Future generations will look back on the mask obsession the same way we look back on the Salem witch trials. From Scott Morefield at brownstone.org:
The face mask debate is unfortunately again rearing its ugly head in many parts of the country, and it’s becoming ever more clear that it will never entirely go away. Even as OMICRON confers some form of natural immunity to large segments of the population before it begins its fade into the sunset, the next sniffle-causing variant will inevitably come along and again compel paranoid hypochondriac leftists to cover their faces and hysterically demand you do so as well. Sadly, manufactured fear over Covid has truly broken so many people who will never, ever be the same.
Our side, the side of truth, data, and reality, can point to pre-Covid studies that showed masks to be non-effective against virus spread ‘till the cows come home. Theirs can point to non-randomized controlled ‘studies’ (you know, because having a control group in a ‘pandemic’ would be ‘unethical’) that use mannequins, models, or super-cherry-picked snippets of data from areas and time periods that they think bolster their narrative. But it seems that neither can land the deciding blow, both because of the lack of correctly administered randomized controlled studies in the Covid era and also because of the purportedly ‘common sense’ perception that that piece of cloth over everyone’s face is a ‘zero-cost’ intervention (it isn’t) that is totally worth it even if it helps a little (it doesn’t).
Sadly, the difficult-to-counter ‘iT WoULd hAvE BeEn WoooOrSe’ response has become the reliable Branch Covidian go-to when attempting to defend their useless interventions. But would it have been, really?
Enter Ian Miller, an entertainment industry content manager who, like many of us, quickly began questioning the establishment Covid narrative when it didn’t seem to line up with the actual facts on the ground. But instead of surrendering to defeat, Miller promptly put his day job experience dabbling in data analysis to work creating and distributing eye-popping charts that soon made him a Team Reality celebrity and a Branch Covidien foil.
