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July 25, 2024 - 10:00am
The German government determined within six months of implementing a mask requirement that there was no evidence to support the intervention, but did not make that information known to the public, according to a new report.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) files, long held from public view, read, “There is no evidence for the use of FFP2 masks outside of occupational safety,” according to German outlet Berliner Zeitung. Nonetheless, some masking requirements remained in effect throughout the country until early 2023.
The RKI, a research institute run by the German government, helped guide the government’s public health response to Covid. Its 2,500-page Covid protocols were released following a lengthy legal battle with a small media outlet, Multipolar.
The files noted that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative was incorrect, but government leaders continued to blame the unvaccinated for the spread of Covid in public comments after that conclusion was reached.
The RKI also knew as early as January 2020 that Covid did not pose a serious threat to children, according to Berliner Zeitung, but the government still enforced school closures.
The development mirrors Covid-related developments in the US, where new testimony and the release of government documents have revealed that top government officials withheld information from the public about the development of Covid guidelines and the US funding of gain of function research in Wuhan. Anthony Fauci told Congress in June that the six-feet social distancing rule “sort of just appeared” and was not based on scientific evidence.
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SubscribeNobody was really following the science. If the science did not come up with the answers the politicians wanted to hear, it was ignored. The political imperative for politicians was to make it look like they were doing the right things to save lives, regardless of whether the policies were actually saving lives. There was certainly never any balance stuck between benefits to some (the elderly) vs harm being done to others (the young).
The issue of abusing the scientific method for political ends in not confined to Covid, indeed there is a lot of it in so called climate science. The ultimate effect is that it degrades public trust in both governments and the so called scientific experts. The authoritarian approach to stamping on anyone who calls out the phoney science is also truly frightening.
Those are the real lessons that should be learned from the pandemic response, but I have no doubt they won’t even be mentioned in any final covid inquiry report.
They will just refine their methods for crushing dissent
The very use of “follow the science” is anti-scientific. Most people are under the misapprehension that science is about proving the truth of an hypothesis. NO. Science is about eliminating falsehood. Hypotheses which make predictions contrary to the facts are wrong. The entire approach in the Covid era (and “climate change”) is the anti-scientific one of corroborating an official narrative. What they should have been doing is examining all plausible factors and eliminating the ones that did not work.
Masks are a classic example where there were theoretical reasons to believe that, far from protecting the wearer, they might even encourage the incubation of a respiratory infection – i.e. be counterproductive. I know someone who incubated a life-threatening infection having been forced to mask on a long-haul flight.
Where was the research to test the incubation hypothesis as a possible negative to masking?
You make some reasonable points, but a single anecdote isn’t science either. One might ask why masks are routinely used in medical practice. Are these useless as well? The general argument seem to be that masks were there to protect others, rather than the the wearers themselves which is the situation in the medical case. I could see a plausible case for saying they might somewhat decrease the risks of transmission in enclosed spaces, but I’m completely open to evidence on this.
In any case the covid mandates certainly at least went well wildly beyond the evidence. Another example was that there was not a single case anywhere in the world of someone contracting coronavirus on a beach, and yet we had hysterical reactions to people enjoying themselves on beaches, the media’s use of telephoto lenses to make them look more crowded and they were etc.
An excellent book to read with a very balanced a non conspiratorial account account is “The Year The World Went Mad” by Mark Woolhouse, who was the scientist on the Scottish SAGE committee.
The common denominator between the Covid and climate change campaigns of disinformation is that both were driven by a hysterical mainstream media actively pushing a fear stampede. These are not the only examples of this.
Totally agree. Many scientists, who advised governments during COVID, were totally ignored and stayed quiet in public. Only some very brave ones spoke out against the hysteria whipped up by politicians, journalists and “celebrities”. The same is happening with the so-called Climate Crisis.
The current media push for war with Russia is the latest example of this.
