Why was masking pseudoscience pushed, universally, by all public health institutions during the pandemic? Part 1

Masks, power, and the dying breaths of left-wing progressivism

The following series on masking explains how and why masking pseudoscience was promoted by all of the major public health organizations during the pandemic. It is a remarkable story that, properly understood, points to the core political pathology afflicting Western democracies today. To be clear, my views, at least on the science of masking, are not controversial among experts behind closed doors. Every expert I have spoken to, including the highest ranking officials who coordinated the pandemic response, agree with me about virtually everything with respect to the science. In this post, however, I will go much further than just the science—and explain why pseudoscience became so prevalent during the pandemic at all. The underlying political anima. The demonic arche of the institutions. The all-swallowing leviathan that we all sense as the cause of our troubles but we cannot quite put into words. I will put this sense into words. Similar material will be available in my upcoming book.

CDC force-masked toddlers during Covid. Science shows this permanently stunted development. CDC knew there was no good evidence. They knew it would hurt children. They knew it would cause tremendous damage to America. They did it anyway. Why?

Power.

I will explain everything.

This is going to be a long series. It will explain everything about masks during Covid--both the science and political reasons why our institutions lied to us.

Prior to the pandemic, there were many clinical trials showing that masks do not prevent respiratory viral infections. The evidence indicated that they simply did not work.

Take this study published in 2019 by the World Health Organization. In it, WHO analyzed ten of the best available trials on whether masks prevented influenza. They found no evidence masks worked.

Or take this study, conducted by CDC scientists. Masking was becoming an increasingly debated issue. So, the scientists wanted to find out in 2020 if mandates might work. They analyzed 14 of the best studies and found no evidence.

Oops.

Public health knew all of this for a long time. Listen to our beloved Fauci. In 2019, when asked whether people should wear masks to avoid illness, Fauci laughed, calling it “paranoia”. He then gave advice that could have come straight from his best buddy RFK Jr.

When the pandemic struck, the public health establishment stuck to its old messaging. Here’s the Surgeon General in March 2020:

Masks don’t work, he says. Even worse, really. He warns: Whatever you do, don’t mask! You might kill someone.

And here’s Fauci on March 8th, 2020. The same message as the Surgeon General.

“There are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

So what did we do just a month later? Mandate masks, naturally. I mean what else would you do after telling people for months that masks don’t work? You force everyone to wear them. Come on now. Don’t be stupid. Everybody knows that.

There was just one problem. There weren’t enough masks. Why not? Well, we had offshored the American economy to China. That’s why.

So we came up with a solution: Cloth masks. Yes, we can avoid the supply chain problems. All we need is cloth, not an economy.

Ah, but there was another problem. Just a teeny tiny one. The tiniest. But a problem nonetheless.

The one clinical trial published on cloth masks in 2015 showed a 13-fold increase in infections among those who used cloth masks.

Figures from the paper for your perusal, dear reader.

Oof.

We can therefore summarize what occurred in several profoundly scientific steps:

1. Masks don’t work.

2. Masks don’t work, and nobody should wear them, because they might be harmful.

3. Everyone should wear masks.

4. Everyone must wear masks, or else.

5. But there aren’t enough masks. OK, cloth masks then.

6. Wait. Cloth masks actually increase the rate of infection. But everyone must wear cloth masks anyway. Or else.

7. Can somebody call Google to make sure nobody can find the paper?

It gets worse.

A few months in, Norway’s public health agency published a paper. It estimated 200,000 people would need to wear a mask to prevent one infection per week.

That’s with a 40% reduction, a figure nobody serious believe or believes.

Then the Swedes enter the fray. No! Not the Swedes! “Bork bork bork,” would they retort? We can only hope.

Alas, the Swedes had dashed our hopes. Anders Tegnell, Chief Epidemiologist of Sweden, who organized the acclaimed pandemic response of that country, was asked to weigh in. Looking at the mask dubiously, as if at an alleged magic potion, he told the truth:

Masks have no benefit.

The Swedes were subjected to relentless international media pressure, yet they prevailed, as we will discuss soon. Meanwhile, American institutions went in the opposite direction, rewriting science by decree.

Why was this happening? The surface-level explanation is that people were afraid. But only surface-level, as we shall see in a moment.

It was April 2020. Stay-at-home orders were ending. People were scared. The science didn’t matter.

And fear was big. When mask mandates ended much later, hundreds of popular articles advised about how to cope with the anxiety of not masking. It’s not an exaggeration. Hundreds.

Many scientific articles showed that people who masked are more prone to neuroticism—that is, negative emotions.

Mask mandates weren’t about viruses—but psychology. Not a public health intervention, but a policy created to manage fear. (But why? Ask yourself: But. Why.)

But fear not! For Cardinal Fauci and Archbishop Walensky hath arrived! Hailing from the cathedral, traveling from the Court of the Orange Man:

Behold! An amulet we bestoweth unto you.

For we are the Science. The Science enters our Spirit. And through ours, yours.

