Leading Mask Proponent Has Change of Heart
A leading proponent of face masks as a means of countering the spread of respiratory infections appears to have changed her mind. Professor Trish Greenhalgh, University of Oxford – described as the “high priestess” of the face mask movement, who even appeared on her X feed wearing two face masks during the COVID-19 years – has endorsed a letter to the WHO in which it is claimed, as reported in the Guardian, “There is ‘no rational justification remaining for prioritising or using’ the surgical masks that are ubiquitous in hospitals and clinics globally, given their ‘inadequate protection against airborne pathogens’.”
This is a remarkable volte-face by Professor Greenhalgh whose adherence to the face mask ideology seemed, at times, to defy both logic and the best principles of evidence-based medicine. Once a leading proponent of evidence-based medicine with many entries of her own in the Cochrane Library – the repository of gold standard systematic reviews of clinical evidence including on face masks – she was reported once as saying that “too much weight on evidence-based medicine can be the enemy of good policy”.
In the face of a persistent lack of evidence for the efficacy of face masks in preventing the spread of respiratory infections, up to and including the Cochrane review by Tom Jefferson and colleagues in 2023, Greenhalgh and colleagues decided to ignore this review, criticising its focus on gold standard evidence, and produce their own ‘review’ of the evidence. That review, as reported in the Daily Sceptic, conveniently only included studies that showed face masks in a favourable light. Unsurprisingly, their conclusion was that face masks were effective and should be promoted during respiratory pandemics.
While the above pivot would appear to be good news, sadly it is not all that good. And the bad news is revealed in Global Health Now, the daily newsletter of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, dated January 12th. The Guardian article, containing a link to the letter, is headlined: ‘Face masks “inadequate” and should be swapped for respirators, WHO is advised’. The letter was addressed to WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the recommendations apply only to clinical staff in hospital environments.
The letter to the WHO chief is titled ‘A Call for the Universal use of Respirators in Healthcare’. In it, the signatories say that as COVID-19 “continues to circulate globally and to mutate” that the WHO must “support equitable access to certified respirators globally”. Thus, the letter meets the first two criteria of Hudson’s Razor which warns that anything that is:
(1) presented as a global crisis; for which there is
(2) only a global solution.
is probably a con. Especially if it requires:
(3) suppression of dissent.
And there is certainly a hint of dogmatism about the wording of the letter. Urging the WHO “to lead decisively” it says, “inaction is no longer justifiable”. And then the reference to history – as in nobody wants to be ‘on the wrong side’ of it – is brought to bear: “History will remember not only what WHO said during the early pandemic — but how it responded after the evidence for airborne transmission became indisputable.”
The moral certainty expressed in the letter is staggering when the authors of the letter justify their conclusions “in light of the long-settled scientific conclusion that only respirators can provide significant exposure and risk reduction”. It is hard to know where to begin when people who should know better refer to “settled” science.
The letter makes specific reference to N95, FFP2/3 respirators. The authors cite various articles in support of their position, but studiously avoid any reference to the gold standard review of evidence by Jefferson and colleagues. Presumably because, in addition to finding no evidence in favour of cloth face masks, it also found no evidence for the effectiveness of N95, FFP2/3 respirators.
As if to impress, a statement that the letter was “supported by over 2,300 signatories worldwide” is included. Who knew so many ‘experts’ could be wrong?
Professor Roger Watson is Distinguished Professor of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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Facemaskism was never a sensible response to Covid. It was a deeply irrational movement that sprang from an episode of collective madness, and which was accompanied by the abandonment of science. Facemaskism, in other words, is a product of the New Dark Age were entering.
Not too different to the last dark age when people believed they could drive out evil spirits by dancing in face masks. It is so ironic.
The whole face covering thing was, and still is, ridiculous. (Note I use the term “face covering”, as the government did, as “mask” is a legally protected term under H&S law)
I have worked in environments where there was a risk of toxic gas that you REALLY don’t want to breathe in. Was the countermeasure:
a) face fitted respirators with sealing checks carried out weekly, all men to be clean shaven at all times, compressed air cylinders carried by those in highest risk areas.
b) stupid soggy blue face nappies.
c) instructions on how to make a “mask” from an old shirt.
Hydrazine EPUs? Nasty stuff hydrazine.
Hydrogen Sulphide, whilst doing work-overs on old gas wells.
Very nasty stuff!
Make a mask and let natural selection have its way!
Does it really matter that she now endorses the use of respirators instead. Without using these words, she is effectively calling herself a silly cow for having previously insisted that face coverings help in reducing the spread of airborne pathogens.
I actually can’t help myself from shaking my head upon seeing someone wearing a face covering anywhere. Seeing people using face coverings, like when I see fields of solar panels or when I see these infernal windmills, only reminds me of how stupid people really can be, especially when they are convinced they are doing good/doing the ‘right’ thing.
Same goes for buying ev’s!
