They’re trying to shut one of our heroes up

Written by Tom Woods on September 18, 2021. Posted in Current News

First, a little good news. The policy of demanding masks and vaccination proof from audiences doesn’t exactly seem to be a winner.

Here’s a diagram of the available seats for last night’s performance of Hamilton in Los Angeles, as of three days earlier (blue are unsold):

The Hollywood Bowl, by contrast, which does not require proof of vaccination, has not been having difficulty filling its seats.

Now, for our main subject for today:

Oxford’s Carl Heneghan and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff are reporting that Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford who’s been a voice of reason in a sea of monomaniacal COVID hysteria, has been the subject of an anonymous attack for his well-founded position against masking, and masking children in particular.

Posters featuring Bhattacharya’s portrait have appeared around campus that link him to COVID deaths in Florida, even though Florida (contrary to the impression you’d get from the media) has one of the best rates of age-adjusted COVID mortality in the United States.

Further, Melissa Bondy, who chairs the university’s epidemiology department (you know, the profession one third of whose members polled were afraid of opening their mail, out of fear of catching the virus from an envelope, as late as the summer of 2020), has circulated a petition criticizing certain faculty members for allegedly offering “recommendations [that] are disturbing and contrary to public health standards; they foster uncertainty and anxiety and put lives at risk.”

The petition names no names but quotes Bhattacharya, who correctly observed that “there is no high-quality evidence to support the assertion that masks stop the disease from spreading.”

“It is hard to understand,” write Heneghan and Kulldorff, “how any scientist can claim there is high-quality evidence that masks on children are an effective public health measure.” Again, hard to dispute this, since the evidence needed to do so does not exist.

This assertion should be uncontroversial even without reference to the relevant studies. The charts from all over the world show widespread masking to correlate with precisely nothing in the COVID numbers, and appear at entirely random points along the various countries’ curves.

Countries with mask compliance rates of 95 percent and above have continued to see outbreaks that should not be occurring if masks had the effectiveness claimed for them. Masks have surely been the most outstanding and embarrassing public-health failures in living memory.

When it comes to masking children in order to “stop the spread” in schools, the fact remains that no randomized studies exist. What we know is that in Sweden, which kept schools in session and didn’t mask children at all, teachers fared no worse than people in any other profession, and not one of that country’s 1.8 million school-age children died.

The New York Times excitedly reported on a study out of North Carolina showing low COVID rates in that state’s schools, but since it had no unmasked schools to compare them to, the study was worthless.

The recently touted Bangladesh study is alleged to show the effectiveness of masks, but most people reporting on it neglected the confidence intervals involved, which in fact lead us to the conclusion that masks have either no effect or a very limited one.

To act as if this question isn’t even debatable, when all of the existing evidence is on Bhattacharya’s side (spare me the mannequin studies, or studies that begin with the assumption that masks work), is inexcusable for anyone, but especially a scientist.

And to try to create a chilling effect on campus for dissident voices, well, that’s typical of the totalitarian instincts we’ve seen throughout this mess. One dissident voice, to these control freaks, is just one too many.

Unlike the thought controllers at Stanford, I believe in open discussion. I also believe that never in our lifetimes have we needed it more than we do at the present moment.

Header image: WBUR

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