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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: What have we gotten from two years of mask-wearing?


Commentary by Daniel Horowitz | May 31, 2022

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/horowitz-what-have-we-gotten-from-two-years-of-mask-wearing-2657419946.html/

It’s truly hard to overstate the damage done to a generation of children by the two-year masking regime. From language and developmental inhibition to social and behavioral anxiety, these Chinese cloths have created a generation of bumbling fools. So, was it worth it?

In a preprint published in the Lancet, Ambarish Chandra of the University of Toronto and Tracy Beth Høeg of the University of California at Davis replicated a CDC study comparing counties with school mandates to those without mandates. However, rather than using the CDC’s artificial and arbitrary number of counties and duration of study, they extended the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. Using this updated method to measure the relationship between mask mandates and per-capita pediatric cases, they found “no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates.”

The study observed over 1,800 counties from July through October 2021, which is presumed to be the largest observational sample ever conducted on the mask issue.

In fact, for most weeks, there was a non-statistically significant higher case rate among the masked counties. What this demonstrates is that with all of the CDC’s observational studies, arbitrary endpoints were clearly manipulated to show results they knew did not reflect reality.

Similarly, a study of fatality rates in 35 European countries during the 2020-2021 winter peak found no positive relationship between reduced mortality rates and mask compliance. If anything, there was a reverse correlation. “While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission,” concluded the author in an April study published in Cureus. “Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”

Several months ago, an observational study published in Medicineby German doctor Zacharias Fögen compared the overall case fatality rate in 81 counties in Kansas without mask mandates compared to the 24 with mandates. He actually found a statistically significant higher fatality rate in the mask counties. “Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates.”

Dr. Fogen posits as a potential reason for negative efficacy that the mask-wearing can make the virions smaller and cause them to penetrate deeper into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis. “A rationale for the increased RR (risk ratio) by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets, hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration.”

While negative efficacy is still a hypothesis, there have been documented negative side effects to mask-wearing. A preprint Italian study from earlier in May found that short-term surgical mask usage was associated with an increased inhaled CO2 level greater than 5000ppm in 90% of 10- to 18-year-olds in the sample. “Shortly after wearing surgical masks, the inhaled air CO2 approached the highest acceptable exposure threshold recommended for workers, while concerningly high concentrations were recorded in virtually all individuals when wearing FFP2 masks,” concluded the authors. “The CO2 concentration was significantly higher among minors and the subjects with high respiratory rate.”

Yet here we are, over two years into this saga, and schools are still masking children, while some that stopped are bringing back this barbaric practice. To this day, people with severe mental and physical disabilities are being forced to wear masks when seeking medical attention at health care facilities. Trauma survivors who suffer panic attacks from having their faces covered are forced to choose between panic attacks and loss of medical care.

But children will, by far, be the most harmed by this policy. The language development impediment that will result from the past two years of inhumane mask mandates is incalculable. The head of the U.K.’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills found that children suffer from “limited vocabulary,” while some babies “struggled to respond to basic facial expressions,” partly due to interacting with people wearing face masks.

Talk about a cost-benefit analysis!

To this day, only a few states have banned mask mandates from coming back. The New Hampshire governor recently vetoed a bill from the state legislature banning local school boards from implementing such immoral policies upon children. What we really need is a ballot initiative in every state to spell out in the state’s constitution that a person has a fundamental right to refuse to wear a medical device and cannot be discriminated against in the realm of public accommodations for exercising that right. Moreover, there should be criminal penalties for any adult who forcibly masks a child.
If we plan to wait for “the science” to catch up to reality and morality, we will be waiting a long time. It might be obvious to us that masking is cruel and ineffective, but not to the megalomaniacs in power. That power needs to be stripped permanently.

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Mandatory Face Coverings’ Only Purpose Was Promoting Fear


REPORTED BY: HRAND TOOKMAN | APRIL 21, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/21/mandatory-face-coverings-only-purpose-was-promoting-fear/

woman in a face mask

A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. That’s fair, but it wasn’t their primary purpose.

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Now that a judge has stayed the federal mask mandate on public transportation, it’s important to have an honest accounting of what this entire mask situation was truly all about. A lot of people will make a lot of claims. A tiny sliver will continue to claim mask mandates actually helped mitigate the spread of Covid-19. They will be the outliers because, in terms of stopping the spread of Covid or any other virus, wearing a mask is the equivalent of doing a rain dance: it might make you feel better, and some quacks will tell you it works, but ultimately it does nothing except make you look foolish and give you a false sense of security. (Vaccine mandates were the modern equivalent of burning witches at the stake.)

It was all so stupid and foisted on us by people we’re supposed to trust, which is why we need this honest accounting of what it was really all about. A lot of people will claim the masks were about establishing and maintaining control. That’s fair, but it wasn’t their primary purpose. The primary purpose of the mask mandates was to make every person who wore one a walking advertisement for fear. If you were wearing a mask, then you were doing your job, because you had given up your right to free expression and replaced it with one, constant sentiment: “I’m afraid, and you should be too.”

