patrick.net

In Santa Clara County, everyone — patients, caregivers and healthcare providers — will be required to wear face masks in public patient care areas in hospitals, clinics, and long term care facilities for the “winter respiratory virus period,” starting Nov. 1 and lasting five months through the end of March.

One way we can detect significant emerging narrative trends is how media slides in sideways a new position. For example, when it was time to decouple masking, CNN’s TV doctor (and former Planned Parenthood director) Leanna Wen penned an op-ed saying they don’t work, or only work one-way, or something like that. After that, the drumbeat of mask skepticism in media increased, slowly and cautiously the government stopped pushing masks, and now nobody except medical fetishists are wearing the damnable things.

Meanwhile the CDC has never had to admit it was wrong about masks. It just changed the narrative. Shazam!

At the time, I correctly called out Wen’s op-ed as the leading edge of the narrative shift that it was. Now I’m seeing something moving again. It’s not just one issue though. It’s a tectonic narrative shift across a wide landscape of issues. The good news is that most of it is shifting toward the truth, toward positions that we all have held for going on at least two years now.

🔬 An important and long-overdue study published in the prestigious British Medical Journal on December 2nd titled, “Child mask mandates for COVID-19: a systematic review.” The six authors, including the indefatigable Tracey Beth Høeg, who has been in the fight right from the start, carefully reviewed a whopping 597 available studies on the efficacy of face masks for kids.

https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2023/12/02/archdischild-2023-326215

The authors found a lot of problems with the studies. A large minority of studies appeared to have obvious bias, and clearly violated scientific norms while trying to force a desired result. None of the 597 studies were randomly-controlled trials, which in fairness might be hard to arrange. Finally, the researchers discovered that government masking recommendations were entirely based on “mechanistic and observational data” — not solid scientific evidence — and no systematic review of the evidence has ever been published.

Until now.

The authors boiled down the 597 studies into the top 22 best-quality ones. Among those 22 studies, sixteen found no correlation between mask wearing and lower infection rates. In other words: masking kids doesn’t work. The remaining six studies showed a “critical risk of bias.” Worse, two of the biased studies only found a mask benefit by making simple math errors. The cited benefits disappeared after the studies’ own data was re-analyzed.

Thanks, “experts.” (Ex-spurts.)

So, back when all those “expert” doctors and scientists were gravely informing school boards they should “follow the science” and mask the kids, those so-called experts were talking out of their aft blowholes. In other words, the experts lied. They weren’t thinking. They were just mouthpieces for government agencies that weren’t following the science. And a lot of kids were hurt. Maybe millions.

It only took three years to straighten out the mess the experts made, but we finally got here.

LOS ANGELES, CA - As the Super Bowl approaches, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has instituted a citywide "hold-your-breath" order to keep people safe during the big game.

"As I said earlier this week when reporters asked me why I wasn't wearing a mask at the NFC Championship game, I was holding my breath, so it was ok," said the Mayor to reporters. "There is a zero percent chance of infection if you're holding your breath. That's just science. That's why today I'm issuing a 'hold-your-breath' mandate. If everyone just holds their breath for 15 days, we'll get through this thing. We're all in this together!"

"Now 3... 2... 1... HOLD YOUR BREATH!"

At Mayor Garcetti's order, all the journalists at the press conference took a deep breath and held it until they all turned blue and passed out, leaving only Mayor Garcetti standing.

When asked later why he hadn't followed his own order to stop breathing, Garcetti told the press he had been wearing a mask, so it was ok.

I had to stop bursting out in laughter when I saw a guy wearing an upside down full face snorkle mask with the snorkle buried under his coat.

93 Year-Old Holocaust Survivor on Masks: "there is a hypocrisy in the public narrative"
March 29, 2021


original link


[scene is of protestors many carrying with signs: NO MASKS ON KIDS; IT'S CHILD ABUSE; FREEDOM PROTEST]

WOMAN'S VOICE: Guys, we have a 93 year old Holocaust survivor. [passes microphone]

OLDER WOMAN IN BLUE SCARF [taking microphone]: Thank you very much. I am in fact a survivor of the Holocaust. And the first thing I have to tell you, that even then nobody told us it was done for our own good. We all knew what was happening. And when I think today, when I see people masked, I think of the yellow star, which gave everybody liberty to aggress me, to insult me, to call me a carrier of disease.

