Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 566 | The Data Is In: Mask & Vaccine Mandates Don't Work | Guest: Ian Miller

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

Today we’re talking about mask mandates and the hypocrisy of of government officials who don't follow their own rules. Despite the numerous studies that have come out stating that cloth mask are ineffective at slowing the spread of COVID, children and toddlers are falling victim to power-hungry politicians who demand that they wear masks in school. We talk to Ian Miller, author of "Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates," about how simple and easy it is to see through the lies we're being told, using good old-fashioned data. Dr. Fauci says follow the science … well, we are. --- Today's Sponsors: NetSuite is the #1 cloud financial system to power your growth: it lets you automate your processes & close your books in no time while staying well ahead of your competition. Go to NetSuite.com/ALLIE for this special one-of-a-kind financing offer & join 28,000 businesses already using NetSuite! CB Distillery: over 90% of doctors said their patients have used CBD to treat a health condition: they sleep better, it helps with discomfort after physical activity, & helps bring some peace & calm to your day. No prescription required. Go to CBDistillery.com & use promo code 'ALLIE' to save 20% off your order! Annie's Kit Clubs has a new Genius Box for your young scientists. It encourages your kids' curiosity while providing fun activities that are as entertaining as they are educational — and with an exciting STEM theme! Go to AnniesKitClubs.com/ALLIE & save 50% on your first box! --- Show Links: AllieBethStuckey.com: "Why Kids (And You) Shouldn't Be Forced to Mask" https://bit.ly/3nRtz9q --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey, guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Thursday. This episode, as always, is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers, American Meat delivered right to your front door. Go to good ranchers.com slash alley. Okay, guys, I am so excited about today's episode. We have Ian Miller. If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because every time we have talked about masks,

we cite the graphs that he creates using publicly available and accessible data about masking and vaccine passports. And if they have actually had any effect whatsoever on case counts or even death counts or anything, not just in America, American cities and American states, but also abroad. He has been so, you. useful to me in understanding, in understanding the data and understanding how these policies have affected COVID case counts. Spoiler alert, they really have it. And so that's what we're going to

discuss today. We're going to talk about the data, how he compiles this, where he is getting his information. He recently wrote a book, which is a bestseller on Amazon, which is awesome. And it is called unmasked, the global failure of COVID mask mandates. I'm also going to put some links in the description of this episode because we've talked about this several times. I hate how mask mandates have so, have so disproportionately negatively affected children because children are necessarily compliant. They have to listen to adults who have an authority over them and whom they're supposed to trust. And that has really broken my heart, especially to see, the hypocrisy of the politicians that are putting these rules in place and have imposed them

upon kids while they are not even these politicians are not even following the rules themselves. It just drives me mad. And I'm not coming from an ideological position on this. I am coming from a data-driven perspective on this. There is no data. There's no science that supports mask mandates or universal masking. There just isn't especially not for kids, especially not for kids. And so we're going to talk about that today with Ian. This is going to be an awesome episode. And like I said, I'm going to include those links in the description of this episode, the several studies that are, some of them are 20 years old that show that masks don't mitigate the spread of this type of virus. I put a blog post together together several months ago that, uh,

compiles links to all of these different kinds of studies. I'm going to include a couple articles that dig into the CDC studies that purportedly show that masks work. These articles reveal that the data doesn't actually prove that. And so we're going to get into all of that today too. You guys, I know we're going to love this episode. Ian is super insightful on this subject. So without further ado, here's our new friend Ian Miller. Ian, thank you so much for joining us. Can you first tell everyone who you are and what you do? Yeah, so I have been on Twitter mostly and then started the substack last year, writing about, you know, the failure of mask mandates and a lot of other COVID policy in general. And so that became kind of a thing for

me starting in mid-2020, I would say just tracking the information, tracking the data, putting in these annotations showing what we did and when and what were the results afterwards. And how did this start for you? Are you a political person? Are you someone who reads data for a living? Why did you decide to start charting this? Yeah, I did some data management analysis and stuff for my day job. And so that was, I had some background in it. And I personally wanted to see it. I wanted to see the results. You know, I live in California. So a few places on earth have been more dedicated to COVID interventions in the city of California, especially Los Angeles. us. So, you know, I kind of was seeing in 2020, you know, L.A.'s in California, we're doing all these things. We're closing everything. We have mass mandates everywhere. What's been the impact? Is it working? And so it was, it's a lot of this information. It's very easy to find. It's all publicly available. It's just you can download it yourself from the CDC or the New York Times or Johns Hopkins.