That was the main purpose of the masks. That’s why they wanted everyone to keep wearing them. It was about control, yes, but far more than that, it was about promoting fear. That’s why they lied about the threat Covid poses. That’s why they inflated the number of deaths, counting so often all who died with as having died from. That’s why they convinced so many Americans that the threat of hospitalization or death is exponentially higher than it actually is. (For the record, the survival rate for Covid is 99.7 percent for unvaccinated adults, 99.9 percent for vaccinated adults, and 100 percent for unvaccinated children.)

All they did the entire time was work as hard as they could to promote as much fear as possible, and masks were an excellent weapon they could force on you to help spread their message of constant fear, division, and dehumanization. The mask stripped you of your right to free expression and replaced whatever you wanted to communicate with one single piece of speech: “Be afraid.”

That was the primary purpose. That’s why they were all so fired up about it. That’s why they were all so desperate for you and everybody else to wear them.

It’s important we have our heads around that because it will help us avoid letting them do it again in the future. It wasn’t just about control. It wasn’t just about dividing and dehumanizing us. It wasn’t just about turning us against each other and forcing us to deny science so we could devastate each other’s social, psychological, and emotional health.

All of those were welcome byproducts to the “public health experts” and other elites who to this day claim masking provides value. But the primary purpose was to promote fear, and to stifle your speech and expression so you perpetually signaled that fear to everyone else.

You were obedient, yes. But more than that, you were afraid. That was the message, whether you wanted to send it or not. It was the primary reason they made everyone wear them, and it’s important we never let them do that to us again.

Hrand Tookman is a Cleveland, Ohio native with a background in interpersonal communications. He writes with an objective of exposing media bias, and inspiring unity in defiance of so many forces today that thrive off of division.

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The Centers for Disease Control’s Lies Have Destroyed Its Legitimacy


REPORTED BY: Dr. GREGG SCHMEDES | FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/22/the-centers-for-disease-controls-lies-have-destroyed-its-legitimacy/

Centers for Disease Control headquarters

On August 6, 2021, the Centers for Disease Control released a report that the agency claimed showed “Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection.” This assertion came amidst a public battle with Sen. Rand Paul, as the CDC released this data from Kentucky, Paul’s home state.

Yet after indisputable scientific evidence continued to pile up in favor of natural immunity, the CDC finally capitulated on January 19, 2022, recognizing the superiority of natural immunity over vaccination alone: “Between May and November 2021, people who were unvaccinated and did not have a prior COVID-19 infection remained at the highest risk of infection and hospitalization, while those who were previously infected, both with, or without prior vaccination, had the greatest protection.”

The CDC’s reversal came after its previous discounting of natural immunity caused mass layoffs, nursing home resident isolation, and hospital staffing shortages. It must not be forgotten or overlooked, and the CDC must be held accountable.

Last summer, guided by the CDC, President Biden claimed, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die.” Biden also spread misinformation about vaccinations preventing the spread of Covid-19 by stating, “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” 

Who is harmed the most by health misinformation produced by our president and his agencies? Those with low health literacy. Our rich-poor gap is growing in this country and lying about health issues only exacerbates it.

A Positive Test Doesn’t Always Mean Infectiousness

A deeper dive into the August natural immunity study reveals methodology that can be recognized as illogical, even to those without medical experience. The CDC researchers created two groups. The case group included people who tested positive in 2020 and then tested positive again during a two-month window in 2021. The control group included people who had a positive test in 2020 without another positive test during this artificial two-month window.

The study observed that non-vaccinated group registered a positive test 34.4 percent of the time, compared to 20.3 percent of fully vaccinated individuals. The CDC falsely defined the case group’s second positive test as a “reinfection.” This is the central lie of the study. This data conveniently omitted data on people actually becoming symptomatic or what a common person would call “reinfected.”

To illustrate this point, consider if a Covid-recovered person comes into contact with Sars-Cov-2 in their community. They might test positive on a PCR test. Their body can remember the virus, fight it off, and the person never becomes ill. However, shortly after the exposure, a PCR swab can detect bits of genetic material (even if it’s unviable virus). Therefore, this study could be more of a reflection of people’s likelihood of re-exposure to Sars-Cov-2, not reinfection, as the CDC claimed.

By conflating exposure and reinfection, the CDC misled the public. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated, “This study shows you were twice as likely to get infected again if you are unvaccinated. Getting the vaccine is the best way to protect yourself and others around you, especially as the more contagious Delta variant spreads around the country.”

This guidance came when mounting evidence indicated Covid vaccines quickly lose their effectiveness against infection and transmission, which the CDC loathed to admit. Unfortunately, Walensky’s guidance undermined the credibility of the CDC for generations to come.

As a physician, it’s frightening that a public health official made a policy recommendation based on such a flawed study. We should encourage critical thinking and scientific skepticism, but such a blatantly flawed study design should not be tolerated in our leading health institutions.