WOMAN'S VOICE: Oh my love.

OLDER WOMAN IN BLUE SCARF: To spit on me even.

WOMAN'S VOICE: I love you!

OLDER WOMAN IN BLUE SCARF: I would like to tell you that this is worse. This is more insidious, it concerns more people. It is, it is, there is a hypocrisy in the public narrative that is absolutely unbearable, to say that we're doing this to protect the old. I would love to die in a state that gives me freedom than this.

[cheers, applause, horn blowing]

I have already outstayed my welcome by many years and my life expectancy is probably not great. But I would gladly exchange it for the lives and livelihood and happiness of generations that come after me, to live their lives as I have been.

[clapping]
MAN'S VOICE: Thank you!

OLDER WOMAN IN BLUE SCARF: To have masks, to see people defile their children with masks, is something totally unbearable to me.

Merianne Jensen: “If masks work, then why don’t they work?” - Prince William County School Board Mtg [February 2, 2022]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cszk-Y8Rkh4&t=6s

Hat tip: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/throttled-adversarial-logic-silences

MERIANNE JENSEN: My name is Merianne Jensen and my address is on file. I know there are many educators who want to protect children. This goal is not different from my own. Our implementation preferences may differ, but we want the same thing, to get through covid without harm. Unfortunately, politics leads us to believe there is only one solution, masks.

Yet thousands of schools around the country have been open during the entire pandemic without masks, and no corresponding rise in serious illness. There were not child coffins lined up as some educators in this county suggested would be the case.

In fact things have been going pretty much as normal. Kids are getting sick despite wearing masks. We are forcing healthy children home for [makes air-quotes with fingers] exposure, despite them wearing masks. And we are segregating children by vaccination status and religious exemption status—

WOMAN'S VOICE: [unintelligible]

MERIANNE JENSEN: — despite the wearing of masks. So I ask you, if masks work, why don't they?

[applause and cheering]

I'd now like to cover the facts, not policy as determined by the White House, not CDC recommendations, which I remind you is still policy, policy I might add that changes by the day without any basis in science at all.

So here are the facts that are available to any one of you.

Over the course of the pandemic 49,000 children have died of all causes, 331 of those were covid-related, yet we have turned kids lives upside down at school for what is essentially a non-risk.

Let's put that risk into context. Last year fewer kids died of covid-19 than have heart disease, cancerous tumors, suicide, homicide, and drownings. Have the protocols, have the schools stopped serving hamburgers and french fries? Have we put up tin foil on the ceilings to block power lines? Do we even address the growing incidences of suicide during the pandemic? No! We play politics with kids faces by placing restrictive fabric over their noses and mouths that the CDC itself has said don't do anything and it's for their safety.

This is asinine. This is blatant political theater and it needs to end.

[applause and cheering]

Finally, regarding that, and I need to point something out that has been bothering me. On November 15th of last year I had the privilege of speaking with Dr McDade[1] for 10 minutes following the CRT town hall meeting. During that discussion which was friendly and cordial, I asked what she, as superintendent could do to get the kids out of masks. Dr. McDade told me that she would if she could, but that her hands were tied by then Governor Northam's executive order mandating face coverings.

[loud groaning from audience]

And if it weren't for that, things would be different. Well, tonight things are different.

[applause and cheering]

But I'd like to ask you Dr McDade tonight, what has changed? And what do you plan on doing now that your hands are untied? I'm in fact, I'm asking all of you to step up the way other leaders who have, and are ending covid restrictions by the day. What [hits podium with fist], when [hits podium with fist], will you, what [hits podium with fist], will it take?

You are on the losing side of history and it's time to make that right before these children now.

[applause and cheering]

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES: After it immediately racked up nearly a million views, this video was removed by YouTube, and then subsequently reinstated. Merianne Jensen gave an interview about this to Clay Travis and Buck Sexton about this censorship and related issues on February 9, 2022, see:
https://www.iheart.com/content/2022-02-09-clay-travis-and-buck-sexton-fired-up-virginia-mom-merianne-jensen-talks-with-cb/

[1] LaTanya D. McDade, Ed.D.
Superintendant of Schools, Prince William County, Virginia
https://www.pwcs.edu/leadership/superintendent_of_schools/index