Masks Not Effective in Stopping the Spread of Covid – Opinion

I remember asking early on in the pandemic, “if masks and lockdowns work so well, why aren’t they, well… working?” A group of USC and UCLA doctors had the same thought, evidently, and in a February letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors only recently obtained by the LA Daily News, they wrote:

These data show that infection rates increased despite having a mask mandate. This suggests that the mask mandate may have had limited or even no effect.

The data showed that the number of COVID cases rose into December after Los Angeles had enacted a mandatory mask in June 2021. I am shocked. Here’s more news:

The letter from the group of doctors cites the county’s statistics, and studies in Europe and some U.S. states, showing that after mask mandates were imposed, transmission of COVID-19 did not slow down.

One of the doctors, Jeffrey D. Klausner, “is also opposed to requiring children to wear masks in schools, saying that 70%, or more, of children attending school, have been infected or been vaccinated or both, giving them immunity from severe disease.”

The fact that school districts are continuing mask mandates in 2022 despite all the evidence confirming it’s a useless, destructive policy, is completely indefensible and indicates their intention to forcibly mask kids foreverhttps://t.co/MgxSpBNQiL

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) August 13, 2022

According to The Daily News, Barbara Ferrer from LA County Public Health may have been influenced by the letter to stop her from imposing another mandate for masks in July as she had threatened repeatedly. Further, I contend that she was forced to act due to public pressure and RedState revelations about corruption within the department. At the time, I wrote that Ferrer would re-visit the subject as soon as the furor died down because she seems to desperately want to mask up LA’s entire population of 10 million people.

Unfortunately for Ferrer, LA county finally fell into the “medium” transmission category on August 11, meaning that by her own stated standards a mask mandate is unnecessary.

The doctors’ letter was written all the way back in February and was sent to the County Board of Supervisors, but the Daily News only recently was able to obtain a copy. Numerous professors have signed on.

The letter to the Board of Supervisors, part of a campaign to educate the board, was signed by Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, clinical professor of medicine, population and public health sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine; Neeraj Sood, professor of public policy at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy; James E. Enstrom, retired professor of epidemiology at UCLA; Dr. Noah Kojima, senior resident for internal medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine; Dr. Catherine A. Sarkisian of UCLA’s Geffen School; James E. Moore, II, professor at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering; Dr. Gabe Vorobiof, associate professor of medicine and cardiology at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine; and Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, professor at UCLA’s Anderson School.

The Orange County Register published an Op-Ed by four of these doctors on July 22nd, which stated that:

We now have better data as of mid-2022. Exhaustive tracking of in-school COVID spread was indistinguishable with and without student mask use in studies in Spain, a conclusion repeated in two separate COVID waves. Studies of student masking with control groups in Georgia, North Dakota, Finland and the UK have all found There is no clear benefit.. One randomized controlled trial showed no significant benefit to the mask wearer, and a second randomized trial found a slight benefit (and only in older adults) that was not reproduced with a different analysis of the same data. [Emphasis mine.]

On Sunday, I published a VIP article asking where we can get an apology from the CDC for reversing some COVID guidelines. Add this USC-UCLA letter to the many reasons we should be hearing “I’m sorry” for the myriad ineffective and onerous mandates imposed by our state and local health officials.

Many of those who believed masking was more theatre and virtue-signaling, now have evidence to support their beliefs. The data is in, and according to these doctors, masks don’t do much if anything to slow an airborne virus like COVID.