Not an Isolated Incident for the CDC

This isn’t the only time the CDC has been caught misleading the public. Drawing ire from the medical community, the was an uncontrolled study of students in Arizona that Walensky referred to in discussing the CDC’s mask guidance for schools. This study defined a “covid outbreak” as “two or more” positive lab tests among students or staff. So, if your school had two asymptomatic third graders, you’ve got a “covid outbreak” on your hands. Even worse, the study weighted such an “outbreak” equally to a school with dozens of symptomatic teachers or students. According to the CDC, two equals 50—at least for “covid outbreaks.”

In a Georgia study that actually had a sufficient control arm, the CDC minimized the fact that there was no statistically significant difference between masked and unmasked student groups. They’ve also minimized the importance of diet and exercise during the pandemic. They failed to effectively communicate evidence-based, life-saving outpatient treatment protocols. The list goes on.

Why This Matters So Much

How does minimizing natural immunity cause harm in the real world? There are at least three deadly repercussions.

First, many hospitals following the CDC’s guidance mandated that only vaccinated health-care workers be allowed to work at their facilities. This means naturally immune health-care workers were wrongly excluded from the workforce. Based on a toxic lie fabricated by the CDC, hospitals continue to experience staffing shortages, contributing to the hospitalization overcapacity narrative they’ve used to demonize the unvaccinated.

Second, the same problem arose for nursing homes, where seniors were denied visitation rights from unvaccinated, naturally immune family and friends, even though less protected vaccinated people were allowed in. Lack of care workers also prevents patients from being discharged from hospitals to care facilities.

Third, the natural immunity lie also stripped countless Americans of their health coverage and livelihoods. During the delta wave, for example, a worker at Los Alamos National Laboratories was fired from his job for religiously objecting to vaccination, despite working entirely from home and having recovered from a previous Covid infection. The CDC now admits this worker’s immunity provides protection superior to that of his co-workers who had merely vaccine-induced immunity at that time. He lost his job while the less protected did not. By denying natural immunity’s superiority to vaccine-induced immunity, how many others have been fired and lost health-care access the moment we need our population to be at its healthiest?

Punishing People We Should Have Praised

Naturally immune people should have been identified early in the pandemic as the most protected, ushered into hospitals and nursing homes to serve our vulnerable, and certainly should have been allowed to keep their jobs. By refusing to acknowledge the harms of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination, the CDC has brought everlasting shame to itself. There is clear evidence these types of interventions carry measurable risk. A better approach would have been to honestly discuss the risks and benefits with the public, much like I discuss surgical risks and benefits with my patients. This is the very tenet of informed consent, and better communication always results in a better relationship.

Americans need an unbiased, incorruptible, and credible CDC that provides reliable and scientifically sound public health guidance. These lies have de-legitimized and undermined public confidence in the institution of the CDC itself.

The consequences of lying about Covid-19 will spill into other areas of health care. Millions of Americans have lost trust in our hospitals and institutions and are now resorting to “under the table” health care. In health care, loss of trust equals lack of access. The CDC must return to the basics of evidence-based medicine to overcome its crisis of legitimacy.

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Joy Pullmann Op-ed: If Parents Pulled Their Kids from School for Covid Insanity, It Would Already Be Over


COMMENTARY BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 26, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/26/if-parents-pulled-their-kids-from-school-for-covid-insanity-it-would-already-be-over/

Young man in a mask at high school graduation

For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.

We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.

What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.

These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.

If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?

More than being restrained by a lucky court order merely from putting toddlers in masks, a person whose judgment is so corrupt shouldn’t be making any decisions about children. A person who puts a toddler in a mask, or allows teachers to shame children based on their skin color, cannot be trusted to do just about anything else important and needs to find a new and more productive line of work. Errors this bad are completely disqualifying, and they will not be rectified by merely changing a few surface policies such as the quarantining of healthy kids.

The fact that parents keep their children in schools they charge are teaching racism or delaying crucial development with Covid irrationality gives the schools all they need to keep ignoring the parents. Parents are saying one thing while doing another. They are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for what they themselves acknowledge is oppression.

So it’s no surprise that school boards, principals, and other entities disregard what the parents say. What the parents say has no, or no immediate, enforcement. And therefore it really isn’t credible. No wonder the school districts don’t take them seriously.

If the parents wanted to be truly effective — as well as truly honest — they would pull their children from schools en masse until problems of such serious magnitude were resolved favorably. Sickouts and mass protests are highly effective forms of warfare on children waged by teachers unions all the time. But parents so far haven’t responded in kind.

Why is that? Why are parents all bark and no bite with their school complaints? Possibly they don’t know how to be effective. And possibly, many aren’t willing to make the big sacrifices required to enforce their beliefs. They can see that something very serious is wrong, but they aren’t willing or able to fix it. They’re still waiting on others to fix things for them.

They, and their children, will wait a very long time for that. They will certainly wait long past Covidtide. And that’s why public schools are as bad as they are — the people who are supposed to hold them accountable refuse to do exactly that even while claiming to.