And so I just went through and started downloading all the data for a lot of different locations. And, you know, people would reach out to me and say, could you put something together for Chicago or for New York or or Philadelphia or anything like that. So I realize there's a lot of people looking for this, and it just kind of became something I would do consistently to try to just download the data, put these annotations in. Here's with the policy and here's what happened afterwards. And unfortunately, the results are pretty consistent

that it never really actually seems to work. Yeah. So basically all you've done is you've said, okay, this is the case rate or the death rate or whatever metric you want to use. And this is when a mask mandate was put into place. This is when a vaccine passport was put into place. And very often you compare that.

You compare the case rate or hospitalization rate against a state or an area that did not impose the same restrictions. And what we often find is that the conclusion is basically the same, really across states, countries, cities. We have not seen a very significant difference, either in cases or deaths, depending on the kind of mask mandates and passports and restrictions that have been put into. place. Is that correct? Absolutely. That's 100% correct. And that's one of the best ways to kind of disprove these arguments is to show, you know, you can't say that a policy mattered if a similar area that didn't have the policy also had the same results. It's a very consistent pattern everywhere you look. Recently, the governor of New York came out and said that, oh, because of our mask requirement, we brought the, you know, the Omicron winter surge has ended because of our mask requirement.

except New Jersey had exactly the same results. In fact, slightly better results, but basically identical numbers over the winter period without a statewide mask mandate. And so I realized pretty early on, and it's been a consistent pattern, unfortunately, that a lot of media outlets, CNNs and New York Times of the world, they don't call them out for this.

They don't say, how could this be possible when New Jersey didn't have this policy? So that became kind of my goal is to show, you can't credit masks when these areas that didn't have it had the same results or better results. Yeah. And I think though sometimes the pushback that you'll hear from these Democratic political leaders is that they'll say, well, it's just because not enough people complied. We put our mask mandate in place and it is really effective. But the people are just disobedient and rebellious and they're just not compliant enough. And that's why. I mean, that's what I get a lot. When I say, when I share some of your charts and I get some detractor that says, well, that's just because people aren't compliant enough. If we had a 100 percent, masking and compliance to the mask mandates, then, you know, those numbers would be going down. What do you think about that?

Well, there's a few things there. One of which is that if anything you're doing requires 100% of people to comply with it in order for it to work, it's never going to work because 100% of people are never going to comply with anything, anywhere. The other thing is that you can do some measurements with compliance. Recently, Los Angeles County, the public health department went around to businesses, did some surveys and observational data. I think they tracked something like 1,200 businesses and said that over 90%, 95% of people were complying with the mask mandate. This is in mid-December 2021. And then just a couple of weeks later, LA broke every record that they had previously had. Cases went up 20, 25 times higher than they'd ever been in L.A.

So, you know, when they even do, when they do measure the data on people asking, actually complying, it doesn't help them. And there's also some survey data that has been done throughout the pandemic. U.Gov did a track to survey in the United States. And I show this in the book where the mask compliance from You go of is consistent pretty much the entire time, but the cases go up and down regardless of the compliance. And there's also been a lot of international survey data that I pulled and used in the book, too. So even when you do measure how many people are actually wearing it, it doesn't make a difference. Yeah. And the mask thing is just, it's very confusing to me. And I talked to, I'm sure you know who Dr. Scott Atlas is. He was a part of the COVID task force. And we had a

conversation where basically he said when he asked Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci to present the scientific literature that proves that universal masking is actually going to mitigate the spread of COVID that they didn't have anything. That Deborah Birx actually cited this one CDC study that proved that two employees of a salon who tested positive for COVID but wore masks apparently did not spread it to their clients. Like that was the extent apparently, according to Scott Atlas, of the scientific literature that supported it. Of course, it's come out now through the reporting of journalists like David Zwig that even

the studies that the CDC says supports masking, especially masking in schools, that actually the data doesn't prove that. I think the CDC just came out with another study that they say shows the efficacy of masking. And yet, when journalists have broken it down and looked at the actual data, that's not actually what it proves because it fails to account for all of the other measures that were taken in schools in different places like that. And I just, I have a really hard time understanding the why. If there is so little evidence to prove that masks, and especially mask mandates work, either in the general public or in school, why? Why the about face from Dr. Fauci in March of 2020 basically condescending the idea that, you know, masks could ever work for something

like this to, if you don't wear a mask, you're a grandma killer by the summer of 2020. were you surprised by that change? And if you were to guess kind of why they keep on doubling down on this ineffective policy, what would you say? There's a lot of great points in there. One of the first things, just going back to that hairdresser thing for a minute, one of the flaws with that was that only half the people that want to see these hairdressers even got tested. So there's another half of the people that were clients in there that never even got tested. The CDC completely ignored that. As far as the research, and I go into this in the book as well, where early on in late March of 2020, Fouchi was sent an email from one of his employees at the National Institute of Health saying that they reviewed all of the high quality evidence on masking in the general public and it all suggested masks would not have a significant impact. Literally just a few days later, I think it was April 4th, like three or four days later, CDC and Fauci come out and say everybody should wear a cloth mask. So clearly there was no science that changed in order to support this.