There are lessons to be learned by the Pandemic response and they HAVE been learned by the Scottish Covid enquiry. For instance the enquiry asked why Doctors gave across the board Medazolam to Care Home residents which effectively put them to sleep permanently rather than by face to face consultancy.
To my mind this was mass murder and I have no doubt it also happened in the rest of the UK. The English enquiry is purely political and vindictive. Perhaps they should learn humility and understand they got it wrong big time.
Spot on. And the people elevated to these positions of authority wonder why they are losing trust. They got so wrapped up their “narrative”, and how the public were perceiving them they lost touch with actual physical reality. The scary thing is: they do not know they are doing it. It’s an auto-pilot, conformity, status-preserving, subconsciously wilful blindness thing. They’re not evil; they are banal. And you are absolutely right the very same thing is happening with climate.
Hannah Arendt’s thin black fungus lives on, until it doesn’t – and then the real questions get asked. If I were anyone in any position of public authority in the years 2020-22 I’d be terrified now of it finally cracking. And that’s why they go on stonewalling, not admitting mistakes, closing their eyes and ears to auto-immune diseases, cancers and other premature deaths, an fall the rest of it, and letting it just go and on and on and on. Not because the truth is too horrifying for them to look at, but because the consequence of everyone looking at it is that there is a realisation – as we saw with Hillsborough, blood infusions, and Horizon – that the people in charge are guilty of negligence and moral cowardice. Look what happened to Paula Vennells. None of them want that to happen to them.
A truth and reconciliation commission, in which the feckless, the deluded, and even the downright corrupted get to fess up their sins of omissions and commission in public yet walk away free men and women with their heads held relatively high is, sadly, the only way out of this horrible mess, and the only way to prevent more harm being done.
I am reminded of the line from “Yes, Prime Minister” – “We must do something! This is something, therefore we must do it!”
Is any surprised by the content of this article? And I don’t know anything about Germany, but it could be applied to the UK, Italy, the US, you make it.
Absence of evidence of effect is not the same as evidence of absence of effect. Masks may be only marginally efficacious and proving that with a study is difficult to do. A good way to see this point is the absence of robust scientific studies that prove that parachutes save the lives of people jumping out of planes.
A study of jumping out of an aeroplane without a parachute is not needed in the same way a study of jumping out of an aeroplane with your fingers crossed is not needed. They are both unretarded falling from height. There are plenty of studies about survivability of falls from height.
If an effect is measurable with a measure and you can’t detect the effect with that measure then there is no effect. The filtering of airborne viruses is easily measured. Indeed, it is regularly tested as there are international standards for such filtering. These internationals standards in fact define what FFF2 does and doesn’t filter, and the conformance tests demonstrate what the FFF2 products themselves do and don’t filter. There was never any ambiguity that FFF2 face masks do not filter an airborne COVID19 virus let alone a COVID19 virus enveloped in exhaled moisture.
Brilliant answer thank you
I got thrown out of the Munich airport train by armed police, because I “only” wore a surgical mask. I am not joking …That evening I relied on the kindness of a stranger, who happened to have a spare FFP2 mask in her bag. Bavaria like Austria had the strictest lock- downs and mask rules of all the States in Germany and outcome wasn’t any different from the rest of the country.
“Pandemic of the the Unvaccinated” What a load of Cobblers. It is the Pandemic of the vaccinated (including me) that has resulted in a virus becoming more lethal with projected ski slope increases in auto immune diseases.
As far as I am aware Germany has cancelled the novel Gene therapy mRNA vaccines and there should be a moratorium on their use. Sunak said they were safe and effective. What utter deceit, considering they are ignoring compensation claims from people whose lives have been destroyed.
We urgently need to get back to free Science which can be debated and not controlled by a cabal of non elected officials who are paid for by the Pharmaceutical Industry to do their bidding.
““If the institute set up specifically to provide expert advice itself questioned many of the central Corona measures, where did the unconditional will to implement them come from, sometimes much stronger or longer than in other countries?” the report read.”
Well now, there’s a question to which we’re never, ever getting an honest answer.