In the end, schools and parents are basically fighting over something underneath all these disputes that almost nobody mentions: money. Schools get public education money, not parents. It gives them the power to abuse children while parents complain yet keep putting that mask on their kindergartener every single day, even after he throws up in it at school or it prevents him from being able to read or speak properly.

School boards don’t care about complaints. They care about money. As long as they have it, and parents don’t take it, schools will continue to do whatever they want to children. And American children will continue to be unhappy, uneducated, and unprepared for life while everyone pretends it’s someone else’s fault.

It’s clear that American parents have a codependent relationship with the schools they claim to despise. They are in fact enabling the very abuse they complain about. So while it is entirely legitimate to go yell at school boards and vote bad people out of office, it’s also time for parents to engage in some critical thinking about their own choices that enable this situation. As long as public schools continue to get money no matter what they do, this situation will continue, no matter how many uncomfortable meetings and lawsuits parents instigate.

If state legislatures do not yank money from America’s abusive public school systems, parents must yank their kids. Trust, me, it will work. It might already be happening.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: The danger of the momentum behind N95 respirators


Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | January 20, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-the-danger-of-the-momentum-behind-n95-respirators/

Were the cloth masks just for psychological training purposes to get us to the main course of obsequious servitude to the gods of Fauci?

It took nearly two years, but the “public health experts” are finally admitting what industrial hygienists knew from day one: Masks do not work against airborne viruses. Yet rather than immediately remove these draconian restrictions – including masking 2-year-olds on airplanes and schoolchildren for hours on end in many states – they are seamlessly gliding into the new position of promoting N95 respirators. Following the inveterate patterns of the past two years, they use the failure of their first position to their advantage to further panic people into blindly following their next recommendation … until that becomes a mandate as well.

On Jan. 2, former FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb, the media’s go-to “expert” on all things pandemic, admitted what we all knew since 2020 but that got us banned from social media for saying so. “Cloth masks aren’t going to provide a lot of protection, that’s the bottom line,” said Gottlieb on Meet the Press. “This is an airborne illness. We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission.”

Well, some of us knew that early on in the pandemic.

Two days later, the New York Times ran an article telling people where to get N95s, states began mailing out N95 variations, and the CDC put out a new message, which between the lines, gives the impression that if you are not wearing an N95, you don’t really have protection. The Biden administration plans to distribute millions of them to local pharmacies. But is there really any evidence that the same people who were wrong about masks are now suddenly connected to God’s word when it comes to respirators? And who says it is safe for people to wear something like that for long periods of time, which until now required rigorous testing, medical exams, and training?

Yes, N95s, unlike masks, actually meet the standard for PPE in hazardous environments. But for which sort of hazard? Not an airborne respiratory virus. Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and hazardous exposure expert, sent me a copy of an N95 usage label made by 3M that he enlarged into an infographic. It turns out the company’s own disclosure blows up the myth of using an N95 for viral protection.

The label confirms what everyone understood prior to the mask mania of COVID: Neither masks nor N95 respirators can stop aerosols, certainly not viral ones, which are much smaller than bacteria. What’s truly revealing is that the label recommends against relying on them for source protection even against asbestos particles, which are on average 5 microns – 50 times larger than SARS-CoV-2 virions.

A large randomized controlled trial published just months before the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 — before masking became a political and social control tool — showed no benefit to N95s over surgical masks in terms of protection against the flu. “Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza,” concluded the authors of the large trial, published in JAMA on Sept. 3, 2019.

Also, remember, that most people are not wearing sealed N95s. They wear the respirators loosely on their faces as they do surgical masks. Also, many of them are the Chinese version KN95s. Even the CDC admits, “About 60% of KN95 respirators NIOSH evaluated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 did not meet the requirements that they intended to meet.”

The same study (Shah et.al.) that found just 10% and 12% reduction in aerosols for cloth and blue surgical masks respectively, actually found that KN95s worn improperly with 3mm gaps between the face and the respirator, as most people wear them, only offer 3.4% filtration efficiency – less than the cloth masks.

And remember, these studies are all conducted in labs, not in the real world, where no study has shown a statistically significant benefit to masks, and the basic epidemiological data has disproven the efficacy for two years.

Take Austria, for example, where they have been mandating N95 respirators in stores. Can you spot the efficacy?

The notion that children can properly wear a form-fitted N95 that effectively seals is both absurd and dangerous. And anything else will absolutely not work. There’s clearly an inverse relationship between safety and efficacy. The only thing that might possibly work will cause danger, which is why the federal government has long mandated very specific criteria for wearing respirators.