It's really, so the why is a very difficult question to answer because it's clear that they weren't, you know, they always say we're following the science. It's clear they weren't following the science because the science, all this evidence and trial data had showed it wouldn't work. I think that they were initially they were thinking that the kind of Asian countries had done well because of masking. That was their thought. I think they also wanted to be seen as doing something, you know, saying, well, we're fighting COVID by telling everybody to wear a mask. And then I think it's kind of become this doubling down because as you say, they promote it, promote it, promote it, say it's the most important thing to do. The results aren't working, but they can't go back and say,

actually we were wrong, it never really worked. They have to just kind of keep doubling down on what they're selling and promoting. Yeah, I think it's that piece. Like if we're, if we could guess in the most charitable way, what is behind these mandates, it's the at least I'm doing something thing line defense that at least I'm not doing anything. And that is why, I mean, obviously it's because he's a Republican, but that's why I think DeSantis is demonized. because even if the case in hospitalization and death rates are similar in Florida to somewhere like California, well, the bad thing is isn't actually the result of the policy.

That's what I've realized when it comes to these COVID fearmongers. It's not the result. It's the intention or what is actually done. So if a governor puts all of these restrictions in place and say they have a higher death count than a state that does it, they are still deemed virtuous. And I mean, of course, we saw the same thing with Donald Trump, that every single COVID death when he was president was attributed directly to him. But, of course, now that more people have died while Joe Biden was president, no deaths are attributed

to Joe Biden because at least he's doing something. That's very confounding to me. It's a great point. It's the same thing with Cuomo in New York, where New York has had some of the worst numbers of anywhere in the world. And he was, you know, the Cuomo sexuals and all these people that were so devoted to him. It's just completely absurd. But I, yeah, I agree. I think a lot of politicians realized that they would be criticized by the media for not doing enough and not doing too much. So it became kind of this politically beneficial for them to kind of overdo it with policy because the media, I think a lot of them were scared and were concerned. And so they were kind of advocating for further restrictions and more mask mandates and more vaccine passports and all this.

So I think politicians kind of realized that they could get away with doing more, but they couldn't get away as much with doing less. Obviously, if you're, you know, DeSantis, there's really nothing you can do that will make them happy. Anything he does is kind of criticized and screamed about. But yeah, I think that's a large part what's kind of contributed to this. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Alley, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. What's crazy to me? And I'm sure this is maddening to you as well, is how accessible the data is that you use to make your charts,

how available it is to anyone. Like you don't have to have a special password. You don't have to have a special degree to understand it. I don't have a background in data analysis. And it's very easy for me to understand and access these things. If you have a search engine, if you have a connection to the internet, you can find these things. And still, you will have people say, that if you don't support universal masking and mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports,

which you've found the same conclusion there, that that really doesn't make a difference to case rate and things like that, that you are not following the science and you are hateful and cruel and whatever, what do you think is inhibiting people from simply looking at the data that is publicly available that shows the conclusions that you are putting into very simple charts. Right. And I've repeated that a few times. essentially saying, you know, this is, it's their own fault. They made it easy to kind of disprove their arguments because this data is so easily accessible and anybody can do it. I'll tell people I can walk you through how to recreate the chart yourself. It's not hard. But I think there's been this kind of

turn mentally for people where they, they were told for so long, you're a good person, you're doing the right thing. You still see that where when the governor of New York mandated mass again in December, she said, you know, 80% of adults have done the right thing and been vaccinated. Well, if you're told over and over and over again by everybody that you trust that you're a good person and you've done the right thing and worn a mask and you've helped and contributed in some way, it's a very powerful instinct for people to kind of maintain that. And it's also, I think some people have been frustrated, the people that have gotten vaccinated or worn a mask the whole time that have feel like they've done the right thing. I think they're frustrated because they're also

told it's the other person's fault. So when you're given that license to kind of be the police in a way where you get to say, oh, you're the, you're the problem here. You're not wearing a mask, you're not complying with what they told you to do, I think it gives them this kind of superiority complex where they feel like they have the license to blame other people for COVID not being over yet, which is never going to happen because it's never going away. But those same people, it seems, don't call out the politicians that have put these rules in place that aren't following them themselves. It's always like other people who aren't wearing their masks. It's always like the conservatives, the evangelicals who aren't wearing their

