PETER HITCHENS: Face masks turn us into voiceless submissives - and it’s not science forcing us to wear them, it’s politics

I will not be wearing a face nappy. It is my understanding that these are guidance and not law so therefore unenforceable. I doubt the police will want to spend their time trying to enforce this either. It is about creating subservience not about health.
I will withstand the tirade of the sheeple if it comes my way.

Fear is an effective control mechanism. Fear of social disapproval and online shaming has helped drive behavioural change. For a period, I stopped petting the next door dog, not so much out of fear that this particular disease was lurking in the dog's fur, but out of fear that such an action be deemed irresponsible.
It has been clear all along that surgical masks are not going to be adequate protection for those who are most at risk, i.e. performing intubation on someone with Covid 19.
The advice has always been distorted by non scientific considerations. Firstly they didn't want members of the public buying the more effective PPE and creating shortages for health workers.
Advice really started to change during the peak of BLM protests where mask wearing became a way of claiming to be responsible while attending large gatherings.
Now the advice is being influenced by the mask wearing being politicised and moralised as a demonstration of personal merit.
This is underpinned by the vague notion that mask wearing is protecting others. But from what? If you are sick you should be isolated. The main thrust of the purported justification for mask wearing seems to be that many people can be infected asymptomatically. That is probably correct, but it raises an awkward set of questions about how many people have really been infected and what the true mortality rates are.
Sadly this government has been trapped by a simplistic binary argument that seems to make them exceptionally responsible for any deaths that can be attributed to coronavirus.
I don't agree with Hitchens' hypothesis about this being a state obsessed with extending its reach. It looks more to me like a group who see that in the current climate, imposing restrictions is seen as the responsible, even caring, thing to do.
It may take over a year for the effects of lockdowns to ramify globally, we have to hope that a learning process about lockdown harms can take place.

"We all need to wear masks to protect the other. Why do they wear them religiously in China; HK or South Korea? It is a scientific fact and not a political one. We should copy what they do in Asis; where they are used to this kind of viruses. Full stop

Posted by: Paula Zingoni"

I don't know about China and HK, but in Japan lots of people wear masks and GUESS WHAT - they have more Flu than we do! Correlation is not causation. Presume you've been wearing a mask at all times, all your life, to protect others?

How quickly and unquestioningly all these mealy lap-lickers so glibly and casually accept this first phase of their being broken in.

All to soften them up for future personal invasions.

Who needs the gestapo busting down doors and forcing people to submit, when it's easier to train the masses to allow themselves to become their own gestapo, invading their personal body politic

"You say: "Another is to undertake a ferocious testing policy. This is now happening in Leicester where testers go from door to door to discover people who are ‘infected’ with Covid, even if they have no symptoms (which is usually the case) and are perfectly healthy. Then they can raise the alarm and close down the city."

So you implicitly deny that asymptomatic transmission of this disease is worth doing anything about. That is wholly irresponsible. A key feature of this virus is that people can be infectious without exhibiting any symptoms, and that is very probably why the virus has proved more difficult to suppress and control than we expected.
Posted by: Dave Bradney"

Please cite sources for this "asymptomatic transmission". Most viruses are impossible to suppress and difficult to control. This one is no different, but it's not especially more dangerous than lots of other viruses circulating, and in any case none of the measures taken have demonstrably helped control it, neither are they sustainable or justifiable, and they have undoubtedly done and continue to do great harm.

So, if I choose not to wear a mask, because frankly the thought is utterly repugnant to me, what words do I use when challenged at the shop entrance?
(And if I am out with my family, can I insist we all have the same 'hidden disability'?)

It’s an obvious fact that the more you look for covid 19 cases the more you will find.
It’s almost a certainty that vast numbers of people in the UK had covid 19 before March.
Likewise if we had done such testing for influenza this year and any other year you can mention then a huge number of extra cases would be discovered.
For example last year in the USA alone there were 16.5 million cases of influenza, and approx 1 billion cases worldwide.
If we tested the population right now for cannabis use we would find hundreds of thousands had just been using it.

So what? Testing positive for covid 19 does not mean you are ill, or that anyone you come into contact with will then drop dead. All that this testing us doing now is proving that there are more cases than scientists thought, but it’s not really affecting the death rates, which are consistently falling. So just why we have to wear masks in shops defies logic. Let’s get the economy back on track ASAP.

If you are healthy and under 70 years old then there’s a far smaller risk of death than flu, driving a car or plugging in your toaster at home. Last year over 6500 died in the UK from domestic accidents! That’s a lot more than died thus far (4800) from covid 19 in the working age range of 20-64, to put some simple common sense into the discussion.