Last week, Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, held up the thinnest, flimsiest, cheapest face mask on the market and told a Senate panel that these masks “are the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” Redfield claimed to have “scientific proof” that wearing such masks prevents covid and said that “if we did it for six, eight, ten, twelve weeks, we’d bring this pandemic under control.” 

Days later, someone at the CDC posted a change to the CDC’s guidance, to warn that covid is spread by aerosolized virons emitted not just by coughing and sneezing but also by singing, speaking, and breathing. The change was immediately retracted and blamed on an “honest mistake,” but even an honest mistake is an indication that somebody at the CDC (besides Dr. Redfield) wants to put the fear of covid into everybody, lest people think that they are safe to go outside, with deaths way, way down. 

The aerosol issue is a red herring. A complaint was made in early July by a group of concerned “scientists” that the World Health Organization, by warning that covid is spread by coughing and sneezing, had failed to warn of the danger of singing, speaking, and breathing. Really. Who does not know that viral respiratory diseases are spread by viral respiration? Who thinks you can only get the flu if someone coughs or sneezes in your face? 

The concerned scientists did make one very good point about the importance of ventilation in lessening the danger of respiratory infections, but who needs scientists to tell them that? It’s commonsense. We even have a term for such protection: It’s call “fresh air.” The more fresh air you breathe, the less likely you are to breathe in enough of a virus to make you sick. Here’s how it works, according to our concerned scientists:

Unfortunately, such commonsense, even when argued with pictures by scientists, has been utterly lost upon the countless public officials and private execucrats who still require masks and social distancing out of doors. The only lesson they have taken from science and taught to others is that fresh air spreads the virus, which means that covid is everywhere and so everyone is in danger of infection, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.  

So we have people crossing the street to avoid passing a neighbor on the sidewalk, cowering in a park when they have no path of escape from a stranger without a mask, and wearing masks while jogging, bicycling, playing golf, and driving alone in their cars with the windows down. Yes, yes, I’ve seen all these, but the absolutely stupidest thing I’ve seen in all my 62 years is three young men wearing masks while zooming across Deep Creek Lake in Western Maryland on jet-skis. As if covid is just hovering over the lake waiting to kill people. 

Responsible public officials would try to talk sense into such people. Instead, Dr. Redfield is boasting that masks will “bring this pandemic under control” if we all only wore them “for six, eight, ten, twelve weeks.” 

Obviously, Redfield and I do not live in the same city, state, country, or perhaps even planet. Where I live, in the D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia, masks have been mandated since May 29—17 weeks!—yet have made no discernible difference in either cases or deaths, as you see here for deaths: 

Deaths blamed on covid were never very high in Northern Virginia—never more than 30 per day, against New York City’s 800 confirmed or probable covid deaths in one day—and here you see they were already falling fast when Gov. Ralph Northam’s mask edict went into effect.

So instead of demonstrating the effect of lockdowns and masks, the graph above much more obviously demonstrates Farr’s Law, which states that an epidemic’s natural course follows a roughly symmetrical pattern, rising and falling at the same rate. Why? Because the faster a virus infects the people it can infect, the faster it runs out of people it can infect.