masks, it's never Eric Garcetti not wearing his mask that's the problem. You know, it's never Gavin Newsom not wearing his mask that's the problem. It's okay for those people to break the rules. But if someone like me breaks the rules, well, I'm the reason why people are still dying from COVID, which of course isn't true. So that's also a little bit confusing to me, like why there isn't more anger about the hypocrisy of people like, you know, Stacey Abrams sitting in a classroom full of masks little kids, totally unmasked herself. Of course, she said the criticism was about racism. Eric Garcetti saying that when he took a picture maskless with Magic Johnson,

that he was holding his breath. I guess he was also doing that at the Super Bowl. All of these celebrities without masks on, smushed together in L.A., which is apparently in a state of emergency so that little two-year-olds still have to wear a mask to daycare. I know that a lot of people do wake up because of that hypocrisy, but there are still so many people that see that,

and they have no problem with it. They're parents that still sinned their little kid to kindergarten with their mask on after they went to the Super Bowl without a mask on and they're fine with it. Is that crazy to you? It's absolutely crazy. You brought up a lot of great examples of this kind of inconsistency. And one of my favorites is, you know, Nancy Pelosi out of fundraiser where all of the wealthy people that were at the fundraiser, yeah, exactly. They're not wearing a mask, but everybody that's serving them food, they're all masks.

I think a big problem is that kind of a lot of media. of sources that people trust, like the New York Times and Washington Post, the Atlantic, have done a really terrible job of kind of calling out this hypocrisy and saying, you know, if all these people don't actually think the rules are that important, that don't apply to them, well, why should we follow them? They really just kind of serve to promote and help this. Like, I bring up examples in the book, and I bring it up on Twitter all the time where you see, you know, there was a story published that I think it was Washington Post that said, Iowa, welcome to Iowa state that doesn't care if you live or die because they lifted their mask mandates. And there's never any follow up to that. So

people that read that just see the story, see the headline and go, oh, my God, Iowa lifted their mass mandate. The numbers are going to be terrible now. And they don't see the results afterwards, which is that Iowa has done just fine. And their numbers have been much lower than states with mass mandates. So I think it's a, it's this consistent problem of the hypocrisy not being called out by the sources that these people go to for information. And so they don't really hear the truth. They don't really hear the data and they don't really kind of hear about the hypocrisy and, you know, understand it and say to themselves, this isn't, it clearly isn't that important because they're not doing it. Yeah. And you know, now studies have come out, which there have been studies that

were already out there, even before COVID, that showed that, hey, cloth masks and surgical masks really aren't that effective when it comes to this particle size of COVID. It's just not. I mean, I was looking at some medical journals and I put them in a blog post several months ago. And I was just stunned to find that really as far back as like the first SARS epidemic, there were studies that were published in medical journals saying, hey, masks really don't do anything when it comes to mitigating the spread of this. And so again, this is publicly available data. And yet you will get people who take it very personally, who will get very, who will get

very angry. And I do wonder how much the kind of public health bureaucracy has been a part of that, that people think that being educated or trusting the science is really just listening to what Francis Collins has to say or the summary of a study by the CDC, which is actually misleading and who aren't actually looking at the data because maybe they don't want to or maybe they're intimidated or maybe they think it's political. But you had Francis Collins, the head of the NIH. He did this interview. He was kind of the evangelist to evangelicals about masks and vaccines. And, you know, he held up his cloth mask and he said, this is a, this is a life-saving device. And basically, you're not loving your neighbor and you're not a good Christian if you don't wear it. And I think to

your point, that's a very powerful, psychological, and spiritual form of manipulation. Oh, wow, you're not a Christian. You know, this is a Christian podcast. You're not a Christian. If you don't wear this mask, you're not a good person. No one wants to be a bad person. No one wants to be seen as selfish. And I just think that you make a really good point that that could be part of the reason why people feel so compelled to stick to this narrative despite the facts contradicting it. Absolutely. It's a very powerful instinct to try to help others, and especially for Christians, and I completely, you know, it's a good instinct to have. I mean, we should want to help our neighbor and be kind that way.

But wearing a mask isn't doing that. It's not accomplishing that. And that's the kind of, they've used these, these kind of tools to tell, get compliance, to encourage compliance. And, you know, it's very funny.

You mentioned how Collins holds up a cloth mask. And then CNN recently, one of their top medical experts, quote unquote, comes on and says the cloth mask or facial decorations. So I think that's one of the key things to, to bring up to people is that, you know, it's a good thing to want to help others. But what you're doing isn't really help.

