“YouTube suspends Rand Paul for a week over a video disputing the effectiveness of masks”, reports the New York Times.
I have no strong opinion on the question, but Senator Rand Paul is also Doctor Rand Paul, so his medical opinion holds some weight. This post on Rumble takes you to the video that got him banned: “It Is Time For Unfiltered News”
As Glenn Greenwald points out,
JUST LAST WEEK: Biden’s former COVID adviser, the epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, told @camanpour [the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour] exactly the same thing.
YouTube and Facebook* play a merry game. On April 16 2020, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity”, posted “An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19”. That post is as good as a soap opera; the writers are always adding new and dramatic plot twists.
On February 8, 2021 at 10:00AM PT, they announced that claims that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” would be removed.
On May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT, they said, “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”
In like spirit, Dr Paul is doing no more than returning to the medical orthodoxy before last. From the Independent, Thursday 12 March 2020:
Coronavirus: Face masks could increase risk of infection, medical chief warns
Members of the public could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting coronavirus by wearing face masks, one of England’s most senior doctors has warned.
Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer, said the masks could “actually trap the virus” and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.
*I initially mistyped that as Facesbook, and my spellchecker, set, of course, to British spellings, suggested an amusing alternative.
Rand Paul is (almost certainly) correct that cloth masks do more harm than good: they give a false sense of immunity, thus leading people to get close to other people.
I myself was deceived early on. Then i saw scanning electron-microsope images of cloth masks vs surgical masks, and realized my mistake.
— What remains to be established is whether surgical masks help.
The DANMASK study that Rand Paul mentions is not reliable (is any medical study reliable nowadays??) and anyway does not show whether surgical masks protect **other people from the wearer**.
One would hope that this issue would be resolved before the next epidemic.
I wallow in despair.
FaecesBurg?
The correct spelling is Fascesbook.
Senator Paul should ask TwoFacedBook what their policy is on a week-long suspension for something they reverse course on during that week, using the OP examples to justify the question. Does the ban end early or does the page stay banned for the 2, 3, whatever, days when what it said is now sayable?
He should specifically ask what happened to facebookers who were banned for suggesting a WuhanLab origin on 20th May 2021? Were they banned for 7 days or only 6? He should also ask whether just quoting/referencing The Independent’s article of 12th March 2020 would get him banned for two weeks for a second offence?. How about quoting Dr Fauci’s own remarks from around that time?
Obviously, he cannot today ask these things by posting them on his Facebook page, but one hopes a senator could make the issue a public one. And he can presumably post these questions on his FB page in a few days.
Generally, I recommend the tactic of making censors face meta-censoring questions.
Facebook (and all the usual suspects), frightening people, and the blocking of the free-flow of information, are key items in this:
Mass Psychosis – How an Entire Population Becomes Mentally Ill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M
The creators of that video have been clever enough to not use, err, certain keywords, that would surely trigger the Misinformation Bots.
Dishman, and I thought the correct spelling was FacistBook.
The Covid situation provides an interesting perspective on the ‘managed-deception’ in which humanity lives.
The virus seems to be real, not just a fiction devised for some political, or other, end. A reality devised, or just used used, for political ends? Perhaps.
Two fairly close family members who were in sound health, became infected through, it seems, incautious social activity, and died.
The virus does seem to be mainly airborne, so I would think masks reduce the risk of infection.
However I see the masks almost being worn as a talisman to ward off evil spirits rather than a a common sense physical barrier to viruses – eg, around the chin.
Various “free spirited” people I encounter regard me with contempt when I wear a mask, evidently viewing me as a brainwashed, “do-as-you’re-told” dweeb.
(I have read the masks are more aimed at protecting others from any viruses, bacteria, emitted by the wearer rather than protecting the wearer).
The origin of the virus is another interesting tale in possible deception, control, coverups, and western suicidal bent – Wuhan Insitute part funded by the US taxpayer??
I sometimes wonder how far we can drift from common sense before the human race implodes.
Sorry to hear that but unless they had a very low level of vit D, were geriatric, morbidly obese or diabetic, they were very unlucky. The *average* infection survival rate is (last time I looked) about 99.7%, with the deaths overwhelmingly people in their 70s and (above all) 80s.
Droplet (sneeze: masks work) and airborne (aerosol) (breathing: masks don’t). The mask mandates are pandemic theatre, a visible indication The Government Is Doing Something.