“While some misrepresent N95s as masks, they are actually respirators and will require one to follow the OSHA requirements for respirators under the Respiratory Protection Standard (RPS) 29 CFR 1910.134 (e.g., written program, medical clearance, initial fit testing, annual fit testing, no facial hair, worker training),” said Petty in an interview with TheBlaze. Stephen Petty has served as an expert witness in hundreds of industrial hazardous exposure court cases and now serves as a witness for those bringing lawsuits against irresponsible mask mandates. Here is a list of OSHA requirements, per Petty’s presentation, that would have to be met for usage of N95 respirators:

There’s a good reason why these requirements were put in place by OSHA. To the extent one actually properly seals an N95 respirator to the face (which few will do), it causes significant medical concerns. Here are some findings from an extremely exhaustive qualitative and substantive evaluation of 65 mask studies by German researchers:

In nine of the 11 scientific papers (82%), we found a combined onset of N95 respiratory protection and carbon dioxide rise when wearing a mask. We found a similar result for the decrease in oxygen saturation and respiratory impairment with synchronous evidence in six of the nine relevant studies (67%). N95 masks were associated with headaches in six of the 10 studies (60%). For oxygen deprivation under N95 respiratory protectors, we found a common occurrence in eight of 11 primary studies (72%).

Thus, to the extent anyone could achieve a meaningful degree of efficacy against virus particles with a respirator – something yet to be proven – it will come at a terrible cost. Even with regular masks, before our public health officials lost their minds (and hearts), it was understood that they are not harm-free. Here is a write-up from the Missoula, Montana, city health department recommending against the use of masks during wildfire season in Montana:

Masks are uncomfortable (they are more comfortable when they are leaky – but then they do not provide protection). They increase resistance to airflow. This may make breathing more difficult and lead to physiological stress, such as increased respiratory and heart rates. Masks can also contribute to heat stress. Because of this, mask use by those with cardiac and respiratory diseases can be dangerous, and should only be done under a doctor’s supervision. Even healthy adults may find that the increased effort required for breathing makes it uncomfortable to wear a mask for more than short periods of time. Breathing resistance increases with respirator efficiency.

The Montana Department of Health emphatically writes in bolded letters that N95s that seal are the only things that might help against smoke particles (which are around 1 micron, 10 times larger than most viral virions), but warns of health risks. “Note that respirator masks should be a last resort, as they are difficult to fit correctly, decrease oxygen intake, are hot, and can easily leak when worn improperly.” They go on to add, “People who are not physically fit may experience difficulty going about daily tasks due to reduced oxygen intake. It is more important to have enough oxygen than to have clean air – if you are using a respirator and feel faint, nauseous, or have trouble breathing, take the mask off.”

On the Washington Department of Health’s website guidance for wildfires, it is made clear that “masks are not approved for children” and that “it is harder to breathe through a mask, so take breaks often if you work outside.” The Sacramento County Department of Health Services states, “N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe due to carbon dioxide buildup, which reduces the intake of oxygen, increased breathing rates, and heart rates.”

Just a year ago, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky swatted down the idea of wearing N95s. “They’re very hard to breathe in when you wear them properly,” Walensky said. “They’re very hard to tolerate when you wear them for long periods of time.”

Thus, whether we are talking about masks or N95s, it’s quite evident that they are either unsafe or ineffective. They can often be both unsafe and ineffective, but they can never be effective without being unsafe, unless worn by the right person with the right training in limited environments for short periods of time.

And this is just the scope of physical harm. One speech therapist in Palm Beach County is seeing a 364% increase in referrals from pediatricians for babies and toddlers with speech delays. “It’s very important that kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth,” said a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach.

How our governments can mandate something this immoral and illogical on our bodies indefinitely without due process, evidentiary standards, or a constitutional interest balancing test is astounding. Every state needs a constitutional amendment explicitly banning this from ever happening again. Biden promised 100 days of mask-wearing, but we are now approaching a full year without any end in sight.Just remember, if a government can criminalize our breathing without due process, what can it not do to us without recourse?

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No, Those Who Pushed Lockdowns Can’t Hide from the Consequences Now


Reported BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 11, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/the-people-who-brutalized-children-to-grab-emergency-powers-are-not-experts-theyre-evil/

Boy wearing mask while playing baseball

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.

“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Health ‘Experts’ Finally Admit Masks Control People, Not Viruses


Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 05, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/05/health-experts-finally-admit-masks-control-people-not-viruses/

masks worn by Joe Biden (speaking) and Anthony Fauci

We’ve been censored. Hollered at by Karens in the grocery store and sometimes even outdoors. We’ve been lectured, demonized, scoffed at, and called murderers and rubes — all for the sin of ignoring mask security theater and daring to show the lower half of our faces in public. That’s why it’s just remarkable to hear the experts now admit that the same face coverings required in so many establishments and localities are not stopping any virus from spreading.

CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, who was previously president of abortion giant Planned Parenthood, said so on the network — and not only in reference to the current variant, as if new data has suddenly justified a change in guidance. She explicitly said cloth masks haven’t been effective since the dawn of the Wuhan virus.

“Cloth masks are not appropriate for this pandemic. It’s not appropriate for omicron, it was not appropriate for delta, alpha, or any of the previous variants either, because we’re dealing with something that’s airborne,” Wen said.

“Don’t wear a cloth mask,” she said in another segment, going so far as to call them little more than “facial decorations.”

It isn’t just one floating head on CNN. In a letter to Capitol Hill staffers, the attending physician reportedly announced the end of blue surgical masks, cloth masks, and gaiters, ordering that “the more protective KN95 or N95 masks” must now be worn.