To a very large degree, yes. I can understand someone buying a small ev for around town/local use if they have a home charger. What I think they are ignorant about is believing that an ev is environmentally friendly, and also about how an ev’s usage can be monitored and controlled externally.
I have a nearly three year old petrol Renault Clio which, when new, gathered information about my location and relayed ‘useful local information’ to the sat nav. I turned it off immediately and declined any data collection.
Correct! There is a place for all types of new tech but one size does not fit all
Info useful to whom?
Rhetorical question! Not useful to you.
To be fair to the data gatherers, it did give useful information. It gave petrol prices at forecourts before I saw them, or which I wasn’t going to pass. It listed some main shops and car parks, that sort of thing.
As useful as it was, I don’t know why they have to gather data about *my* car usage before they will send me the information. I felt it was a bribe. I’ll suffer the reduced information for privacy.
So they can harvest it and sell it on…
Silly blue face nappies have an equal stopping force against viruses as a builders scaffolding against ping pong balls!
They are theatre masks to stop the distribution of bacterial infection during surgery (bacteria being 10000 times bigger than viruses)
You would have thought that ‘Professor’ Trish Greenhalgh would have known this
Professor Trish Greenhalgh
She was, and still is, 100% certifiable. She belongs in a very long stay institution with high walls.
I actually agree with that statement.
What we need is more weight on evidence-based scepticism.
Masks that clearly don’t.work.
Jabs that clearly don’t work.
Migrants that clearly don’t integrate.
Temperatures that clearly don’t go up.
Men that clearly aren’t women.
Both the producers of so-called evidence based science and policy makers clearly need to pay more attention to evidence based scepticism.
Evidence-based scepticism.
I really like that. I will be using that argument in future exchanges 👍🏻
Does this imply we should more non-evidence based medicine do you think – I guess witch doctors etc would approve?
She is a poor soul with a germ-phobia complex which will require psychiatric therapy to overcome.
She’s an egotistic jackass and requires a serious downdressing. The purpose of these respirators is protection against sawdust and airborne paint particles for people in situations where a lot of this (or something similar) occurs as side effect of the work they’re doing. Further, the most popular kind is Chinese KN95 respirators which are Chinese imitations of US N95 respirators produced without any quality control whose use is expressively forbidden in situations where respirators are required.
The sole interesting property of these kind od face masks (mandated in Germany for a long time after the UK had dropped mask mandates altogether) is that they’re more expensive and hence, there’s more money to be made from having them mandated.
There’s nothing that a decade or two of forced labour in Siberia can’t cure.
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Somewhat misleading headline. She thinks that it’s really important to “stop the spread” of some mild virus and wants to spend our money on it and force people to do it.
She has meanwhile arrived at the point German authorities issueing COVID regulations had already arrived at some time in 2021. These kind of facemasks were mandatory in Germany for most of the ‘German’ pandemic which lasted quite a bit than in other places due to the closer coupling of German politicians and US left-wingers and much weaker protection of Germans against excesses of the so-called German state when compared to citizens of the USA.
Indeed. Another reason might be that Germans are more inclined to apply logic to things and would have realised the whole thing was a farce if they’d been allowed to cover their faces with bits of old cloth, whereas people here just parked that absurdity deep in the back of their minds.
As I wrote in another comment: These kind of so-called respirators are supposed to be used for protection against sawdust or airborne paint particules for people doing work which causes a lot of this as side-effect. They have to be fitted properly for this to work and must be changed after a fairly short timespan, four hours if I remember this correctly. There’s also supposed to be a break with people not wearing them for a while after such a period. That’s information I got from German acquaintances who work professionally in construction etc and hence, knew about this. They’re in no way suitable for “virus protection” of large swathes of the population who haven’t been trained in using them properly and keep reusing the same mask endlessly.
Germans are as suceptible to being brainwashed via doctored news as other people (this certainly worked for my parents at that time) and these masks are exactly as unsuitable for their proposed use as Greenalgh’s original three layers of undies, just more expensive.
Fair points – though they are more plausible, if one doesn’t think too hard about it.
I’ve had a minimum amount of ABC-training (countermeasures against atomic, biological or chemical weapons) as part of my mandatory military service in Germany. There’s a reason why the military doesn’t use them instead of what they’re using because they need real protection against gasses and germs. This obviously also requires the wearer to be shaved clean as they mask cannot fit tightly enough with a beard between it and the skin.
I always specially appreciated the sight of people wearing face coverigns (of any kind) over their full beards because of this.
Lol – viruses don’t go through beards!
Indeed, with my beard they’d be caught and digested by all the bacteria in it.
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Germans are much more susceptible to brainwashing. Witness the comparisons between people actually taking to the streets in demonstrations in favour of the EU, and the incumbent government; exactly the same as the Nazi party rallies.
How about them falling over themselves to welcome Merkel‘s ‘refugees’ in 2015, virtue signalling what ‘good Germans’ they were. How many times have I had the ‘doctors and engineers’ bullshit regurgitated at me, or the ‘migrants are necessary to pay our pensions’ drivel? How’s that working out for you, Biggi?
