GP Dan Stock advises a school board, seen in a viral video (at the bottom of this post, worth watching). His first claim is about face masks and that they do not make the virus disappear. The video is causing a lot of controversy, up to the highest echelons. And there are the inevitable debunks. The most famous debunk, by ZDoggMD, starts with "It's better not to start with an obvious falsehood". Now the debunker is actually quite in agreement with Dan Stock on the broad outlines, except for the face masks (and about vaccination ADE as a reason for recent outbreaks). The debunker claims that face masks are indeed useful and not a "high-risk intervention". So A. it helps, and B. doesn't help, it doesn't hurt.
Now it is at least debatable that face masks have an influence on driving this epidemic. Face masks that barely allow you to breathe do indeed filter aerosols. So that is of no practical use, only under specific, short-term circumstances. Our own Jaap van Dissel has also always maintained that face masks do not or hardly work. I mention it to indicate the controversy, not that it inspires so much confidence in me. So saying that face masks are effective is certainly not an obvious truth. That's A.
Dan B: According to ZDoggMD, making face masks mandatory makes sense because it is not a high-risk intervention. That is incorrect, which is confirmed in This meta-study of 109 studies and publications. He underlines his statement "It's better not to start with a shameless untruth" by starting with two untruths.
Below are some paragraphs that struck me in the study about the annoying to sickening effects of long-term use of face masks.
"Effectiveness of face masks mainly based on assumptions"
From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Translated excerpts from the "Conclusions" section:
Wearing a mask for long periods of time can cause a chronic sympathetic stress response caused by blood gas modifications and controlled by brain centers. This, in turn, induces and triggers immune suppression [worsens your immunity] and metabolic problems with cardiovascular and neurological diseases.
We found evidence not only of possible long-term effects, but also of immediate short-term effects with longer mask wear: carbon dioxide retention, drowsiness, headache, feeling of exhaustion, skin irritation (redness, itching), and microbiological contamination (germ colonization) [19,22,37,66,68,69,89,91,92].
[...]
In any case, this is in contrast to the WHO definition of health: 'health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not just the absence of disease or infirmity.' [178].
In addition to protecting the health of their patients, doctors should also base their actions on the guiding principle of the 1948 Geneva Declaration, as revised in 2017. According to the Minister, every doctor swears to put the health and dignity of his patient first and, even under threat, not to use his medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties.9].
In the context of these findings, we therefore propagate an explicitly medically judicial, legally compliant action taking into account the scientific factual reality [2,4,5,16,130,132,143,175,176,177] against a predominantly assumption-based claim to an overall effectiveness of masks, always taking into account possible undesirable individual effects for the patient and mask wearer concerned, in full compliance with the principles of evidence-based medicine and the ethical guidelines of a doctor.
And to think that face masks are being reintroduced here and there, even outside and with children...
The original video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlWwy-PrGo has been removed from YouTube.
The video stirs up a lot, including reactions from official quarters, which mainly boil down to "We know what we're doing." Today the first page of search results on youtube looks like in the screenshot. Upon further scrolling, many dozens of re-uploads follow. I suspect that this will decrease in the future. This is the search link used.