“…[S]urgical masks are NO LONGER ENOUGH for an airborne virus that’s transmitting as fast or faster than any virus known to mankind,” tweeted a paranoid professor from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Washington Post jumped in too.

And here’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spilling the beans that a surgical mask “is not considered respiratory protection.”

WebMD piled on also, urging Americans to discard the kind of cloth face masks worn by busybody fellow shoppers while they lecture the unmasked to cover their faces. Those aren’t good enough and never have been.

This is now the wisdom imparted by the experts, that the sweaty, flimsy, itchy muzzles that have been forced on schoolchildren, healthy athletes, socially distant employees, grocery-shopping moms, and even their toddlers are “not appropriate.” They’re nothing more than “facial decorations” against a virus that’s in the air and can’t be contained.

It’s almost like conservatives have been reading the available scientific studies and saying this since the beginning, like here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Maybe sweat-soaked cloth masks in the gym actually aren’t great for your health, many on the right suggested. My 3-year-old’s mask that she can’t stop touching probably isn’t keeping her healthier, others thought. Yet the response from the left to this pushback was routine scorn and censorship.

Amazon banned a book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson that discussed the scientific evidence that mask mandates are ineffective. Big Tech weaponized fake fact-checks to choke out The Federalist’s science-backed reporting on masks. Former White House COVID Task Force advisor Dr. Scott Atlas was banned from publishing references to scientific mask studies, as CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta cheered Twitter on. Google-owned YouTube infamously nuked a June interview of Atlas.

Yet now, the left’s “experts” are going on network television to announce that we must stop wearing the cloth and surgical masks that have become synonymous with COVID morality, and they’re announcing that actually we’ve known these masks have been “inappropriate” all along.

Americans are just supposed to take this. In response to the gaslighting, they’re just supposed to obediently discard the cloth masks they’ve been berated and coerced into wearing and instead go buy some stronger mask to protect God-knows-who from this wave of a virus that manifests as the common cold for even the vast majority of the yet-unvaccinated.

While in many sane areas of the country, masks have long been an afterthought, that’s not the reality for other Americans. Mask mandates still prevail in too many places, with the entire state of Oregon tossing around the idea of a “permanent” mask mandate.

Other authoritarian pockets such as Madison, Wisconsin, just never let their temporary mandates expire. Of course, these mandates don’t require any particular kind of face covering. So as Wen said, the masks are nothing more than “facial decorations,” meaning the mandates are nothing more than political theater.

The gaslighting is enough to drive anyone absolutely mad, but with the experts’ admission that most of our masks aren’t cutting it, they’ve also admitted something far more consequential. These masks and the mandates that accompany them have never been about controlling a virus. They’ve always been about controlling people.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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CEOs of 2 major airlines question need for mask mandates, say ‘case is very strong that masks don’t add much’


Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | December 16, 2021

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/airline-ceos-question-mask-mandates/

CEOs of two major airlines spoke out and questioned the necessity of masks on flights, CNN reported.

American Airlines CEO Doug Parker and Southwest CEO Gary Kelly both made related remarks during a Wednesday Senate hearing on the financial support the airline industry has received amid the ongoing pandemic. Masks are required on all American airliners per order of the federal government.

Both Parker and Kelly said that they don’t believe masks make much difference when it comes to tamping down the transmission of COVID-19 and that advanced air filtration systems on airliners make them one of the safest places to be with regard to coronavirus infections.

The remarks were spurred by a question posed by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) during the hearing.

Wicker, ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, asked whether the company CEOs believed that masks ought to be mandated on airliners.

Kelly answered, “I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment. It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.”

Parker added, “I concur. An aircraft is the safest place you can be. It’s true of all of our aircraft — they all have the same HEPA filters and air flow.”

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, begged to differ and insisted that not all planes are equipped with the same air filtration systems.

“It is important to recognize that the safe, controlled environment on planes … includes the HEPA filters that are not on all aircraft,” she said.

Both Parker and Kelly previously announced that they are retiring from their respective positions at the companies in 2022.

A study released in October from Harvard University’s school of public health concluded that there is a low risk of COVID-19 transmission on flights. A portion of the report states, “With its focus on considerations aboard the aircraft, the phase one gate-to-gate report found that, through a layered approach to risk mitigation, the scientific evidence shows a low risk of SARS-COV-2 transmission on aircraft. The report provides evidence that it is possible to leverage technology and modify behavior to allow some near-normal activity while reducing the risks of disease transmission during the COVID-19 crisis.”

The report continues, “Analysis from the report shows that ventilation of air on aircraft reduces the possibility of exposure to COVID-19, lower than other common settings, such as a grocery store or indoor restaurant. This effectively counters the proximity travelers are subject to during flights. Because of the frequent exchange of air and HEPA filters on planes, over 99% of the particles containing the virus are removed from cabin air.”

