Another pre-wormhole artifact, an early April retrospective on the Spanish Flu:

“The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”https://t.co/A4G4cfvDNx

— Genève Campbell (@bergerbell) March 3, 2021

The Post portrays the donning of masks to prevent the spread of a respiratory virus as a ridiculous and thoroughly discredited practice, calling it ‘useless’ in their very headline!

Turns out folks called them chin sails or flu fences back then rather than face diapers.

But some of the idiocy we’re witnessing today is just the repetition of unremembered history. Since I so seldom get to run quotes from the Washington Post approvingly, I’ll let them tell the tale:

The masks disrupted lives in unexpected ways. A San Francisco fisherman said “bandits” in flu masks robbed him. A woman taking a train from Chicago to Pasadena, Calif., reportedly experienced a break from sanity when she disembarked and “beheld the masked city,” according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. And columnist Fay King bemoaned the new mustaches. Men who formerly “couldn’t bear to have [a] hairy lip classed with a tooth brush” were growing facial hair, now hidden behind the masks.

[…]

Tobacco-chewing workers were “kept busy putting the masks on and off” to spit, reported the Fort Wayne Sentinel, while smokers became creative. One cigar vendor made doors in masks so that her wares could be enjoyed, reported the Oakland Tribune. One man fashioned a cigarette holder from a long rubber tube, and another simply shoved his mask up over his forehead.

Replace smoking with eating and you’d have thought that last paragraph was about current events, not stuff that happened over a hundred years ago. Mandating masks, however, may have had vastly more serious consequences back then as well.

You see, one thing nobody bothered mentioning in all the fear-mongering stories about the Spanish flu we were subjected to in March to soften us up for lockdowns is that, in 1918, the discovery of antibiotics was still a decade away.

And it turns out that the majority of Spanish flu fatalities died of secondary bacterial infections rather than from the flu itself.

So, since bacteria are over a hundred times larger than viruses, what do you think the odds are that forcing people to breathe into a piece of cloth all day might have been responsible for a huge chunk of the fatalities?

In any event, the Washington Post’s early March take on masks is in sharp contrast to what they started telling their readers at the end of August:

Masks Work. Now We Need to Pay Attention to When and Where, and Which Kind.

Funnily enough, that story made no mention of the one from five months back ridiculing masks. They also somehow managed to ignore the dozens of studies done over the last decade showing wearing one is neither safe nor effective.

The Post did, however, site, a completely fraudulent graph that Kansas officials somehow managed to foist on the public without getting thrown in jail.

Counties without mask mandates were surreptitiously given a different y-axis to make it look like they reported more cases when in fact they’d reported less…

@AlexBerenson Kansas Department of Health secretary is manipulating mask data by setting 2 Y axis points in their graph to appear that masks are making a big difference when no mask is still in fact lower. Complete propaganda. pic.twitter.com/pMBLcgTxoG

— Travis Baird (@tbaird9) August 7, 2020

Kansas officials also cherry-picked the data to make it look like mask-mandate counties witnessed a larger drop in cases than free counties when, once again, the reverse was true.

Rates for that date range aren’t shown on the chart. I know the correct one axis chart of KDHE shows new daily case rates were lower before the order than after. The mask counties rates may be declining since July 12 but the rates are still higher than they were before the order pic.twitter.com/6qQmZMDcV9

— Chris (@HPpetition) August 20, 2020

The Post’s August pro-mask piece also cites:

• A summary of data released by South Carolina which doesn’t appear to include the data itself or even the dates it was from. So who knows what’s going on there?
• 2 studies that didn’t involve masks at all.
• Two computer models neither of which has any empirical validation and, hence, both of which are total junk science.

A clue as to why the Washington Post went from aggressively discouraging masks in early April to using blatantly crooked data to push them in late August is given by the final sentence in the first piece, which quotes from the book it’s based on:

The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza,” Barry wrote. “Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

“…only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

Back in early-April 2020, of course, the Washington Post was trying to push us into the equally pointless but vastly more deadly lockdowns that rained down so much unprecedented hardship, misery, and death on the American people and, in the process, likely put Joe Biden in the White House.

Once lockdowns could no longer be maintained, however, the media needed something to create a palpable sense of crisis so folks didn’t notice the lack of any real one. And—voilà!—suddenly masks DO work.

Great catch. This is from when they were pushing lockdowns & needed to say masks won’t work. But when lockdowns couldn’t be maintained, they needed something to create a palpable sense of crisis so ppl didn’t notice the lack of any real one. So—voilà!—suddenly masks DO work.

— Michael Thau (@MichaelThau) March 3, 2021

That’s my honest take, at any rate. You believe what you want.

Just mind your own business and don’t try forcing the rest of us to be equally stupid.