And the CDC studies that when they've tried to justify their masking recommendations have been so deeply flawed that it doesn't take somebody with a lot of credentials to understand it. I wrote a whole chapter about this in the book where you show, you know, they try to say, oh, masks dropped infections by 75 percent, but they don't show you that they also dropped by 75 percent in counties that didn't have a mask mandate. It's things like that. And it's very frustrating that they've kind of used messaging this way. And I think that they've also done, they purposely kind of came out and tried to disqualify. discredit anybody that that was telling the opposite story. You know, the Great Barrington Declaration was kind of this famous article written to try to say we need to focus on protecting the elderly and let the rest of us go back to normal.

And Francis Collins and Fauci were kind of colluding privately to try to discredit those people and they called them fringe epidemiologists. And they were incredibly well-credentialed experts in their field. So it's, yeah, it's very frustrating how they've used language to try to convince people to wear masks. I posed a question on Twitter. I think it was on Sunday night because just you're looking at the Super Bowl. And I don't care that everyone is maskless. I think it's great.

I would love for everyone to continue to be maskless. I don't care that people aren't following the so-called rules of the Super Bowl or L.A. County, which said that you had to wear masks in this place. That doesn't bother me. Obviously what bothers me is we've kind of already talked about is the fact that the next day, two-year-old kindergartners would go to their daycare, go to their school being forced to wear masks and that people don't have a problem with that. And so I asked on Twitter, like, how does it make logical sense that my two-year-old,

in order to get on a plane, she has to wear a mask, she's never had to wear a mask before. And so there have been things that we've missed out on as a family or we had to drive 15 hours to go somewhere because I didn't want to put it in a mask because am I going to get that flight attendant who gets angry that my toddler won't wear a mask? And it just seemed like too much. And so we have to go through all of that. but adults can be smushed together in a stadium without masks and not just there, but I mean, there have been plenty of football games over the past several months where people have been,

you know, smushed together without a mask, which again is great, but how does that make scientific sense? And the only real response that I got from people trying to be like, oh, I'm so scientific, was, well, the Super Bowl is outside. It's outside. And planes are really dangerous places for COVID to spread. And so that's why, you. you know, two-year-olds have to wear masks. Do you think that argument holds water? Definitely does not. Plains have these incredibly powerful air filters that filter the air repeatedly. In fact, they're probably even, if not the same as outside, maybe better. Not that masks have any impact anyway, but if theory, if you were trying to make that argument, the planes have these air filters

that filter air constantly. So it wouldn't be a significant risk on a plane regardless. One of the things that we're kind of outliers on in the United States is that is the two-year-old masking two-year-olds. You know, hardly anybody does that. I don't think a lot of parents know that. I think it's just kind of, you know, people are just told what they're told by the media or from the scientists, and they don't know that a lot of other countries have never masked kids in schools. Most other countries, because the WHO doesn't recommend it. The WHO, even though I think WHO is in itself very corrupt in a lot of ways, but they don't even recommend. They actually recommend against masking kids under five years old.

Exactly, exactly. And especially one of the things that drives me crazy is in California, for example, Los Angeles and San Diego, I don't know if this is still the case, but for a long time, they were masking kids outside at recess. So if you're trying to say that the Super Bowl isn't a problem because it's outdoors, you know, they're masking kids outside at recess. It's, you know, three, four, five, six-year-olds. It's completely unsupported by any kind of scientific data evidence. There are real harms to it and, you know, significant side effects from masking kids that young and from masking them at schools. And so, and there's no benefit. So basically, you know, every policy has a tradeoff. What's the harms and what's the benefits? There's no benefit to mask wearing in schools. All we're getting are harms and a lot of people are still defending it and supporting it and promoting it. It's completely ludicrous. And then another response. I forgot about this one is, well, everyone at the Super Bowl, they had to show a negative test or vaccine verification. And two-year-olds, they can't get a vaccine yet. And so obviously they still have to wear masks. What do you say to that? Well, Unfortunately, in a lot of countries that do a better job of tracking this data, the rates of infection and people that are fully vaccinated is higher than those, the rates among people that are unvaccinated.

This is the case in Denmark. It was a case in Scotland, UK, and Ontario, Canada. A lot of the places that Iceland are another example. So, you know, trying to say that vaccinations are going to prevent the transmission of COVID is just not backed up by any kind of scientific data or evidence anymore. I think a lot of experts, again, this is the same problem. these experts kind of go on TV and they say, oh, you can't get COVID if you get vaccinated. Joe Biden said that. A lot of vouchers out there, it's a dead end for the virus if you get vaccinated. That's just not the case. It doesn't mean there might, you know, there might be benefits to it. But as far as children who we know are at extremely low risk of severe cases or from death from COVID, there's really no benefit to it because it's not going to prevent them from spending it to other kids or from spreading it to adults.