Yeah, on everyone else’s dime, as usual. If too many years of weapons and amplifiers leaves you with hisses and muffled voices, you develop a reliance on lip-reading. Works great, you don’t even really know you’re doing it, until everyone masks up. Hate ’em, hate ’em.
I’m lucky, with mild impairment. Amongst the more impaired, I read that suicides are up during this time. Greater sense of isolation. But the pols feel virtuous, so . . . no skin off their nose.
Just a quick article about the panic, that made me feel better.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-person-who-gave-me-covid/
I can remember when I used to give Milton Friedman style answers about how corporations were just interested in making money and had no ideological agenda to impose tyranny – I now feel very foolish for giving such absurdly wrong answers in the past (although it one listened carefully to Milton Friedman – he actually said that corporations should be politically neutral profit maximisers NOT that they actually were).
The fanatical totalitarianism of “Woke” Big Business is obvious now – and it most certainly is not just the Social Media companies. It started with “social responsibility” collectivist ideology coming into the “Business Schools”, and that started as far back as the 1970s. But it has got worse and worse over time.
What can be done? I do not know – I just do not know.
There are still some business enterprises that stand against totalitarian tyranny (“Social Justice”) – but they will find their access to financial services strangled, under various codes of conduct that are being pushed by the banks and other such.
It looks like some version of the Chinese Social Credit system is the future – perhaps even more extreme (more tyrannical – more irrational) than what is done in China.
Certainly such things as “mathematics is racist!” are not being pushed in China – objective truth and hard work are not being denounced as “white supremacy” there.
As for Covid – vast numbers of people have died who could have been saved, see Senator Ron Johnson’s United States Senate hearings in 2020 – or the hearings in the Texas State Senate.
The international establishment have allowed a vast number of people to die who could have been saved with Early Treatment with a combination of long standing medications.
They have got away with doing this – and the only people who are likely to punished are the people who tried to SAVE lives.
Think about all this – then you will know what a truly terrible position the Western World is now in.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/herd-immunity-not-possibility-dr-malone-vindicated-after-oxford-prof-warns-over-new
In one of the most appalling examples of Big Tech silencing scientists who refuse to withhold their criticisms of the mRNA technology behind the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer who helped develop mRNA vaccine technology, saw the credit for his contribution to medicine effectively erased from the Internet by Wikipedia after he raised concerns about potential long-term autoimmune issues and other complications potentially arising from mRNA jabs.
He has also shared other medical heresies, including the possibility that ‘imperfect’ vaccines might actually help foster more virulent COVID variants due to a phenomenon called ‘ADE’ – antibody-dependent enhancement. Essentially, what doesn’t kill the virus makes it stronger. In retaliation for sharing these views, Dr. Malone was ridiculed by colleagues as a conspiracist and an “anti-vaxxer”.
But earlier this week, Dr. Malone saw his views subtly vindicated by an unexpected source: a British scientist and academic named Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, who is the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group. During a briefing, Sir Pollard warned Parliament that the UK likely won’t ever achieve herd immunity, thanks to the delta variant.
In remarks that risked undermining the government’s vaccination campaign, Sir Pollard, a professor of pediatric infection and immunity, warned Parliament on Tuesday that achieving herd immunity is likely “not a possibility” thanks to variants like delta. Recently, a group of scientists estimated that the threshold for herd immunity might now be as high as 90% due to the delta variant. According to Pollard, we’re learning for the first time that herd immunity is magical thinking – and has always been magical thinking.
Since those who are vaccinated can still be infected by variants, “there is virtually nothing the UK can do” to eradicate COVID completely.
“We know very clearly with coronavirus that this current variant, the Delta variant, will still infect people who have been vaccinated, and that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated, at some point, will meet the virus,” Pollard said.
He said it was unlikely that herd immunity will ever be reached, saying the next variant of the novel coronavirus will be “perhaps even better at transmitting in vaccinated populations.”
Watch out, Perry, because it seems that it was aerosol scientists that (for better or for worse) gave us mask mandates!
S.M.
To be fair to the government, I do not think they have said that vaccination prevents infection or transmission of the virus – just that it makes the virus less severe in people who have been vaccinated.
Of course there may be other problems with the medications – we shall find out this winter. Let us hope things go well – as most people (including myself) have been double jabbed.
Obvious fears include making the immune system too active (and it attacking the body) – and “new variants” evolving in people who have been vaccinated. We just do not know yet.
I continue to believe that Early Treatment would have been the right way to go – but that just was not on offer in the United Kingdom.