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Long-Term Face Mask Usage Creates
“Cesspools” of Bacteria and Viruses
Governor Mills’ Face Mask Mandate Falls Under Maine Statutes
Definition of “Public Health Threat”
By: David Deschesne
Fort Fairfield Journal, June 3, 2020
Face masks have been mandated at various levels across the country as a response to the media-generated COVID-19 scare. While used properly in a hospital setting, masks can be effective at reducing transmission of disease and infection, most people in the general public have received no training or discipline at the necessary level to use face masks safely or effectively. Most aren't even using bona fide face masks purpose-built for the task of reducing disease spread, anyway. They are, instead, using homemade cloth masks or simple bandanas “cowboy style” both of which have been found to be as useless as wearing nothing at all.
Dr. Pam Popper, founder and President of Wellness Forum Health, who also serves on the Physician's Steering Committee and the President's Board for the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C. addressed the face mask issue in one of her editorial videos recently.
“Government workers and health authorities are recommending that people wear masks when leaving their homes and in public places. In some states it's mandated - you can't come out of your house unless you've got a mask on,” said Dr. Popper. “In an office like this where you're wearing a mask, every time you talk on the phone you take the mask off so you can be understood, you get a drink of water and you have to pull it down, if you want to eat something you have to take it off, and you're handling pens and pencils and papers and cell phones and all this sort of thing. Well, by noon every day what you've done is created a bacterial cesspool and it's dangerous. So I basically didn't want my people to be exposed to that, I don't want to be exposed to it either, so that was my objection to it.”
Dr. Popper discussed how she looked into research on mask usage to see what the studies have said regarding effectiveness at reducing disease transmission. “I was amazed at how much research there is to this mask issue. Viruses are tiny, tiny, tiny little things and as it turns out, they can penetrate the surgical mask barrier. According to the U.S. Academy of Sciences, in community settings, “face masks are not designed or certified to protect the wearer from exposure to respiratory hazards.” Another study showed that surgical masks don't provide protection for aerosols. They gave a range but COVID-19 is in that range - not protective for that.”
She also cites research for household settings. “In household settings I found two studies showing that in a household, surgical masks do not prevent transmission of the flu. Surgical masks! Due to shortages, a lot of health directors, including ours, have been instructing people to make their own masks out of cloth.”
According to a hospital study she found, which looked into hospital wards that used either medical masks, cloth masks, or a control group which included a high proportion of people who wore some type of mask, the rate of infection was highest in the cloth mask group as compared to the group wearing any other type of mask. “Transmission of viral particles through cloth masks was almost 97 percent. The reason cited included; moisture retention, reuse of the masks and poor filtration, all of which can actually increase rather than decrease the risk of infection. The researchers concluded that the results 'could be interpreted as harm caused by cloth masks,'“ she said.
Dr. Popper also cited a recent study which looked at both the efficacy of surgical and cotton masks for blocking transmission of SARS-Cov-2 from coughing patients. “The patients were instructed to cough five times while wearing no mask, then a surgical mask and cotton mask,” explained Dr. Popper. “The researchers reported that neither surgical nor cotton masks were effective for filtering SARS-Cov-2 from environment or external mask surface. They also reported there was greater contamination on the outer rather than the inner surface of the mask, which they said could be due to air leakage around the mask edge. Because remember, you're not taping this thing to your face. Or high velocity coughing which causes the viral particles to penetrate the mask. They wrote that these results support the importance of hand hygiene after touching outer surfaces rather than wearing masks.”
Not only are the masks useless, they can be dangerous. Dr. Popper noted how a woman in New Jersey crashed her car into a power pole because she was wearing an N-95 mask for several hours. “Insufficient oxygen and excessive carbon dioxide intake caused her to pass out according to the Lincoln Park police department. She was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.”
