“The devil—a real physical force rather than an abstract metaphor for evil—starred as a tyrant who ruled over the Americas…and European conquistadors played the part of soldiers fighting a war against him to reconquer the continent for God.”
-Kristie Flannery, “Can the Devil Cross the Deep Blue Sea?”
Recently a very vocal man in one of the facilities in which I work sent an email to everyone: To all those doubters of masks, just look at Hopkins, they have reinstated a mandate thus proving the mask efficacy, and thus masks do work and any who doubt that are nonscientific and dangerous. Although an educated man, he has fallen deep into the COVID cult. He may as well have been saying: Beware all ye sinners, the Great God of Medicine has thus spoken, and to all ye heretics and doubters beware, for the Devil is among us and the sinners and doubters doth threaten all of us with their blasphemy!
I recently completed a rather lengthy podcast (click podcast to hear it) about the rituals of COVID and how they have persevered despite not an inkling of science to support them. COVID science is not evidence based; in fact, evidence and open eyes dispute every part of it. The Cochrane study of masks—in which the only 78 randomized trials clearly demonstrate no benefit of masking—only reinforces 100 years of study and observation of how masks don’t help with flu (a bug larger than COVID and thus more likely to be impacted by a mask, although both bugs go through masks as easily as mosquitoes go through iron fences, a fact that does not deter the faithful from their unfettered belief in such things) and also reinforced by the reality of the past 4 years. Despite the gospel uttered by hospital doctors who are tinged by mediocre brains more compliant to protocol than adept at critical thinking (and often tied to drug company leashes), masks have not slowed dissemination of COVID, protected the wearer, or reduced death. Non-mask states and nations do as well or better than the ones who insist on mask mandates when demographics and other salient measures are factored in; I’ve published about this, as have others, and these facts are indisputable, even if the TV doctors say otherwise. These “experts” of course don’t need facts to buttress their arguments, because, well, they’re from Hopkins.
The pictures above are from a long-term care facility; both signs sit at the entrance juxtaposed. The place boasts a nearly 100% vaccination rate and has had a well-enforced mask mandate for 3 months, and yet they have had a two-month COVID outbreak that won’t go away. Not that COVID is very dangerous these days, but it is reason enough for them to raise the alarms and to mask everyone. The very fact that the public health department doesn’t see the religiosity in this flagrant contradiction—masks plus vaccines don’t slow down COVID one bit, a pattern apparent across all my facilities and across the world—is not surprising given the ugly history of public health in this nation, but the fact that doctors are so blind and sheep-like, and that institutions like Hopkins stoke myths and fear rather than understanding the importance of not conflating science with religious rituals, is frightening and needs to be assailed. How can thinking people, even those who have not read the definitive studies disproving the efficacy of masking, not see the macabre humor of these signs showing high vaccination rates, mask mandates, and an active COVID outbreak all occurring together? It’s mindboggling!
I am an atheist about masks. Many smart doctors, despite our 4 years of experience and the conclusions of every single worthy mask study, understand that masks likely don’t work, that there is no evidence at all that they work, but that maybe with a good study (one this nation refuses to conduct lest it dispute the established gospel) they could work. That’s agnosticism, and it’s dangerous because it prevents us as thinking doctors from vehemently assailing the clear desecration of medical science perpetrated by TV doctors and institutions like Hopkins. Richard Dawkins, a noted atheist, explains the difference between atheists and agnostics through the allegory of people who believe that there could be a man riding a bicycle around the orbit of earth. Agnostics says: Well, we’ve never seen such a man, and it’s unlikely a man can do that, but we can’t rule it out completely. Atheists say: There is no man riding a bicycle around the orbit of earth, period! When it comes to masking, it’s time to discard agnosticism and admit that a century of research and experience has established beyond any doubt that masking doesn’t work and that it is both psychologically and physically dangerous, something also well documented. By promoting a mask mandate, Hopkins is discarding science in favor of ritual and myth and causing harm and deception along the way, clearly a violation of the Hippocratic Oath that its doctors have taken, and clearly a threat to the very integrity of medical science in this nation and to the health of its citizens.
But should we be surprised? The quote above is from an article I am reading for my history class about the plausibility of Satan in the late 1700’s. Science at that time clearly demonstrated that Satan was a physical presence across the world, having set up shop in America but able to fly across the seas. Any scientist who disputed this belief would have been considered a misinfomerer, especially since the great academic institutions of the day let everyone know that Satan’s presence was a proven fact. When we look at Hopkins, and so many other medical institutions in this nation, we see the same pattern: dogma buries reality, blind faith in “experts” trumps facts and read science. We are expected to believe in masks because the Hopkins doctors say it is so.
