Below I have attached fact sheets on the efficacy of masks and the problems with the new miracle drug Paxlovid. If you want to skip the commentary, here are the fact sheets. But, of course, I also have a few things to say about all of this!
As we are past two years into this pandemic, and it seems not to be going away (at least in the eyes of the media, our medical community, and those who follow the script sheepishly and believe everything they read and hear), it's time to reflect on what the heck is going on.
Before COVID particles sailed across the sea and landed on our shores, most of us who gather information not from CNN but from from reality and facts, we knew that masks were not going to work. This included, at the time, Dr. Fauci, who famously said so in March 2020. That's because COVID particles are far smaller than the holes in masks and thus pass through masks like mosquitoes passing through a picket fence, and also because mask studies from past viral outbreaks, such as flu, showed that masks neither protect the wearer nor slow transmission.
That somehow COVID would be different, that for a reason only known to people who cling to myth and faith, COVID would be stopped by masks, that universal masking and mask mandates were necessary now and forever, that became the mantra of our COVID scientists, of the medical community, of CNN and MSNBC, of Oprah, of Dr. Fauci (who wanted eye protection and double masking). As deaths escalated right through those masks, we were told we were wearing them wrong, we needed better masks, the un-maskers were the problem, or that it would be much worse without masks. None of that makes sense to those of us who still have an intact brain in our skulls and who have looked at the data and have lived through the ramifications of a mask-based policy.
Even today, in my town of Columbia MD, often voted the healthiest city in America (hence our low COVID death rate), smart people, liberal people, are wearing masks everywhere, in the parking lot, in their cars; going to COSTCO is like a masked ball. Walking the streets it's like I am in a dystopian reality. When I go to work in long term care, we all must still wear masks, even though despite a well-enforced mask mandate since March 2020, almost all our patients caught COVID, caught it right through those masks, and so we are told: keep wearing masks. The utter absurdity of masking, the Orwellian drama of watching people cling to the mask myth and shame those who don't, doesn't seem to be going away. So, here's a compellation of mask facts. This is not "misinformation" and it's not derived from right-wing conspiracy theorists. It's all out there, on the CDC website, on scientific websites. It's the only truth we can derive, and it's clear as day: MASKS DON'T WORK!
As an aside, when the virus hit us and i told everyone that masks would not slow the spread of COVID or protect the wearer, I was called a right-wing Trumpist (I'm a left wing liberal who voted against Trump twice), a conspiracy theorist, and just dead wrong. And then they said, "If masks don't work, then what do you propose we do?"
"Well," I said. "We can all run three times around a tree and lick the bark, or we can wear garlic around our necks; those things work as well as masks. In fact, garlic works better because it keeps people away from us, which is the only way to really stop the virus. But, I have a better answer than that, one that actually will work."
They shook their heads and walked away. Mask zealots don't want to hear anything that contradicts the gospel preached by Morning Joe and Rachel Maddow and Jake Tapper and Anthony Fauci. Even a front-line doctor like me who has watched mask failure first hand and has read every mask study written, I don't count for much against the Priests of Science.
But there were two measures we could take to slow the spread and save lives. First, focusing on the vulnerable and leaving everyone else alone, we should have been doing rapid daily tests on everyone who walks into a long term care facility every day. That's the only way to stop the virus from coming in. Second, we should have instituted early treatment, something I did to the extent I was allowed (I used prednisone, blood thinners, and Zithromax) since public health officials and the great Anthony Fauci frowned on such nonsense. Still, I did it, and the death rate of my patients during the early phases of the virus (when nationally 35% of older frail nursing home patients died who had COVID) was about 10%. Had I added Ivermectin to the mix, studies showed that only 2% of my patients would have died, but I also would have lost my license, since effective treatment was forbidden lest people live and then, my God, there might not be emergency authorization for the vaccine and the anti-viral treatments that were making a lot of money for a lot of people and touted as the only way to save lives.
Yes, we let hundreds of thousands of people die unnecessarily because we clung to masks as the only way to stop the spread, and we rejected both early treatment and a rapid testing program like I descried. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, blood on the hands of those who chose myth over science, gospel over human life.
And then our medical gods went even further. Rather than endorsing the cheap, easily administered, and safe early treatment that I and others used, they insisted we use anti-viral treatment, an expensive therapy given only in hospitals that early studies showed were miraculous. Well, they weren't, and as with most early emergency-authorization studies conducted by the drug companies that peddle these snake-oils, reality painted a different picture, and tens of thousands of people died unnecessarily from both the drugs and from the failure to utilize proven common-sense treatments at home.
Now we have Paxlovid, the newest greatest anti-virial, pushed by the geniuses at the Washington Post, the Biden COVID task force, Dr. Fauci whose track records of leading us to the highest COVID death rate in the world seems not to have dented his image, and of course the "good guys" at Pfizer who make the drug. They have all told us that you have to take this drug right away, you just have to or you'll die, it's a miracle, it's wonderful, it's as good as masking even. Only on the last point do I agree with them.
And so, as the very mild Omicron strain swept through and infected my masked and vaccinated patients, they all panicked, and they demanded Paxolvid. I had dozens of calls and emails insisting i supply them with the drug. I told them that they weren't sick and weren't likely to be sick, and if they did get sick I would give them something with a better track record than Paxlovid, something old and tested, not something new and only endorsed by Pfizer's manipulative emergency-authorization protocols. Again, few believed me, several patients actually left my practice, furious that I veered from the gospel. And so, I derived a fact sheet about Paxlovid too, and here it is:
When our medical system is controlled by those who trick people, who put myth over reality, who refuse to abandon their discredited "cures" that don't work and have led us into the pit of death and despair, when they insist that we keep going down the same road despite the fact it is leading us to a cliff, then all of us suffer. People suffer and die, science suffers, our medical system suffers. Facts are facts, and until we accept that masks don't work, that COVID is treatable with very simple medicines and strategies and not novel anti-viral treatments, and the world need not focus on this one thing and continue to exist in a never-ending horror show, then the damage will only accentuate. Here are the facts. That's all I can give you. Either stick with your appealing dogma and allow COVID and CNN to destroy society and all those who live in it, or be scientific, humanistic, and factual and let's move on.