“The Major Efficacy of a Mask is That it Causes Alarm”
Laurie Garrett gives us the real rationale for mask mandates.
Laurie Garrett is an American science journalist and former Senior Fellow in the Council on Foreign Relations. Garrett has been a leading voice promoting draconian Covid mandates for the last two years—especially masks. In a video that’s resurfaced from the National Academy of Medicine in 2018, Garrett gives us the real rationale for mask mandates.
There’s only a couple of countries that have ever really done large-scale studies to try and figure out what might work. Japan, it may not surprise you, is one of them. In one of their large studies they basically showed that the masks, it seemed like the major efficacy of a mask is that it causes alarm in the other person and so you stay away from each other. And that’s what I think happened with SARS. When I was in the SARS epidemic I saw everywhere all over Asia people started wearing these masks, and it is alarming, when you walk down the street and everyone coming toward you has a mask on, you definitely do social distancing, you definitely—it’s just a gut thing. But did the mask really help them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not. If the virus was around their face, the mask would not have made a difference.
That’s right. The reason American kids were forced to cover their faces for six hours every day was “that it causes alarm in the other person and so you stay away from each other… But did the mask really help them? Did the mask keep the virus out? Almost certainly not.” Garrett always knew, but continues to support muzzling them anyway.
More from el gato malo:
They knew. They always knew. They lied, and our kids were the victims.
Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.
But see, that's not the horrible part. Not even on the scale.
It's all the parents who refused to--who couldn't even imagine--fighting for their kids because the people in their set might exclude them from the in-group.
The whining I saw on Twitter from the journalist set in high-toned neighborhoods about how their kids were suffering but--"hope this will end soon" and a billion variations on that theme--when every one of those people could have afforded to pay a HS kid to tutor their older children in person, or get a nanny for the youngest ones.
Meanwhile the truly economically straitened people were in despair for their children but had no recourse.
I just read a Holocaust survivor's obituary because I clicked through after reading Mike Hagerty's. The family was waiting to be sorted after getting off transport at a concentration camp, and her mother saw in an instant what the two lines meant, and swapped coats with her daughter so the 13 yr. old would look bigger and not be sent immediately to slaughter. The mother and 2 younger kids were sent to the death line. Imagine standing there in that moment and knowing you couldn't save the rest.
This generation of the "educated, elite" class of parents are a disgrace to rats and mice everywhere in the parenting sweepstakes.
i heard Laurie Garrett on a TWIV episode talking about the 1976 swine flu "epidemic." she said that the army over reacted, that the vaccine was hastily rushed out and unnecessary since the soldier in question didn't even die of the swine flu, and that the bad dangerous vaccine was taken off the market after 50 reported deaths and 500 cases of GBS (my cousin's wife spent a year in a wheelchair; i decided i'd take my chances with the flu and have no regrets). BUT, THIS TIME IT'S DIFFERENT, they all agreed. THIS IS A REAL PANDEMIC AND THESE VACCINES ARE MIRACLES AND EVERYONE SHOULD GET THEM. yeah ok, that's what they said last time. i thought, how brave, Dr. Garrett is to acknowledge the failure of that vaccine program and the damage it caused with 46 years of hindsight to protect her. had she criticized the swine flu vaccine in 1976, she would have lost her job, been censored, pilloried. sorry, Dr Garrett, but courage is telling the truth in the moment, not from a safe place in time.