Masks are nothing more than a ‘comfort blanket’
In the week when all the remaining COVID-19 legal mandates were lifted, HART is encouraged to read that more commentators are realising that masking the healthy is likely to cause more harm than good.
Dr Colin Axon — an engineering scientist from Brunel University — described many medical staff as having a ‘cartoonish’ view of viral transmission and went on to say that masks were nothing more than a ‘comfort blanket … entrenching bad behaviour’. Conservative MP, Sir Graham Brady, in a recent newspaper article, also highlighted the lack of evidence that face coverings reduced the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and that the real purpose of the mask mandate was to introduce ‘a means of social control’. The BBC, which throughout the pandemic have slavishly promoted the dominant COVID-19 narrative, has recently shown some welcome dissent with presenter Nick Robinson admitting that the type of mask that most of us wear ‘gives you no protection at all, absolutely none’ (listen from 2:12:29).
Now that we have been granted greater opportunity to choose whether or not to don a face covering, it is important to emphasise that continued wearing will perpetuate the currently inflated level of anxiety many people feel about the prospect of returning to a normal lifestyle. Regrettably, one unhelpful consequence of 16 months of psychological manipulation — orchestrated by the Government’s behavioural scientists — is that going without a mask in community settings can evoke feelings of shame. Although understandable given the relentless covert ‘nudges’, HART believes that such reactions are totally unjustified. On the contrary, those choosing to ditch the masks should do so with heads held high, in the knowledge that you are no longer: prolonging excessive fear; excluding 1-in-5 of the adult population who suffer hearing loss from the opportunity to socially engage; stymying essential human connectedness and the emotional development of our children, nor colluding with a compliance strategy which promotes mindless acceptance of often-counterproductive restrictions.
So if you opt to go without a mask do so in the knowledge that you are acting as a force for good by making an important contribution to getting our lives back to some form of much-needed normality.