Whatever the ‘latest thing’ is, be it Climate change, Ukraine, TDS, the Germans will eagerly lap it up. Anyone who has spent time there will recognise the almost complete absence of critical thinking, and a blind obedience to state conformity.
I think you mean “mind virus”.
I want to know if she has ever had Covid.
I have never had Covid, and the only time I wore a mask was when I was refused treatment if I didn’t. I have a special mask for this purpose on which I have written “This mask is pointless”. It has been screwed up in a pocket for years, is grubby and scruffy and is kept in my coat pocket ready for instant deployment.
Weel, I think it is there still. It hasn’t seen the light of day for over 3 years.
How do you know you’ve never had covid? I may have asked you before, in which case apologies. I suppose it’s possible you’ve simply not had any illness resembling “covid” since it became a “thing” in which case I salute your good health! I have had some colds/flu like illnesses since late 2019, no idea exactly what any of them were, don’t care.
She can’t have had covid because she always wore a mask and got “vaccinated”
If she’s been “vaccinated” then she’s had Covid every time that happened. She may have cells that still create new spike protein in which case she will have Covid semi-permanently until all affected cell nuclei die.
The gift that keeps on giving
I had a mask saying “Adolf Hitler approves” written in Arabic script. I wore it in Germany during the pandemic and nobody batted an eyelid. Not even the Arabs.
Maybe they don’t work because there is no such thing as an infectios agent that can be “caught” from another
Much more work needs doing to understand the riddle of transmission and Germ theory v. Terrain theory, eg look at the studies/results from the Common Cold Unit 1949-1989.
Why would masks be necessary for Covid given that we have a ‘safe and effective’ vaccine?
In a 2 page spread on people suffering from a failing immune system, the Mail made no mention of the vax. One person had caught Covid 8 times – yes EIGHT – and you can but wonder on her jab status. No, they completely ignored any obvious cause of a damaged immune system and went for Covid causing it instead.
What nobody seems mention is that the level of vitamin D in our population is far too low to avoid infection by colds, flu and covid. Even those prescribed vitamin D by GPs will only get 400 IU daily I commend the blog of Dr John Campbell in which he shows that this figure was established in the 40s as a protection against rickets. By a mysterious error of miscalculation, the dose was actually underestimated. In consequence even 400 IU is insufficient protection against rickets; a very low bar anyway. It has since been learned that increasing the vitamin D supplementation progressively protects against colds, flus and also covid and more The needed vitamin D supplementation for this level of protection is ~ 8,000 IU i.e. 20 times more than the medics are dishing out. Strictly the dose should be checked by a blood assay to establish that the blood concentration of vitamin D lies at about 100 ng/dl or 250 nmol/l in the two standard ways of reporting the measurement. instead of this endless discussion about useless masks, can we please instead attend to a method of rendering them irrelevant by a method that actually works? At 88 years… Read more »
I’m glad I never used them. In the early days, I came across (quite likely via the “Lockdown Sceptics) that it was possible to access a proper .Gov site that published the artwork to print out exemption badges etc. I downloaded it all and declared exemption. It was only used once or twice, when someone had the nerve to ask why I wasn’t wearing one. There was some documentation published by the British Standards Institution (BSI) on medical gadgets, that went as close to the bone as it could along the lines of them being useless. Also, most of the so-called masks on sale had tiny labels on them that said they were not medical equipment (to avoid prosecution). When they started using them as part of the campaign, it looked to me that it was a copy-cat job with other parts of the world where it was common practice in overcrowded areas – such as the Tokyo metro railway system. Forgivable when it came to life when they did not understand the physical nature of viruses – but modern academics and civil servants should have known better. Of course, some might say that they did know, and deliberately exploited the… Read more »
Of course masks were a campaign tactic, there as a constant reminder that we were supposed to be in a ‘deadly pandemic’, and to signal adherence to the narrative. This was even admitted by several politicians at the time, who’s names I have thankfully erased from my memory.
‘Masks’… like keeping mosquitos out using chicken netting.
Did she apologise to Tom Jefferson and Carl Henegan. She was quite abraisive to them during the “panademic”
You can never “mask” the truth.
It’s about time a professor from Oxford actually took notice of the Cochrain review from Oxford. Perhaps her department has walled itself off for “safety “!
She is the perfect example of why I seldom listen to self-proclaimed “experts”.
Those that push for “respirators” should first have to wear N95, FFP2/3’s all day for a month and then decide.
Under normal circumstances, this is prohibited for health & safety reasons. These masks are also not designed to last that long. They’re supposed to be changed for new ones after about 4 hours.
He is NOT a medical doctor and so the use of his Dr title of anthropology in this WHO context is highly misleading.
A ‘professor’ wore two masks…? What a complete and utter buffoon
Only P100 respirators are effective (but only for the wearer) against respiratory illnesses, nothing less.