It's not going to prevent adults from spreading it to them. So there's really no justification for that line of thinking. And it's very frustrating that it's kind of continued on into 2022. Yeah. And this illogic is continuing to affect policy. D.C., her mayor, or its mayor, announced that they are lifting the mask mandate for bars and restaurants, but not for kids in school. According to Fox News, California is leaving school mask mandate in place despite lifting indoor mask mandates elsewhere. Now, I saw also Politico reporting, I'm guessing this is true. This makes sense to me that Gavin Newsom actually wants to lift mask mandates for school. Well, that part isn't necessarily what is what seems likely to me. The next part does, but that it is the teachers unions who are pushing back against lifting mask mandates in schools.

And we're actually seeing that in a lot of places. We're seeing that in many states that it's actually not the, it's not the experts. it's not the scientists that are making these decisions. Even the CDC has said that they want to defer to the governors in making these decisions. The governors are then saying that they're deferring to the teachers' unions. So maybe that's what's behind it, is really that the teachers unions are kind of imposing this guidance of kids wearing masks, even though it's ineffective and really has nothing to do with science at all? Absolutely.

And I think that's been a consistent problem where there were these emails they can't. out that teachers unions had influenced CDC guidance on school reopenings and school masking. I mean, that's completely insane. And for the people that claim that to be following the science so closely, the fact that they're being influenced by a political organization, which essentially what teachers unions have become in the last two years, is really depressing. And it's a very important point to bring up because these people try to pretend for so long, they've been pretending for so long that they are all their decisions are being based off of

recommendations from the experts. And that's just not true. it's clearly that they're that they're being influenced by outside sources and that can't be acceptable especially when this is part of the goal with the book was to try to destroy the arguments behind masking entirely because if you believe that masks work they're always going to be licensed for the organizations like the teachers unions to try to bring it back if you know cases go up again which i'm sure they will and again in winter 22 23 so you know if you if you buy the premise that masks work they can they can never really permanently go away but then that's that's the

goals to try to present the data and show all the evidence that it hasn't worked and that we can't keep going back to these things over and over again and listening to teachers unions that think these measures actually make a difference. And the amazing thing is that the very people who often say, oh, we have to listen to the science and Republicans are the ones that are politicizing this. I'm not saying that there are no Republicans who have wrongly politicized it, but they are, you know, they are the ones, whether they realize it or not, that are actually doing it. what they're doing for politics. I try to tell parents is that your child is wearing a mask to school because of politics. I know that you love your child and you think that you are doing what's best

for them. Of course, I think all parents believe that they are doing that. But the restriction, the rule that your child has to wear a mask to school is not for their safety. It's not based on science. It actually is based on politics, not the other way around. And I'm hoping that your book, I'm hoping that people who are not conservative that have all different kinds of political backgrounds will read it and that it will help them wake up to the logic that has diluted so many people over the past couple of years. I think one thing that's really difficult is to admit that you've believed a lie, admit that you've been lied to, admit that maybe you impose something on your child unnecessarily that could end up harming them long term. That's going to be really hard for a lot of people to admit,

don't you think? It definitely is. I think one thing I would say to people that feel like that is, you know, there's nothing, there's no reason to blame yourself for listening to people that you trust. You know, you listen to scientific experts. That makes sense. In theory, they should be telling you the truth. The problem is, is unfortunately, they haven't been telling the truth.

They've been kind of trying to promote a policy as opposed to maintaining this kind of dispassionate, scientific, evidentiary-based line of thinking. And one thing to bring up as well is that, you know, one of the problems that I've tried to fight against and, you know, blaming Republicans is something that we look like somebody like Ron DeSantis, who was one of the first people in the country to push for opening schools. He got the schools open. He pushed for normal schooling without masking. And he was fought every bit of the way. And now it's kind of universally accepted that closing schools was a disaster. It was a terrible policy. Never should have happened that masking schools has had very little impact, if at all. And nobody kind of

goes back and it goes back and gives him credit for being the first person to point that out. It's like, oh, Ron DeSanza is trying to kill your kids. And it turns out, no, actually he was right the whole time. And that's so when you see that people have been right that were demonized and they're telling you this is what we should be doing, that's kind of somebody you should be listening to more so than somebody who, you know, didn't give you any evidence for why these measures were so important has been proven wrong over time. And good for him for abiding his time because it could be really easy to kind of acquiesce when there's a cacophony of voices that are telling that are calling you a killer and everyone who supports you a killer. It can be really easy to either back down or kind of caveat or apologize for your position. And he just kind of, he just knew that he just waited that the spike that was happening in all Southern states in really the heat of the summer when people were inside was going to go away.