Hopkins has a sorted past and a more sullied present. Its medical library is named after its founder William Welch, a man who believed that medicine is a discrete science of measurements that is not contingent of understanding nuance or the complexity of human beings. He was a documented racist and Eugenicist, promoting racial science and belonging to (and serving as an officer in) many national racist and Eugenic groups. He helped orchestrate the Flexner Report in 1911, mandating a dogmatic top-down approach to medical education and practice overseen by the AMA and funded by corporate money. He in fact helped direct Corporate money into institutions that played by the rules, those that engaged in research beneficial to the corporations. The Flexner Report that he endorsed and helped orchestrate not only tied industry to health care to create a poisonous alliance that is with us even more today, but it also relegated African American and women to menial roles in health care; all but two Black medical schools were closed, and the role of the remaining schools was to train black hygiene workers to keep black diseases away from the white population I have written extensively about this, I’ve dug into his archives, and the very fact that Welch is a hero at Hopkins, that the library is named after him and that his statues are everywhere, tells us a little about this institution and its values.
Hopkins helped with eugenic forced sterilization. Its doctors endorsed and helped with the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. Even today it is fed by drug-company money, as the studies its doctors conduct are almost all controlled by and financed by the pharmaceutical industry. Most of its doctors are paid by money tied to drug company funding, and its very credo is to carry out the pharmaceutical agenda. Science, discourse, nuance; they have never existed at Hopkins, and they certainly don’t now. The institution and its doctors support wildly erroneous medical myths and have been on the forefront of promoting those myths if they lead to more financial bloating. That Hopkins tells us that masks work is like having the Church let us know about how to save our souls; they are religious institutions completely devoid of any scientific core.
Let’s not forget that until COVID no one and no institution advocated masking because we knew it was not a barrier to the spread of viral respiratory pathogens; there were not masks in Hopkins ever before, other than in the operating room when the doctor’s spit could easily contaminate an open wound. Yes, masks do block spit, but we have known forever that masks don’t block respiratory viral infections, and every study during COVID has reinforced that fact over and over again, as has the breadth of our experience these past four years.
Soon enough Hopkins may double down on one-way aisles—remember those in the stores—and 6-foot separation and twenty-second hand washing, all mythical constructs without an ounce of scientific thought ingrained in them but which this vile institution declared to be scientifically valid and medically necessary. Even the infamous personal protection equipment (PPE) touted early in COVID as the reason so many people in hospital died, anyone with a brain knows that wearing a gown and hat and booties won’t slow the spread of a respiratory virus. It’s a religious ritual, not science. It’s an affront to science. And it’s dangerous.
Moderna and Pfizer are having a hard time selling their vaccines, or even their anti-virals like Paxlovid, because most Americans aren’t quite as dumb and drug-tinged as our nation’s doctors. They have open eyes and see that more people are getting sick since we started vaccinating, that masks have accomplished nothing, that Paxlovid is an experimental pill they prefer to avoid (as we have written, the studies endorsing Paxlovid are deceptive, and a new study shows that this drug increases the risk of long-COVID) but which doctors prescribe to the tune of many billions of dollars a year. How to convince Americans to buy all this crap and feed institutions like Hopkins and their drug company handlers? Well, religions succeed best when they stoke fear and then offer salvation in a simplistic and palpable way, and masking serves both these purposes.
The Hopkins mask mandate is not an endorsement of masks as a scientifically validated method of slowing the spread of what is now a mild respiratory virus. No, just the opposite. It is validation of how low our medical institutions and doctors will stoop to spread their gospel across the land and assure that no heretics deviate from their absolutist path to salvation, which involves getting the experimental vaccine, taking the experimental pills, and continuing to follow the rituals of our medical theocracy.
Many of my friends and family members tell me that COVID deception is a blip, not too bad, it’s over, don’t worry. They fear for my mental health for continuing a battle against doctors and medical institutions who deceive people into doing things against their own self interest and speak in the tongue of religious orthodoxy rather than medical science. But I can’t stop. COVID mythology led to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths, to tens of millions of people suffering and falling into depression, to the most vicious attack on science in my lifetime by conflating real science with religious declarations made by “experts” both ignorant and tinged by ties to industry. What Hopkins and our nation’s doctors have instigated is a concerted well-financed attack on everything good and decent in the medical world, an attack fueled by self-serving politicians and media outlets, and one that has led this nation down a path of death, depression, and religious absolutism. How can I possibly stop fighting against that? It’s not in my soul to do so, even if others believe that this is just a blip, and that the liturgy by doctors and institutions like Hopkins is more believable than the rantings of a front-line thinking doctor like me. I’ve been through the depths of COVID, I’ve been there from day one, I almost lost my medical license for speaking out, I’ve written 3 non-fiction books about the data, and so many others have too, but we are told to stay silent because the gospel of Hopkins seems to have won the day.
To put our heads in the sand, to support politicians who did this to us, to accept the mythology of the greatest assault on science and freedom in a hundred years, is to condemn our nation and its medical scientific integrity to never-ending religious orthodoxy. Satan lives in the minds of the priests of Hopkins, and that deception must be stopped. Haven’t we spent enough money and let enough people die and suffer from this lethal orthodoxy? How can we sit back and let it happen?