Maybe masking with N95s helps a bit, but that’s far beside the point…

Despite surgeons routinely pointing out that they don’t wear masks to stop the spread of viruses, masks were not simply encouraged, but often mandated by laws and institutions during the pandemic. Amazingly, all this happened during a time when health authorities weren’t certain (so far as we know) how aerosolized the SARS-CoV-2 virus is—and didn’t seem particularly interested in finding out.

Meanwhile, 99.9% or so of transmission took place indoors, but there was little effort to encourage the kids (and everyone) to spend their time doing healthy things outdoors. To fight indoor spread, UV light could quite easily (and obviously) be employed. However, UV light falls into a treatment category known as “disinfectants”, which were bizarrely chucked into the pyre of association with Donald Trump. Still, affluent people I know whose actions are decoupled from Reality TV Politics did in fact install UV light decontamination into their household air filtration systems.

Meanwhile, despite the prior lack of research indicating efficacy of mask usage against viruses, and substantial indications of its specific harm to children, research was quickly churned out suggesting that masks and their mandates…work?

• Lyu and Wehby’s widely read (and rarely understood) paper did not achieve the conditions of an intention to treat study, but bizarrely measured the second derivative of the infection curves among geographies to suggest that mask mandates work. Somehow, nobody in medical science seemed to notice that such a measurement made absolutely no sense at all.
• By the time Van Dyke et al’s paper on Kansas county-level mask mandates was published, the data trend had in fact reversed itself. Yet publishers went ahead and pushed it, including on the CDC’s own website. Who reads retraction notices, anyhow?
• The WHO published an 80-citation paper called Mask use in the Context of COVID-19 which is noteworthy in that it did not cite a single study specific to mask use in the context of COVID-19. No, I’m not kidding—I spent basically a whole day last year reading nearly every word of documentation.
• Whoops, the RCT fundamentalists forgot that observing a group, however large, without a control doesn’t give efficacy indications even if the observers are from Duke University and the publisher is the New York Times.In a bizarre test of just how much bullshit the public is willing to eat while smiling, Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested wearing multiple masks. Induction-to-infinity masks aside, not one public health expert (who was given air time) pointed out that were this true, those two masks could then simply be fused into one, meaning that the critique would be logically about mask design and not numeracy.

• After pretending to care about the disadvantaged for as long as necessary, publishers such as Forbes now simply erase all history of complaints.

There are 717 more bullet-points in this presentation, the remainder of which can be viewed at the IHO’s Museum of Absurdities located, according to a consensus of experts, near Frostilius in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way.