“So, like everything else going on here, the instructions to wear masks or make them out of cloth at home and use scarves and clothing and everything else is absolutely ridiculous, guaranteed to make things worse. It just makes you wonder, if I can find this stuff, these people who are supposed to be so much smarter than me would know this stuff and they wouldn't prescribe these ridiculous ideas.”
“If you live in a state that requires a mask, I wouldn't tell you to violate the order. You might want to write to your senator, or call your senator or call the U.S. attorney's office and file a complaint. Call the civil rights office and file a complaint. File a lawsuit, there are all kinds of things you can do if you are opposed to this policy for the reasons that I just stated.”
Doctors and nurses in hospital settings do wear either surgical, or the much more adequate N95 masks, but under normal circumstances they don’t wear them all day long due to the adverse sanitary issues that practice would create. Under normal hospital protocol, when a nurse enters an infected patient’s room, an N95 mask will be put on. Immediately after leaving that room, the mask is taken off and discarded, with the nurse putting on a new, sterile mask for the next patient’s room. That has changed with the shortage of N95 masks worldwide. Here, in Maine some hospital nurses report they are issued only one N95 mask for their entire shift and they must wear that mask continuously from one person’s room to another - thereby potentially spreading virus particles around the hospital on the outside of their masks and increasing infections. An anomalous rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations in Maine was noted at the end of May, likely due in part to this practice.
Masks that are worn for several hours can become moist from respiration. According to the college textbook, Basic Nursing and Practice, 2nd edition (1991 Mosby-Year Book, Inc), “A mask that has become moist is ineffective and should be discarded. A mask should never be reused. A safe rule is to change the mask every hour. Clients and family members should be warned that a mask can cause a sensation of smothering.” (p. 525).
Maine's governor, Janet “Big Sister” Mills, who is a lawyer - not a trained nurse or medical doctor - issued executive order 49 FY 19/20 on April 29, 2020 mandating the use of “cloth face coverings” when in public settings where other physical distancing measures are difficult to maintain.
Given that most people haven't received the proper training on basic mask hygiene, or do not change their mask every hour as the aforementioned nursing manual prescribes (most people who do wear their filthy masks day in and day out, wear them in a store, then take them off and throw them in their car, or stash them under their chin, only to reuse them again at their next stop) the mask mandate has become more of a public health threat than a benefit.
According to a documentary video from the World Health Organization (WHO), “WHO only recommends the use of masks in specific cases. If you have cough, fever and difficulty breathing, you should wear a mask and seek medical care. If you do not have these symptoms, you do not have to wear masks because there is no evidence that they protect people who are not sick. However, if you are healthy and taking care of a person who is sick with the new Coronavirus, then you should wear a mask whenever you are in the same room with that person.”
In a 60 Minutes interview done before the face mask hysteria in the U.S., a video clip which is now being continually deleted by YouTube, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said, “The masks are important for someone who's infected, to prevent them from infecting someone else. Now, when you see people and look at the films in China and South Korea where everybody's wearing a mask, right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. Often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
Masks can also increase the viral load of a person who wears one for extended periods of time since the body's natural process of eliminating viruses is through breathing them out. The mask then traps virus and bacteria particles, causing the wearer to continually re-breathe them back in.
Curiously, one month after the mask mandate went into effect, Maine has seen a rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations during the last week of May, nearly doubling the weekly average of hospitalizations since the beginning of the outbreak two months ago when masks weren’t mandated. This, along with the research that shows long-term use of masks is detrimental to health, and Maine nurses reusing their masks all day long leads one to believe the masks - as the public is currently using them - are causing more harm to public health than good. In a sense, Big Sister's mask mandate can be classified as a “Public Health Threat.”
The Maine Revised Statutes define a Public Health Threat as “any condition or behavior that can reasonably be expected to place others at significant risk of exposure to a toxic agent or environmental hazard or infection with a notifiable disease or condition.” (22 MRS §801). Big Sister’s mask mandate does indeed seem to qualify.