When June Became the Cruellest Month

Five years ago this month, with the introduction of mask mandates, the world changed. And I did, too.

Do you remember what life was like back in early 2020, before the Covid craziness began? One day we were being told that not only was it unnecessary to wear a ‘face covering’, but it was, according to existing knowledge, wisdom and best practice, a mistake to do so. The next day The Science™ flipped and we were being instructed that we must wear them in a variety of settings, on pain of social shaming and financial penalty. (At Smile Free we’ve documented the whole masking timeline here.)

Do you remember what happened when the masking switch was flipped? People started appearing in public dressed as if they were Jesse James on his way to rob a Rock Island Line train.

And before those Chinese masks (which were useless at stopping the ‘spread of COVID-19’) showed up, people resorted to other means of ‘protecting themselves’ against a ‘deadly’ virus: forced to queue to gain entry to my local farm shop, I came across one woman wearing a WW2 gas mask.

I think it’s not too much to say that, manipulated by the media and deranged by the daily podium pronouncements from politicians, the population lost its grip on reality and common sense. The world succumbed to mask mania.

I recall experiencing a mixture of feelings, of which fear and foreboding were present in equal measures. By nature, I’m a rule-follower; my basic instinct being to blend in. But I’ve always had a streak of sceptical enquiry and a half-decent BS detector: I’ll do what I’m told for as long as I believe the people who are doing the telling. And I remember that, for a number of reasons, I stopped believing the mainstream narrative.

Perhaps it was the invocation of The Science™ as an absolute truth. Or maybe it was that the largescale protests about George Floyd had been granted some quasi-divine exemption from the ravages of a deadly ‘novel virus’. Then again, it might have simply been the sight of a council rubbish lorry, manned by four men crammed into its cab, barrelling through the otherwise deserted street of our village which alerted me to a possible fraud. But whichever of these were responsible – maybe all of them – it dawned on me that something just felt off.

I have always had a minor discomfort with enclosed spaces, and I called my GP asking if he would write me an exemption letter for masks. After trying to persuade me that I “really should try to wear one” and recommending some “helpful videos on YouTube” that would ease me through my discomfort, my ‘go along to get along’ demeanour shifted and I told him bluntly that I felt claustrophobic when wearing a piece of cloth over my mouth and nose. It wasn’t about being a ‘no one tells me what to do’ sort of guy; it was simply that I couldn’t tolerate the things. He told me I could pick up the letter later that day.

Now imbued with a new confidence, I marshalled my thoughts about masks – and why I wouldn’t wear one – and wrote them down.

Why I Don’t Wear a Mask

1. They have a negative effect on the wearer. I find them suffocating. They make it harder for me to breathe. They steam up my glasses. Wearing one makes me feel anxious, even panicky. I become distressed.
2. They don’t work. Masks, the argument in their favour goes, help make us safer and more confident to be in each other’s presence. But, given the type being worn, and as people are wearing them, masks do nothing to protect oneself or anybody else. From a health point of view there is no practical purpose or benefit, either for the wearer or for others, served in covering one’s face. In fact, given the way people use them, it seems as if they might do more harm than good.
3. They discourage social cohesion. Not being able to see someone’s – everyone’s – face feels alienating and introduces emotional distance between people. It discourages interaction and makes communication difficult.
4. They are having a negligible positive effect on society – and the economy – as we try to emerge from the ‘lockdown’. (In fact, they may have the opposite effect, of reinforcing people’s fear of the virus, hence extending their wish to stay isolated from the rest of society.) Supposedly introduced as a way of encouraging people to ‘get out and get back to normal’ in shops and in the workplace, there are no material benefits observable. I read that the uptick in retail sales the week they were introduced as being mandatory in shops was less than 3%. Shops, bars, restaurants, places of entertainment, offices etc. remain closed or sparsely used.
5. They have no evidentiary basis for their use. At best, The Science™ is inconclusive and ambiguous. At worst, it says that masks can do harm.
6. They are being mandated by a government which has zero credibility. Masks are an excellent proxy for the overall performance of the people who have been ‘in charge’ during this period. ‘Advice’ and ‘guidance’ have flipped by 180 degrees on wearing masks, with no emergence of any new evidence to support these changes in policy.
7. They infringe my civil liberties. Introduced without proper debate or scrutiny, the mandating of wearing a piece of cloth across my mouth and nose, enforceable by law, seems to be an afront to my basic human rights. If they could be shown to work – if there was strong evidence for their use – then there would be a decent argument for using them. But they don’t and there isn’t. This has become about two things: the government and the establishment doubling down on their poorly made decisions to send us into the downward spiral of lockdown, and their innate desire to regulate and control the population.

This was written in July 2020. In 2025 I have seen nothing that would make me re-write any part of my anti-mask manifesto. On the contrary, I stand by every word.

Paul Stevens is a member of Smile Free, which continues to campaign for the truth to be told about mask mandates and masking and to ensure they never reappear. Sign up for news about our soon-to-be-released film, Masking Humanity.