Unmasking The Lie

The head of the UK Health Security Agency has admitted that there is no proof that face masks work.

Hallelujah! Finally something valuable has emerged from the Covid Inquiry, which is otherwise asking the wrong questions.

This week, Professor Dame Jenny Harries who heads up the UK Health Security Agency admitted there was no good evidence that face coverings work to prevent Covid transmission.

You don’t say … Actually, that is exactly what they did say in the early days. In March 2020, when she was the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Harries said that masks were ‘not a good idea’ for the average member of public, could ‘trap the virus’, were likely to be re-used and increase the risk of infection.

Around the same time, Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, said, ‘In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.’  And Dr Anthony Fauci was clear that ‘People should not be walking around with masks.’ He went on to say that a mask might make people feel better and it might even prevent ‘a droplet’, but doesn’t give the protection people think and can even increase transmission.

These were not a few lone wolves, this was also the advice of the World Health Organisation in its guide ‘Mask use in the context of Covid-19’ published on 1 December 2020, which said, ‘At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.’ The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) concurred that ‘evidence regarding the effectiveness of non-medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 is scarce’.

But although there was no new hard evidence, policies changed country by country. In England, Scotland and Wales, masks were legally mandated on public transport and in shops at different points throughout the summer of 2020.

Embarrassingly, the UK government even produced guidance about how to make a bacteria-laden useless rag cloth face covering.

Why did the UK government perform a U-turn on masks without any new evidence? There are two reasons.