journal article in Cureus called the “Correlation Between Mask Compliance and COVID-19 Outcomes in Europe” has come to the stunning conclusion that the higher the mask compliance rates, the higher the Covid case rates. For those who aren’t well-versed in statistics, this is the exact opposite of what researchers should find if masks indeed “worked.”
“Masking was the single most common non-pharmaceutical intervention in the course of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic,” the article states. “Most countries have implemented recommendations or mandates regarding the use of masks in public spaces. The aim of this short study was to analyse the correlation between mask usage against morbidity and mortality rates in the 2020-2021 winter in Europe. Data from 35 European countries on morbidity, mortality, and mask usage during a six-month period were analysed and crossed.”
“These findings indicate that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage,” the author Beny Spira, a professor at Sao Paolo, writes.
“For this analysis, all European countries, including West and East Europe, with more than one million inhabitants were selected, encompassing a total of 602 million people. All analysed countries underwent a peak of COVID-19 infection during these six months,” the professor writes before providing the full dataset.
“[Un-] Surprisingly, weak positive correlations were observed when mask compliance was plotted against morbidity (cases/million) or mortality (deaths/million) in each country,” the study notes.
The professor shows a scattershot of mask compliance versus cases and deaths per million, as well as a fitted regression line. As one can see, the relationship is positive (not good).
“While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission,” the study concluded. “Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”
The mask study’s results are similar to those of Harvard-led researchers when they found that the higher a nation’s vaccination rates, the higher the case rates. The Harvard study of 68 nations and 2,947 counties in the United States published in the European Journal of Epidemiology in late 2021.
The scientific findings were discovered by a Harvard researcher, S. V. Subramanian of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Canadian researcher Akhil Kumar.
“At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1),” the study stated. “In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people.”
Those startling results have been further verified at the state-level in the United States: The highest-vaccinated states are now among the few remaining hot spots in the country.
It should come as a surprise to no one that these hot spot states in the United States also happen to be among the last to lift their mask mandate orders. In California, there are cities that are reinstating mask mandates, despite five Covid waves and the absence of evidence that they work.
The United States’ Covid policy responses that include quarantining, masks, and social distancing, as well as the ‘lockdowns,’ have failed to produce statistically significant results fighting Covid, but have wrought serious damage to the economy and violated countless Americans’ rights.
An exhaustive Johns Hopkins University comparative analysis published in January found that strict lockdowns failed to significantly reduce Covid-related deaths.
“Lockdowns in the U.S. and Europe had little or no impact in reducing deaths from COVID-19, according to a new analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins University,” the Washington Times reported. “The lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic in 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by about 0.2%, said the broad review of multiple scientific studies.”
“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers wrote.
Now, we can add mask mandates to the list of public health interventions that did nothing to stop the spread of Covid-19, but did tremendous damage to the U.S. economy and society.