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Daniel Horowitz Op-ed: The country that ‘succeeded’ against COVID with masks has the highest case rate in the world


Commentary by DANIEL HOROWITZ | December 07, 2021

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/horowitz-the-country-that-succeeded-against-covid-with-masks-has-the-highest-case-rate-in-the-world-theblaze-2655944084.html/

Those who believe in the freedom of bodily autonomy are celebrating a slew of recent court rulings enjoining the Biden administration’s injection mandate. However, no GOP state attorney general has bothered to fight the equally immoral, illogical, and inhumane mask mandates that are still in place. Despite nearly two years of evidence that strict mask-wearing has zero effectiveness in stopping the spread, the mandates on 2-year-olds on planes and in many schools still continue. Slovakia is a perfect case study of the mask mendacity.

On May 13, 2020, the Atlantic published an article lauding Slovakia for, at the time, having the lowest per-capita COVID death rate in Europe. The article’s prediction should now be the laughingstock of the world:

When this pandemic ends, and when the reckoning over how the world responded invariably begins, Slovakia will likely be among those highlighted as a success story, whereas the United States—which was supposed to be the country best prepared for such a crisis—will be remembered as among those that suffered the worst. How Slovakia was able to flatten its curve comes down to more than just quick decision making and the widespread adoption of face masks. Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Slovakia is of the value of leading from the front.

Slovakia was so worried about masks that the country even got Taiwan to donate hundreds of thousands of these useless cloths as part of a bilateral trade agreement.

Well, that was before Slovakia’s first winter wave. One can excuse people for mistaking low spread at the time for mask efficacy rather than the fact that the country just didn’t get its turn yet. But for countries to continue this inhumane mandate despite what we now know demonstrates that masks are not a means to public health but an end in themselves of tyranny.

At over 2,000 new cases per million per day, according to Our World in Data, Slovakia now has more cases per capita than any country in the world. To put this in perspective, that is almost three times the level of the winter peak in the U.S., a country that has not exactly performed well in the pandemic!

It’s true that some individual states closer to the size of Slovakia have had more severe waves. However, even the worst counties in the upper Midwest are tracking about 1,200 new cases per million per day.

And here is the epidemiological curve presented by the inimitable Ian Miller, juxtaposed to policy solutions:

It’s not just Slovakia. Wherever you turn in Europe, both masks and vaccine mandates have failed miserably, and the spread is now worse than ever. Belgium is now six weeks into the new mask mandate, and it has more cases than ever before, even though the Belgians already suffered one of the deadliest waves in all of Europe. Oh, and 87.4% of adults are vaccinated.

To begin with, the CDC, as late as May 2020, was citing the 10 randomized controlled trials that showed “no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks.” The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford also summarized six international studies that “showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.”

The only randomized controlled trial studying mask efficacy against COVID published last year was the now famous Danish study that failed to show any meaningful reduction in spread from mask-wearing. Then, several months ago, the media trumpeted a large study done in Bangladesh that seemed to show efficacy. Well, now that the authors have released the actual data, we see that indeed no such claim can be made from the study. It turns out that out of over 340,000 individuals over a span of eight weeks, there were only 20 fewer cases of COVID detected in the mask group over the control group – 1,106 symptomatic individuals confirmed seropositive in the control group and 1,086 such individuals in the treatment group.

Even these results are hard to interpret because of numerous confounding factors. University of California Berkeley professor Ben Recht critiqued the study as follows:

This study was not blinded, as it’s impossible to blind a study on masks. The intervention was highly complex and included a mask promotion campaign and education about other mitigation measures including social distancing. Moreover, individuals were only added to the study if they consented to allow the researchers to visit and survey their households. There was a large differential between the control and treatment groups here, with 95% consenting in the treatment group but only 92% consenting in control. This differential alone could wash away the difference in observed cases. Finally, symptomatic seropositivity is a crude measure of covid as the individuals could have been infected before the trial began.

Given the numerous caveats and confounders, the study still only found a tiny effect size. My takeaway is that a complex intervention including an educational program, free masks, encouraged mask wearing, and surveillance in a poor country with low population immunity and no vaccination showed at best modest reduction in infection.

In other words, you can now add this to a list of 400 studies compiled by the Brownstone Institute that fail to find any correlation between public policy interventions and better pandemic outcomes.

It’s not OK for Republican-controlled states to continue to ignore the facts that masks are inhumane and they simply don’t work. Consider the fact that Head Start has now mandated masks on 2-year-olds, many of whom have special needs. Oregon has moved to make its mask mandate permanent. Why are no red state governments at least suing against the federal mandates, and why are so few red states even banning mask mandates within the states?

The courts are all political. They only responded to the lawsuits against the vaccine mandate when they saw robust political opposition within the political branches of the red states. They see no such opposition regarding the mask mandates. Thus, absent a unified effort from state attorneys general, they are unlikely to respond to a handful of individual lawsuits. The same legal rationale denying the feds the power to force vaccines also denies them the power to cover our breathing holes. But the courts only respond to political momentum.If nearly two years of masking failing to work anywhere is still not enough to end the most invasive human mandate of all time, then we truly are no longer a free people.