And it was going to switch geographically. And of course, that's what happened. Now, what's incredible is that after a year of vaccines, mask mandates, January, we saw our highest case rate ever. ever higher than at the start of this thing, higher than in January of 2021. Now, the death rate, this is just according to Google, which compiled this data for the New York Times in our world and data. The death rate wasn't as high as it was in January 2021, but it was a lot higher than it was over the summer when we had fewer vaccines going out.

And so I'm a little bit confused on that. And I'm not asking you to speculate about the efficacy of the vaccine. But don't you think it's just a little strange that when 70% of the country has been fully vaccinated, a large percentage has gotten their booster shot. We're seeing vaccine mandates and passports that's still happening. Big employers are still requiring their employees to get this vaccine, that we had the highest case rate ever in January versus a time when we had hardly any vaccines a year ago. That's just a little strange to me. Yeah. And again, it goes back to the problem.

of that the vaccines just don't stop infections or transmission, hardly, if anything at all, really. You know, we saw this kind of early on where Singapore last summer with a much higher vaccination rate the U.S. had their biggest surge of the pandemic. So we should have known going into winter that this wasn't going to really stop cases from happening. And clearly that didn't happen. And we could see this with Vermont. Vermont's numbers had gone up. Iceland saw the same thing. All these very highly vaccinated areas that saw their biggest surges of the pandemic. So trying to say that that would prevent surges, which is what a lot of experts went on TV and did. They said, oh, if everybody, we just got a higher vaccination rate. And they would set out these numbers, 80, 85%. And then they

would ignore that areas that had that percentage saw their highest surges of the pandemic before this. So I think it's been a very, it's very confusing because it's so easy to just show, and I do this all the time where I'll point out, you know, Fauci said if we get 70% of people vaccinated, we won't see surges anymore. And then, of course, that's disproven just a few months later. So it kind of goes back to what I was saying a minute ago about how, you know, when these people are so often and so consistently and so easily disproven, you got to stop trusting them at some point because it's clear that they're kind of winging it. They're not really basing their their mandates and their guidance on evidence. It's just kind of political posturing. Yeah. And one of these days,

I hope we can really get to what is behind the motivation for what made Fauci and the public health bureaucracy switch on masks because, yes, maybe it was just let's just do something. Maybe it was just, hey, this is a political wedge to make it seem like Donald Trump doesn't care because he's kind of flattered the whole mask thing and therefore maybe he'll lose in November. Maybe they see it as a right-left issue or maybe it's more nefarious than that. I don't know where the propaganda is coming from. I don't know what the motivations are to mask two-year-olds when I don't know if any other country in the world is doing it. But I really, maybe it'll be you. Maybe you will uncover, um, excuse me, something for us that tells us where this propaganda and this craziness is.

coming from. What do you think is behind these politicians that are now rolling back restrictions, even though cases, at least in January and February, have been so high. Are you optimistic about that? Are you cynical about that? What do you think? I think it's mostly political pressure. I think they've realized the polling numbers have showed people are really fed up with it. They're tired of these measures. They're tired of their kids being masked. And I think that they realized that they were going to get really hurt. in midterm elections coming up if they continue these policies for too long. And I also, I feel like there's my concern is that a lot of states, like you mentioned, California being a state of emergency, they just extended that again. You know, and Illinois, the governor, when he said, oh, we're going to

enter a mass mandate said, it doesn't mean that we won't bring it back again when the numbers go up. So my concern is that they're kind of kind of give this temporary respite for now. And then as soon as there's another surge again, which inevitably will happen, they're going to go right back to the same policies that we already know don't work. I think it's been mostly political. I'm optimistic to an extent that a lot of states that had statewide mask mandates in 2020 didn't bring them back in this winter with all the big numbers went crazy. Ohio and West Virginia and places like that where the governors had praised masks

and mask mandates didn't go back to it. So I think they realized that people are tired of it and that, you know, they don't have the political capital to keep mandating masks forever, at least in some of these states. I'm concerned about New York and Illinois and California, but yeah, optimistic. about most of the rest of the country kind of committing to return to full normalcy. Yeah. It really is a battle against true misinformation and propaganda and just this faulty mindset. I saw a tweet by someone the other day that said, you know, why are we throwing up our hands and saying we're done with mask mandates when cases are so high? I can't believe

we're lifting indoor mask mandates. And this is a point that you make a lot in your tweets. Oh, so cases are at an all time high, meaning the policy that was put in place. has been ineffective, let's just double down on the policy that was completely ineffective. That should probably work this time. I mean, a lot of people think that way, crazily enough. Yeah, it's amazing how that logical consistency works there where it's like, well, this policy is so important to keep, even though we just had it and broke every record with COVID cases. And another thing I try to point out as well is it's not just that the mask don't stop the surges, is that when you remove mask mandates, there's no negative side effects at all. And people forget,

