Physician And Medical Journal Editor: Healthy People Should Not Wear Face Masks
Healthy People Should Not Wear Face Masks
by Jim Meehan, MD
MeehanMD.com.
Via Health Impact News:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts began telling us to follow a number of disease mitigation strategies that sounded reasonably scientific, but actually had little or no support in the scientific literature. Community wearing of masks was one of the more dangerous recommendations from our confused public health experts.
The Pandemic of Bad Science and Public Health Misinformation on Community Wearing of Masks
Renowned neurosurgeon, Russell Blaylock, MD had this to say about the science of masks:
As for the scientific support for the use of face masks, a recent careful examination of the literature, in which 17 of the best studies were analyzed, concluded that, “None of the studies established a conclusive relationship between mask/respirator use and protection against influenza infection.”[R] Keep in mind, no studies have been done to demonstrate that either a cloth mask or the N95 mask has any effect on transmission of the COVID-19 virus. Any recommendations, therefore, have to be based on studies of influenza virus transmission. The fact is, there is no conclusive evidence of their efficiency in controlling flu virus transmission. – Russell Blaylock, MD
You can read Dr. Blaylock’s brilliant discussion of this matter at the end of this paper or at this link:
Blaylock: Face Masks Pose Serious Risks to the Healthy
Quarantining Healthy People – A Failed Experiment
We were told that everyone, even the healthy, should quarantine at home. All were told to “shelter-in-place,” isolate ourselves, hide alone, indoors, until the danger of the virus passed, despite the large body of scientific evidence that shows our immune systems thrive on diversity of exposures, sunlight, time in nature, and in loving company of others.
Furthermore, it seemed that the public health experts were ignoring the very real harms that result from shutting down the economy, putting tens of millions of workers out of work, and the shadow pandemic of suicides, drug abuse, overdoses, and other harms that follow massive economic downturns. [R][R]
Historically and by definition, quarantines had always been about sequestering the sick. Never before had anyone beat a virus by quarantining the healthy. We were not told that quarantining healthy people was a first-of-its kind experiment. And the experiment failed. More on this topic later.
Community Wearing of Masks is a Bad Recommendation
We were frequently confused by the mixed messages coming from public health agencies. Early in the pandemic Dr. Fauci, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the WHO all told the public, in no uncertain terms, not to wear masks. Then, over the course of the next several weeks and months, the CDC twice changed their recommendations, as did the WHO, and the recommendations always contradicted each other!
The CDC made the mistake of telling us cloth masks worked, and they even provided directions on their website for making homemade cloth masks.
To clear up the confusion, I will show that the scientific evidence not only does not support the community wearing of face masks, but the evidence shows that healthy people wearing face masks pose serious health risks to wearers.
Hiding our faces behind masks and isolating in our homes is not the solution, at least not for most people with healthy immune systems. Supporting the health of your immune system, confidently confronting all pathogens, and allowing herd immunity to develop and protect the vulnerable populations should be the goal.
What’s happening in the world today, including the misinformation surrounding community mask wearing, is about political agendas, symbolism, fear, and dividing and isolating the people. It has nothing to do with science.
Medical Masks are Bad for Health
As a physician and former medical journal editor, I’ve carefully read the scientific literature regarding the use of face masks to mitigate viral transmission. I believe the public health experts have community wearing of masks all wrong. What follows are the key issues that should inform the public against wearing medical face masks during the CoVID-19 pandemic, as well as all future respiratory disease pandemics.
Face masks decrease oxygen, increase carbon dioxide, and alter breathing in ways that increase susceptibility and severity of CoVID-19
Mask wearers frequently report symptoms of difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, headache, lightheadedness, dizziness, anxiety, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and other subjective symptoms while wearing medical masks. As a surgeon, I have worn masks for prolonged periods of time in thousands of surgeries and can assure you these symptoms do occur when surgical masks are worn for extended periods of time. The longer a surgical mask is worn, the more saturated with moisture it becomes, and the more significantly it inhibits the inflow of oxygen and outflow of carbon dioxide.
In fact, clinical research shows that medical masks lower blood oxygen levels[R] and raise carbon dioxide blood levels.[R] The deviations in oxygen and carbon dioxide may not reach the clinical criteria for hypoxia (low blood oxygen), hypoxemia (low tissue oxygen), or hypercapnia (elevated blood carbon dioxide), but they can deviate enough to cause even healthy individuals to become symptomatic, as occurred with the surgeons studied and published in this report:
Preliminary Report on Surgical Mask Induced Deoxygenation During Major Surgery
At the same time masks inhibit oxygen intake, they trap the carbon dioxide rich breath in the mouth/mask inter-space. Thus, a fraction of carbon dioxide previously exhaled is inhaled at each respiratory cycle.
Masks force you to re-breathe a portion of your own breath, including all the stuff (infectious viral particles) the lungs were trying to remove from the body (more on this later).
As medical masks lower oxygen and raise carbon dioxide in the blood, the brain senses the changes and the risk they pose to the maintenance of normal physiology. Thus, the brain goes to work to bring things back in order. To obtain more oxygen and remove more carbon dioxide, the brain tells the lungs to increase the rate (frequency) and depth of breaths.[R] Unfortunately, struggle as they may, your brain and lungs can not fully compensate for the negative effects of the mask. Some may even suffer the symptoms of carbon dioxide toxicity.
For people with diseases of the lungs, especially chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), face masks are intolerable to wear as they worsen breathlessness.[R]
In the case of respiratory pathogens, the negative effects of masks and the respiratory changes they induce could increase susceptibility and transmission of CoVID-19, as well as other respiratory pathogens.
Viral particles move through face masks with relative ease. Studies show that about 44% of viral particles pass through surgical masks, 97% pass through cloth masks, and about 5% through N95 masks. Increasing tidal volume (depth of breaths) results in literally sucking more air, more forcefully through and around the mask. Any SARS CoV-2 particles on, in, or around the mask are more forcefully suctioned into the mouth and lungs as a result of the compensatory increases in tidal volume.
The changes in respiratory rate and depth may also increase the severity of CoVID-19 as the increased tidal volume delivers the viral particles deeper into the lungs.
These changes may worsen the community transmission of CoVID-19 when infected people wearing masks exhale air more heavily contaminated with viral particles from the lungs.
These effects are amplified if face masks are contaminated with the viruses, bacteria, or fungi that find their way or opportunistically grow in the warm, moist environment that medical masks quickly become.
Despite the scientific evidence to the contrary, public health experts claim that medical masks do not cause clinically significant hypoxia (low oxygen) and hypercapnia (high CO2). I would like to ask those experts to explain the growing number of cases in which medical masks worn during exercise have resulted in lung injuries and heart attacks:
Two Chinese boys drop dead during PE lessons while wearing face masks amid concerns over students’ fitness following three months of school closure [R][R]
Jogger’s lung collapses after he ran for 2.5 miles while wearing a face mask [R]
If medical masks were perfectly safe and effective, then why would healthy boys suffer heart attacks or a 26 year old man collapse his lung while wearing masks and running?! In my opinion, these are tragic examples of the risks of wearing medical masks. And we are only getting started.
From Natural Blaze, here.