Stating what was obvious about mask and mask studies …

 Masks served the political need to “do something”, and they ended up being a way for us to wear our fear on our faces - implied shared suffering.  A symbol of our grief at the change COVID gave us. But there was never a reason to think they would help stop an virus that spread via aerosol.  

As others have observed, the real injury will be when the CDC that has proven to be a political toy has to try to intervene if we see something even more nasty than COVID. 

It wasn’t only Dr. Fauci. Miller subjects the CDC and its claims about masking to strict scrutiny and finds them wanting. The amount of cherry-picked data and flawed methodologies embraced in CDC studies of masking is astounding. None of the 15 studies the CDC used to justify its claims that masks work are randomized controlled studies, considered the standard for such research. Worse, when randomized controlled studies that were conducted during the pandemic did not bolster the CDC’s masking message, they were downplayed or ignored.

https://freebeacon.com/coronavirus/hubris-exposed/

No Mandate, No Factor

They discuss conjectures about why lifting the mandate did not result in the catastrophe that the mask manic predicted. My speculation is that no one changed their behavior, which is to say, the mandate didn’t result in the mass masking everyone pretended would happen based on government edict.  The 2nd reason is that, excepting N95/KN95 masks, the aerosol spread of COVID isn’t hindered by masks. 

See/listen here for more on that: https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

From the Atlantic:
“In early march, Texas became the first state to abolish its mask mandate and lift capacity constraints for all businesses. Conservatives hailed Governor Greg Abbott’s decision, while liberals predicted doom and death and President Joe Biden disparaged it as “Neanderthal thinking.”

“Nine weeks later, the result seems to be less than catastrophic. In fact, in anew paper, economists at Bentley University and San Diego State University found that Abbott’s order had practically no effect on COVID-19 cases. “The predictions of reopening advocates and opponents failed to materialize,” the authors concluded.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/texas-mask-mandate-no-effect/618942/?utm_source=msn

Free the Kids - of Nutty Mask Mandates

“There’s an extraordinary difference—even greater than widely recognized—between Covid-19’s effects on kids and its effects on adults, as fatality numbers show. Far from regarding this important fact as a godsend for the upcoming generation, however, many policymakers have treated it as an irrelevancy. At the same time, they have ignored that children living in mask-mandate states have had essentially identical Covid fatality rates as kids living in mask-free states.“ 

https://www.city-journal.org/school-mask-mandates-are-unnecessary