But back in March of 2021, when Texas lifted their mask mandate, there was a huge outcry of criticism. I devote a large section of the book to it as well where you point out all these people, these politicians were saying that he was part of a death cult and wanted to murder Texans. And then, of course, the numbers a couple of weeks later were lower. They actually continued to drop after the mandate was lifted. So it's not just that they don't stop infections and surges. It's that after you remove it, there's no difference. But they never go back and update the story or update that, you know,

the people on Twitter and never go back and say, actually, we got this one wrong. Removing the mass mandate didn't have any negative side effects. It's maddening, Ian. It's maddening. And I know it is to you too, because you deal with this data all day long and you see just how honestly not to be rude, but just stupid people are about this. People are very stupid about this. And it's kind of disheartening. But I think that you've probably changed more mind than you realize just by doing a simple thing of compiling data. And I'm thankful for that. Can you tell everyone a little. little bit more about your book. What can they expect in reading it? Well, thank you. First of all,

it's very kind of kind of. The idea behind the book was to show, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, show what was the evidence before COVID on mask mandates or masking, I should say? And then what happened afterwards, like what was the new, once they decided to say everybody should wear a mask, what was the guidance on what we should expect to happen from wearing masks in the general population and then present the data of what were the results afterwards? And you can show that by looking countries like Sweden where nobody wore masks. So I highlight them significantly. I showed all of the U.S. states, a lot of international locations as well, where, you know,

it's one thing to say, oh, it hasn't worked in the U.S. because, like, a lot of people will say, oh, people weren't wearing masks. That's the reason it didn't work. But when you go back and look at all these different locations, the United Kingdom and France and Italy and Spain, et cetera, you know, it's impossible to say that no one was wearing masks there either. So especially because the enforcement in some of these areas was incredibly strict and fines were very severe and police enforcement.

So that was the goal to try to show, you know, tell the story of like, what was science pre-COVID, what were the expectations? And then did the results match the expectations? And, you know, I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but the results don't line up with the expectations. Yeah. Wow. Well, thanks for the work that you do and thanks for working on this book.

It's a best seller on Amazon, which is really exciting. I think it just shows. And there have been a lot of books like this that have told the other side of COVID, it. People are really hungry for what's true. They're tired of the propaganda and they want to see the true side of it, the other side of it. And so congratulations on that. I hope you sell lots and lots of books. And thank you for taking the time to come on the show and talk to us. Well, thank you very much. Thanks very much for having me. Thank you. All right, guys, hope that you enjoyed that episode. Remember, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my birthday. Today is a. my last day of being 29. Let me tell you just like a really quick story about 29. So when I, and this is just so like you, I know whenever I meet you guys, one thing that you say is I feel like I know you. I feel like we're friends. So and I feel that way too. So this probably isn't going to surprise you. When I was in first grade, we had like a local news organization, like a local news station that we were visiting as at a field trip. And one of the. the anchors, I don't know how old she was, maybe like 45, but it was her birthday. And so our first grade class, we were all supposed to, like, write her cards. And I guess I had heard this.

This is what happens when you have, like, older siblings and you watch the things that they watch. You know things and you, like, no phrases or you know things that people say that probably other six and seven-year-olds don't. So the card that I wrote, this woman that I don't know, that she actually read on air. Maybe I can find the tapes. somewhere. I said, I said, dear so-and-so, happy birthday, you 29-year-old again. Why did I say that as a six-year-old, as a first grader? For some reason, I just knew that when people get old, that they always want to say that they're 29 for a really long time. Maybe that's what I'll do. Maybe I'll just continue saying I'm 29 forever. Not really. I'm excited about turning 30, kind of, but I'm

definitely going to milk it for the rest of the day that I'm just in my late 20s. So for my 30th birthday tomorrow. It's going to be a bonus episode. Make sure that you tune into that. It'll be out at the regular times. It'll be really fun. We're going to listen to some voicemails from people giving some advice for 20s and 30s. And I'm going to be doing the same thing. It's just going to be a really fun and reflective and hopefully practical and maybe funny episode. And I'm excited about it. So make sure that you tune in for that tomorrow. And also be sure to donate an item in my honor for my birthday. If you want to know what you can do for me for my birthday, you can donate an item to Prestonwood Pregnancy Center. It's a pregnancy center. It's a pro-life pregnancy center serving

women and families in crisis in Texas. And they need baby items. And we've got an Amazon registry for them in the description of this episode. Just click on that. Donate what you can. It would be super helpful. It's a way for us pro-lifers to put our money where our mouth is. So make sure that you do that. back here tomorrow on my 30th birthday. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity,

and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want. honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction

and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.