In the 14th century, priests offered items and blessings to ward off the Black Death. So, are Fauci, CDC, etc. 21st century science-priests? Are masks 21st century science-amulets? Whereby science, once invoked, works precisely the same as magic—so long as ye believe, my flock?

That’s exactly what they were. And are. I am not being hyperbolic. I am being literal. They are science-amulets. And science-priests. Literally. But wait, what is the religion? It can’t be science, because science is not a religion? Well, not exactly. You need just one more ingredient. An ingredient of a real religion. But what is that religion? Am I saying Fauci is religious? We are religious? “But I’m not religious,” you might say. To that, I will say: “are you sure?” But I will explain all. Patience.

First, though, we will chase this story down, following each and every link in the chain. Why were people afraid to begin with? Again, the simple answer: the media had been scaring the sh*t out of everyone for months. Remember the freezer trucks? The Chinese people dying in the streets, surrounded by men in Hazmat suits, insta-fragged by the virus?

Ah but then came our beloved World Health Organization. Our beloved WHO! We love them so much. They searched and searched, and in March, they found the highest numbers they could: 3.4% of people died.

But WHO’s figures were very misleading. Fauci and then-CDC Director Robert Redfield published in NEJM just a week earlier that the death rate could be a fraction of 1%.

Even Time Magazine fact-checked the World Health Organization’s figure. And getting fact-checked by Time Magazine is like getting beaten in basketball by a retard in a wheelchair. Humiliating.

(*CFR is widely understood as an often dramatically inflated measure of mortality, due to what is known as ascertainment bias. It is often used to create sensational headlines and misrepresent infectious disease risk. This is epidemiology 101. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General at WHO, knew this. He also knew that by promoting inflated figures without nuance, he would intensify the global panic. Science Media Centre did an excellent job covering the scientific aspect of this at the time.)

Then, along came Orange Man, who repeated Fauci and Redfield’s numbers. Uh oh.

The media went berserk. Now, but Trump was right, you might say. It didn’t matter. Come on, why should it matter? It’s Trump! And so once Trump said it, Everyone-Who-Is-A-Good-Person knew where the Lines Of The Unsayable were drawn. You could only use the 10x exaggerated numbers. Trump had made that official.

And if you didn’t? Maybe you like the Orange Man, a cancelable offense. Maybe, like him, you were a Nazi. Or a white supremacist. Or a eugenicist. Or a fascist.

And maybe you want people to die. On purpose. You know, those people who want people to get infected and die on purpose. Maybe you’re one of those people. (There’s an entire book, podcast, and blog dedicated to this claim. And the guy behind it is frequently—still—quoted by the mainstream media.) So, yes, maybe if you’re honest about the science, you actually just really love death.

Now, the agenda to spread fear came from the top. In his book about his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott Atlas describes his horror when Fauci repeatedly claimed during a meeting that more needed to be done to make Americans fearful.

Yet when polled, Americans reported that they believed they had a 25% chance of dying from COVID-19. For Americans under 60, that’s 100-1000x higher than reality. Americans were brainwashed with media hysteria. Fauci wanted them even more brainwashed.

And it wasn’t just Fauci. It was everyone who was making decisions. According to a Congressional report, HHS spent a billion dollars on ads and other messaging to provide manipulative messaging like this.

This was big money. It was an industry. The money had to be spent. People had to be paid. They had to spread fear.

So so that’s why mask mandates happened, despite the evidence going in the other direction. Fear. Fear that had been relentlessly pushed. But why was HHS trying to spread fear? We’re about to arrive at the complete explanation. But still, I apologize, I must give a simple answer for now.

Our first and most foundational layer: power.

Fauci and friends spread fear because they wanted power.

I know it sounds cynical. I resisted this explanation for an extremely long time. Before I became a heretic—I mean, a traitor—I was someone who was on the “other side”. I was on the side of masks, lockdowns, etc. And I knew that my intentions were pure. They were so very pure. How could power be the reason for this all, when my motivations were so pure?

What if we considered for a moment that it might be precisely these pure intentions that are the perfect vehicle for power? What if we considered that something truly powerful could only ever use the very purest intentions? What if we considered that, in fact, that’s exactly how extraordinary power always works.

Before we explore that—what are these pure intentions exactly? how do they work? why?—I shall push forward and cover more ground. A bold statement:

Power entirely explains the dysfunction of the pandemic response. And everything grotesquely dysfunctional in the political and scientific scene happening today.

But only a very specific kind of power, a very specific shape of it, configured in a very specific kind of way. Preliminarily, let’s sketch out a simplified theory of what we might call public health power. Could we that this public health power represents something like what Foucault calls biopower? Not quite. The public health power that I have in mind has countless useless, demonic appendages. And these crush and tear. They are senseless. They speak in the name of the Almighty (Science) but bear little relation to what we might anticipate its effects should be.

