Wearing a face mask to ‘combat’ Covid is all about politics, not science, and this free Englishman says No!

With the finger-wagging brigade on the march again...

You mask if you want to. This free Englishman is not for masking. The evidencelight campaign to get us all to go about with soggy pieces of cloth on our faces is back.

In Tuesday’s Daily Mail, Dr Saleyha Ahsan issued a trumpet-blast in favour of masking, and blamed her own recent chest infection on coughing passengers on a plane she flew on, who ‘had chosen to not wear masks and instead spread their viral droplets over the rest of us’. She had forgotten to bring a mask of her own.

She complained: ‘The plane was packed with chesty coughers and, not surprisingly, a few days later, I was unwell with what turned out to be a fourweek viral illness.’

May I just point out here that this does not really add up to evidence that the two things are connected, as Dr Ahsan, a trained scientist, really ought to know. But once the masking frenzy sets in (parts of Spain are already beginning to impose mask mandates), facts and logic fly far away.

Propaganda

In the absence of a mass Covid outbreak, the reasoning is even weaker than it was then. But already I am beginning to see those sad, haunted faces again, fear-filled eyes staring out from above muzzled mouths, which were such a dismal aspect of the Great Panic.

My heart goes out to these poor people, and it is for them that I mainly write this. For me, the wearing of such a mask was always a political act. The person who engaged in this unnatural and self-cancelling activity was making a statement about himself or herself.

That statement was: ‘I believe propaganda without question. I do what I am told even if the reasons for it are sketchy and weak. I support mass coercion of others.’

To do so was and is much like wearing one of those red Donald Trump ‘Maga’ baseball caps, which transform the people who don them into regimented, obedient foot soldiers in someone else’s army. They cease to be individuals and become units.

I will come to ‘The Science’ in a moment. oddly, it is less important than ‘The Politics’. But here are some mask memories that will stay with me. They are mostly to do with trains, where I came into closest contact with the rules.

My favourite was the time when I was required to wear a mask on a Swansea-bound express, between the Severn Tunnel and Newport, because of the more ferocious Covid regime then in force on trains in the principality.

But I was only on that train so that I could give blood (something I have been doing since 1970) without wearing a mask. For at that time in England the blood service suddenly demanded that anyone who wished to give a pint of blood must cover his face while doing so.

Yet in Wales, the local blood bank sensibly advised against wearing masks, because they hid the signs that the donor might be about to faint.

I also remember a French high- speed train, on which Mrs Hitchens and I ate a long, time-consuming, four-course picnic lunch, wine included, partly for the joy of it and partly because we were exempt from French mask rules as long as we were eating.

Even so, an infuriated ticket inspector chose to lecture us explosively about our irresponsibility — whereupon I donned a large black Polish Army surplus gas mask, which in those days I carried about for satirical purposes.

‘Take it off!’ he cried. ‘ You are trying to frighten people!’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘it is you who are trying to frighten people.’ Then I removed the monstrous contraption from my head, and poured another glass of wellchilled Alsatian Riesling. He went off muttering fierce warnings, but never came back.

one of the effects of mask edicts was to stamp out the sense of humour and the sense of proportion across the advanced world.

once, to mock the surprisingly large number of people then going about, in strong winds, wearing masks in the open air, I bicycled slowly through Hyde Park in London, wearing the self-same Polish gas mask.

I looked as ludicrous as if I had been taking a lobster for a walk on a lead. But nobody in the whole park gave me a second glance, let alone laughed. The entire country, I concluded, had come to see the mad as normal.

The apex of this was the near-total suppression of news of a study in Denmark which, let us put this kindly, cast doubt on the effectiveness of face masks in preventing the spread of Covid-19.

The data had been gathered in spring 2020, in a large randomised controlled trial (by far the most reliable test of such things), and had involved nearly 5,000 people. It had actually been carried out by pro-mask scientists.

Risk

First, its long-expected publication was delayed after major scientific journals declined to publish it. Who knows what changes were made before it was eventually published elsewhere in November 2020?

And then — even though the whole subject was of huge interest and relevance — almost no major media even mentioned it.

This was the culmination of an astonishing triumph of politics over science which much of the world still knows nothing about.

Let me summarise it.

As the great Covid fear was getting into its stride, on March 31, 2020, the executive director of the World Health organisation (WHo) health emergencies programme, Dr Mike Ryan, said at a briefing in Geneva: ‘There is no specific evidence to suggest the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.

‘In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly.’ Pretty clear, eh?

Soon afterwards, in a series of official pamphlets for reopening shops and services, our own Department for Business and Enterprise said: ‘The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.’

Dr Jenny Harries, then a deputy chief medical officer, warned on March 12, 2020, that people could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting Covid by wearing masks.

Mania

She said they could ‘trap the virus’, and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.

on April 3, 2020, the other deputy chief medical officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, said he did not believe healthy people wearing them would reduce the spread of the disease in the uK.

Then it all began to change. Why?

Here is one of the best clues you will get. on July 12, 2020, Deborah Cohen, the then health correspondent of BBC2’s Newsnight, reported that the WHo had reversed its advice on masks, from ‘don’t wear them’ to ‘do wear them’.

The change was down to political pressure, not new scientific discoveries. Ms Cohen said on Twitter: ‘We had been told by various sources [that the] WHo committee reviewing the evidence had not backed masks, but they recommended them due to political lobbying.’

There is ‘ The Science’ for you.

And all that really remains is obedient conformism, panic and fear, things we used to pride ourselves on treating with scorn.

Remember the great fashion for those 1940 posters saying ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’?

If we are still the people who kept calm and carried on in 1940, we can fight off the muzzle mania.

If not, I’ll be getting out my gas mask again.