The Highwire with Del Bigtree - ARE MASKS COMING BACK THIS WINTER?

Episode Date: December 24, 2022

The attempt to remask the public has started. And it’s rapidly moved past COVID as a reason to know of any basic respiratory illnesses. But does science justify it? Jefferey and Del break down the latest PR push surrounding masking.#DoNotComply #NoMoreMandates #Freedom #MasksDontWorkBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We make an effort here to report on poor public health policy, bad science, really so it doesn't get woven into the fabric of society and cause suffering like we have seen with the masking of children. And we're seeing now a push. We're seeing an official attempt to normalize masking. Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Los Angeles. The headlines look like this. This is out of the LA Times. Health officials are urging masks again amid high COVID and flu levels. And you look into this article, it says, we quote, we also encourage you to wear a high quality well-fitting mask to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses.

This is Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a briefing with reporters. So now respiratory illnesses, colds, just common colds now. You're going to be wearing a mask. That's the recommendation from the CDC. And so we look and, you know, they're starting to loop it in there. So now it's just it's high COVID. We have surging COVID. people have that memory of the last couple years. Oh yeah, and cough cough flu too. So we look at the CDC's

own in-house journal. We go back to this just to inform this decision from Rochelle Walensky. This is the emerging infectious diseases, their journal. And this is the title of this article here. Some 2020, non-pharmaceutical measures for pandemic influenza and non-health care settings, personal protective and environmental measures. So you go into this study and you go down under masks, under face masks, and it says this. In our systemic review, we identified 10 randomized controlled trials that reported estimates of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory confirmed influenza virus infections in the community from literature published during, get this, 1946 to July 27th, 2018. So kind of a big duration there. In pooled analysis, we found no significant

reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks. Now, they go on to say, there is limited evidence for effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Again, they repeat our systemic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory confirmed influenza. And now you're seeing the same headline coming out of the New York Times. This is a concerted effort here. This is the attempt. It's time to wear a mask again. Health experts say, which health experts? And you go into this article here and it says there is strong evidence. that masks helped to reduce the transmission of several respiratory illnesses.

So no longer COVID, but that word, strong evidences, is hyperlinked in this article. You click on one of those hyperlinks, and it brings it to this study, as this is supposed to back up their claim of strong evidence. Face masks and hand hygiene to prevent influenza transmission in households. You go into the study and you look at this. It says hand hygiene with or without face masks, it seemed to reduce influenza transmission, but the differences compared with the control group were not significant.

Wow. Okay, New York Times. Got it. This is exactly what I was saying at the top of the show, right? Somewhere in a conclusion, somewhere they cherry picked some spot. But when you look at the study itself, it's saying, no, it didn't see that. Pumped that into an AI, then ask the AI, do mass stop the flu? And the computer says, no, yes, no.

There's lots of these studies in here, literally done by the CDC, that are saying, no, it doesn't do anything. It's really amazing. Do you think they, I mean, when you think about this, Jeffrey, is this reporter read that study? Or do they literally just read the headline zipping through and say, that must be, you know, Michelle Wollenski once mentioned this, this must be a great study. I'm just going to put the headline in them. It's just amazing that they would make that mistake. Well, we've reported on other outlets, Washington Post, Sacramento, B, purposely making mistakes,

purposely making errors to support a preconceived conclusion that they want to put forth in the article. So hard to know what's in this author's mindset. But really, I mean, if it's not purposeful, it's a basic mistake. It really is really interesting. But you're seeing the same effort in the UK as well. So it's just going, you know, the United States in Europe, you're seeing the same headlines. In the UK, they're having a strep A outbreak. So you're getting headlines like this in the UK piggybacking on that schools should be bringing in pandemic measures to protect children from strepe and it says in here can we not learn from the pandemic surely the best way to avoid unnecessary harm is to set a new normal they're talking about face masks they're talking about ventilation systems and well what did we learn from

the pandemic well when it comes to masking children this is a headline this is actually a study it was the new england journal of medicine and they looked at sweden sweden did not mask the kids and they kept their early education schools open. And here's the headline, open schools COVID-19 and child and teacher morbidity in Sweden. And it says here, despite Sweden having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidences of severe COVID-19 among school children and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. And so there's a study. But if you go into the literature, into the media in Sweden, you're seeing articles that look like this. They're actually, they're in horror what the rest of the world did. Imagine if our children had it like this.

And they show a picture of a kid with a, this is the head picture on this article. And they're basically saying, you know, Germany locked down. They masked the kids and they had higher incidences. And they also have all the harms that came with that when it comes to the education loss, the verbal communication, the connection with these kids. So this is the headlines. It's basically a gasp from Sweden saying, imagine if our kids had to go through that. Oh, my God. I can't help but think, you know, over the years.

as we've all been traveling in airplanes here and there and buses, when there would be people from another country here wearing masks everywhere they go and they're sort of standing out. And I don't know about you, but I was just saying, God, that's really unfortunate. Their government or somehow they're oppressed to a level believing that the air they're breathing is dangerous to them. We've been doing just fine here in America since I was born,

and you would just look at them. And now they are trying to turn us into that. Like I guess now we're seeing what it was like to live in those countries, a government that is telling you every virus out there that you're, you know, everyone's been surviving since the dawn of man. Now you need to be afraid, be very afraid, and mask yourself on a constant basis. We told him this was happening, Jeff. We told them there you're lowering the bar so far with this fear around COVID with a death rate of 026, 0.035%, somewhere in there. If they lower that bar, then as I said early on, every flu, every flu, every,

you know, upper respiratory infection is going to have the same crisis. We lowered the bar too far. Now they can lock us down at any time and be justified. Exactly. Exactly. And what we saw from the CDC during this time, they came out with a study looking at the effects of masking schools and pediatric cases of COVID-19. And they found a link. And this was the CDC study. And so what happened was we see an interesting deviation here of the social structure when it comes to looking at the studies coming from the CDC or really believing them. We have Tracy Hogue. She's an epidemiologist, physician, clinical researcher, and her and her co-authored took that data from the CDC and did an even more robust study to check it out. And this was just released this month. This is

in the Journal of Infection, lack of correlation between school mask mandates and pediatric COVID-19 cases, a large cohort. So here you have basically independent scientists and researchers challenging the CDC's data with their own data sets. And what they did was they took the CDC's data, but they basically took three times as many counties they looked at in a longer duration. So the CDC only took this little window snapshot and said, here it is, ran to the mountaintop. We found a correlation between this. And this is what Tracy Hogue writes. This is the summary in the article. In summary, expanding upon a widely cited CDC study in employing the same methodology, but with a larger, more representative data set over a longer period of time, we fail to find the same evidence that school mask

mandates are associated with a reduction in county pediatric COVID-19 cases. We demonstrate how observational studies can be misleading when used to guide public health policy. So there it is. We have independent scientists challenging the CDC.