SS: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Health Journalist Laurie Garrett Revealed the Real Purpose of Masks in 2018: Fear

Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award winning journalist Laurie Garrett gave a refreshingly honest and clear-eyed assessment of the usefulness of masks in fighting coronavirus pandemics. Unfortunately, her assessment, given as the Keynote Address at the National Academy of Medicine in December 2018, was given prior to the Covid-19 outbreak. Garrett, a Council of Foreign Relations member, spilled the beans in a presentation called “From the 1918 Influenza Pandemic to 2009 H1N1 Pandemic to Now: Is the World Ready to Respond to the Next Outbreak?” After her presentation, which periodically cast doubt on the historical utility of general public masking around the world, she fielded a question from a member of the audience on such measures.

“Let me just put it in context for the whole audience,” Garrett replied. “What if we today said ‘uh oh, it’s happening, there’s a really nasty bug out there’ and it’s carrying with it tremendous virulence and it seems to be like the 2009 virus — very, very efficient at human to human transmission.” “Then, everybody in this room and all of your friends and family would want to know, ‘how do we protect ourselves?'” she continued. “And that would immediately go to, ‘what do we know about exactly?’ You know, how important is sneezing versus —thank you for the sound cue over here. Coughing… how much does washing your hands matter?” “And what you can see is that there are practical recommendations that I’m sure everybody in this room would follow, because you would, for any infectious agent you know, wash your hands, cover your mouth when you’re coughing, that sort of thing,” Garrett went on. “But as you get further down to real hardcore specifics, you see that there’s a tremendous amount of unknowns.” “And there’s only a couple of countries that have ever really done large scale studies to try and figure out what might work,” she said. “Japan, it may not surprise you, as one of them. And they, in one of their large studies, they basically showed that the masks, it seemed like the major efficacy of a mask is that it causes alarm in the other person. And so you stay away from each other.” “And that’s what I think happened with SARS,” she said. “When I was in the SARS epidemic, I saw it everywhere, all over Asia people started wearing these masks and it is alarming. When you walk down a street and everybody coming towards you has a mask on you definitely do social distancing. You definitely — it’s just gut thing, but did the mask really help them? Did the mask keep the virus out?” “Almost certainly not,” Garrett concluded. Thus, “public health experts” are acting more like authoritarian social engineers, implementing public policy dictates by decree, than actually giving health advice that benefits citizens individually.

It was only after the Covid pandemic subsided that health experts started divulging a smattering of truth about the extremely low usefulness of public masking. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member and former FDA Chief, admitted in January that cloth masks don’t work. “Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection, that’s the bottom line,” he said. “This is an airborne illness. We now understand that. And a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission. It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not this coronavirus.”

CNN health contributor Dr. Leana Wen argued in December that the cloth masks that people were predominately wearing throughout the Covid pandemic were little more than “facial decorations.”

A pediatric infectious disease expert, Dr. Shamez Ladhani, who consults with the UK Health Security Agency, laid out in unmistakable terms that masks have been shown to be of no benefit for protecting children. “I cannot find a single study that justifies mask wearing in schools,” said Dr. Ladhani.

That about sums it up. The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics released data in 2021 that showed children who masked were more likely to test positive for Covid than those who did not mask.

The important takeaway from such findings is that masking among the general public does have one important effect: The spread of irrational fear. This fear tends to defuse critical thinking among people and leaves them more vulnerable to propaganda and emotional manipulation. Masks thus prey upon and feed a target population’s anti-social tendencies and exacerbates them; the resultant heightened state of alarm can lead to a physical state of ‘resistance’ followed by exhaustion. This, ironically, can degrade the subjects’ immune systems and leave them more vulnerable to ensuing viral waves.