What Foucault called biopower is related, well, to Foucault’s very real perversion. We could speak of Foucault’s time in Algeria. The well-known accounts of his behavior. But we ain’t gonna go there. With public health power, we mean something nonsensical. We do not mean the something sensible that Foucault fled from in terror and that justly pursued him…

Those in the institutions want power. They want to increase their power. They want to expand. They want more funding, more employees, a growing fiefdom. Fauci promoted the power of the institutions. And in turn, he was given power. Thus, Fauci was the most powerful public health official. You see, the more you promote the power of an institution, the more powerful you become within that institution. And this, my friends, leads to everyone running public health institutions promoting the power of these institutions. And, here’s the thing: in institutions that have been for decades unaccountable, they will do that by saying whatever they can get away with. Which are, granted, very specific sorts of things.

Don’t believe me?

I said this would be an long series. This is not the end of that series. We are only just getting started. But let us make an observation based on what we have seen so far.

Fauci played a pivotal role in both:

a) exaggerating the threat that led to demand for the mask mandates, and
b) promoting the pseudoscience that justified imposing them.

He generated both the fear and the solution to the fear. This is remarkable, isn’t it? To say nothing of the creation of the virus itself. Oh boy. We ain’t even going there in this series. We cannot cover everything. Soon we will. But not here.

So let us continue examining the facts about masks. Let us excavate them and carefully observe their configuration. You will recall from earlier that Fauci had downplayed masking for COVID-19 on March 8th, 2020, even stating, as the Surgeon General had, that masking could cause “unintended consequences”.

Take note, my friends.

For this is quite remarkable. Because after this, Fauci was asked by one reporter from The Street on June 12th, 2020 why he changed his advice. He claimed that he had been lying to save masks for healthcare workers.

That he could so casually admit that he was lying is itself disturbing. But if he lied masking science for instrumental reasons, what else was he lying about? None of this seemed to bother him. Or his interviewer, who nodded along.

But it gets so much worse. Let us examine the next piece of evidence. On June 1st, 2021, a year after The Street interview, a FOIA’d email by Fauci was published. It caused an uproar.

On February 5th, 2020, former HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell had asked Fauci whether she should wear a mask. Fauci responded that masking would not help.

This email means that Fauci was forcing masks on hundreds of millions of people when, privately, he did not believe the recommendation was scientific. Fauci had all along privately believed masks did not work and was lying when he promoted them, and then lied again about saving PPE to hide the first lie.

Just think about that. Fauci lied to cover up a lie. This email also implies that he didn’t believe that PPE for healthcare workers really worked either, and was lying to them too. This is head-spinning. Why would Fauci feel the need to do that?

Ohhhh, my friends, my friends. We shall get there. We are in fact converging.

But first, to punctuate these points, let us observe the following:

Isn’t that curious?

Now, it is also notable that only in private correspondence with Sylvia Burwell (a former HHS Secretary) does Fauci tell the truth. To go back to our theory, it does not expand public health’s power to lie to Sylvia Burwell, and could hurt his standing with her, so he tells her the truth.

But what happened then? Well, after the release of the Burwell email, Fauci became subjected to vicious, high-profile attacks. A few days later, he becomes visibly angry during an interview.

He turns the volume up to 11. He is in survival mode. He’s been caught. And so he lays down the gauntlet:

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”

By equating himself with science, it is obvious what he is doing. He is creating a shield of legitimacy, and he is doing it to survive. This helps him to maintain his position, fending off his attackers. “To call me into question is to call science into question. Are you really sure you want to do that?”

Alternatively, we might say that it makes him feel better, which, as someone who has his entire life maintained and accumulated power, is the same thing. Threat -> defense.

There is of course a problem here. Although Fauci buttressed his position with the in-group, if Fauci is constantly speaking contextually with an objective to expand the power of public health, as I have said, and not with the objective of transparently communicating scientific fact, and if the real underlying reasons for his “flip-flops” lie outside of science, as I have maintained, then although he might shore up his personal position temporarily, he actually discredits science in the long term by invalidating the legitimate scientific concerns of critics.

This is not an accident. It’s exactly how an unaccountable, constantly expanding bureaucracy like public health should function. Because there is no accountability, all that matters for its main power brokers are perception and power, and that’s exactly why Fauci was selected, through an organic process, to be the leader of the unaccountable institution of public health.

Man, and we’ve only discussed masks. And we’ve only just gotten started.

But how is science being done by Fauci anyway? Actually, in a certain literal sense, he’s right. Attacks on him are attacks on science: under Fauci science is about expansionary power, but that *is* the science that Fauci knows.

That is also the science his colleagues know.

If we put on our They Live glasses, we will hear the following words by Fauci:

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on power.”

That is, an attack on the interests of the public health bureaucracy, which are not the same as those of the American people.

But what if there is some science somewhere, some argument that I am ignoring or missing?

Let us therefore now go through all of the evidence and arguments that were available at the time.

Every single nook and cranny. Every single argument and counterargument. Every single pivotal piece or body of evidence. Will cover, dissect, and assemble it all—into a system.

You will be shocked.

P.S. I found a picture of Fauci through Google Search LOL