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Rand Paul wins: Dr. Fauci admits he wore a mask for show to avoid sending ‘mixed signals’


Reported by CHRIS PANDOLFO | May 18, 2021

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/fauci-admits-mask-for-show/

President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on Tuesday confirmed what Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told him two months ago about mask-wearing being unnecessary for Americans vaccinated against COVID-19.

Fauci appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to discuss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new mask recommendations, reiterating that the CDC says it’s safe for vaccinated people to stop wearing face coverings. He explained that the science has “evolved” over the last few weeks to show that vaccinated people are protected from infection and that the risk of them spreading the virus to someone else is “extremely low, very very low.” When asked by host George Stephanopoulos how his personal mask-wearing habits have changed, Fauci responded that he feels more comfortable being seen in public indoors without a mask. Though he was vaccinated in December, Fauci said he had continued to wear a mask to avoid sending “mixed signals” to the American people by not wearing a mask.

“But being a fully vaccinated person the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low. And that’s the reason why in indoor settings now I feel comfortable about not wearing a mask because I’m fully vaccinated.”

Exactly two months ago, on March 18, Fauci told a different story to Sen. Paul during a hearing on the pandemic response. Paul had grilled Fauci on the absence of scientific evidence to suggest that vaccinated Americans needed to wear masks.

“You’re telling everybody to wear a mask whether they’ve had an infection or a vaccine, what I’m saying is they have immunity and everybody agrees they have immunity,” Paul said. “What studies do you have that people who have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection?”

“If we’re not spreading the infection, isn’t it just theater?” he pressed.

At the time, Fauci told Paul “I totally disagree with you” and insisted that mask-wearing is not theater because of the risk that vaccines did not protect against COVID-19 variants. Now, Fauci admits that he continued to wear a mask indoors even though he was vaccinated and knew he didn’t need to because he didn’t want to send “mixed signals” to the American people, which appears to be the very definition of “theater.”

Sen. Paul has not yet commented publicly on Fauci’s remarks but he did share the following social media post from the Republican Party of Kentucky: “Two months TO THE DAY after Dr. @RandPaul said Dr. Fauci was performing ‘theater’ and wearing two masks ‘for show’ despite being vaccinated, Dr. Fauci finally admits it was, indeed, for show.”

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Why Is Big Media Hiding That Illinois Has Far More COVID Cases Than Florida? Because Illinois Has A Democrat In Charge And Tighter Lockdowns


NOVEMBER 27, 2020 By 

Why Is Big Media Hiding That Illinois Has Far More COVID Cases Than Florida? Because Illinois Has A Democrat In Charge And Tighter Lockdowns

COVID-19 cases in the United States are growing, but the media is selectively covering the states with the highest numbers.

On Tuesday, the United States reported there were at least 2,216 new COVID-19 deaths and approximately 178,200 new cases. Some states, despite strict coronavirus mandates and guidelines meant to prevent spread, are suffering from the most cases and deaths. Instead, however, big news seems to be focused on continuing to shame GOP politicians for refusing to completely shut down their states again.

Nearly every week in June and July, mainstream media news outlets singled out and slammed Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for rising COVID-19 numbers as the state remained largely open and unmasked. Headlines such as “Florida shatters US record for new single-day Covid-19 cases,” “Florida’s governor just can’t seem to get it right on coronavirus,” “Florida Shatters Record For New Coronavirus Cases, Orders Bars To Close,” “Florida shatters records with over 10,000 new COVID-19 cases in single day,” “Disney World reopens even as coronavirus cases soar in Florida and across U.S.,” “In Florida, COVID-19 Death Toll Keeps Rising,” “Florida invited the nation to its reopening — then it became a new coronavirus epicenter,” ran rampant across news websites and broadcast programs.

Months after outlets such as CNN, NPR, the Washington Post, and others continually targeted Florida for increasing coronavirus cases, the corporate media ignored Illinois, which recorded 15,415 cases in just one day. That’s more than Florida ever reported in a single day, yet Florida is singled out for negative news attention.

“This is despite Illinois’ population being 40% lower,” Youyang Gu, creator of a COVID-19 projection website reported.

 

While Illinois continues to see climbing cases and deaths, outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, and CNN are choosing to hyper-focus on states with Republican leaders such as Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who have chosen different COVID-19 mitigation techniques.

Instead of noting these significant trends in Illinois, CNN chose to publish another article on Florida, focusing on the fact that case numbers continue to rise after reopening even though daily new deaths in the state are down.

While Illinois enacted mask mandates, closed restaurants, and discouraged people from holiday travel and gatherings, Gu notes that the state is still experiencing an exceptional amount of cases and deaths per capita compared to states with much higher populations such as Florida, California, and Texas.

 

“We hear a lot of the talk about how the deaths in Florida were ‘preventable’. What about the ones in Illinois?” Gu questioned.

“I don’t want to spark a political debate here. I just hope that more people can recognize that the news we consume online can be inherently biased. They often serve to fuel division (and clicks),” he wrote.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.
Photo Covid, mask, testing, coronavirus, ppe, nurse

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