COVID-19
We all want this crisis to end. Read this. Then find a mask and put it on when you go out in public
This is article is abridged for your convenience.
Public use of masks to control the coronavirus pandemic
(Originally published March 29 by Longrich Paleo Lab)
Nicholas R. Longrich, PhD
Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
The Longrich Paleontology Lab is part of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. We use fossils to understand large-scale evolutionary change in organisms and ecosystems.
The US and UK governments, as well as the World Health Organization, currently advise against the use of masks by the public to fight the ongoing Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic (1). But could they be wrong?
The governments of China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Viet Nam, Czechia, Slovakia, Bosnia and Taiwan all recommend that the public wear masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In some countries, like Japan, masks aren’t officially recommended, but are still widely used by the public. Many countries treat masks as a strategic resource. China has ramped up production of facemasks, converting Foxconn factories that once made iPhones to make face masks. Taiwan has also ramped up the production of facemasks, prohibited their export, and implemented price controls and rationing. It’s hard to see how both approaches could be right. Increasingly, advice against the use of face masks has been questioned (1) (2) (3), including by the head of China’s CDC (4). Austria has recently moved to make mask wearing in public obligatory, and in the United States, the CDC is now debating their use.
Common sense, scientific studies, but perhaps most of all the success of countries using masks to fight the coronavirus suggest that masks may make a difference. There are fewer scientific studies available to guide decision making than we might like, and the evidence is not always clear-cut. However, decision-making in a crisis requires that decisions be made in the absence of perfect clarity. What is clear is that the exponential mathematics of pandemics mean that even if masks are of limited benefit in reducing infection rates, masks could make a large difference over time, potentially slowing the pace of the pandemic, limiting its spread, saving lives, and finally, letting countries to restart the economies that their people depend on for their livelihoods.
Figure produced by Johns Hopkins University using data from Worldometers on March 29.
Masks protect you from others, others from you
It seems sensible to assume that any barrier between two people’s airways reduces the chance of an air-borne virus being transmitted between them. Masks worn by infected people catch some fraction of virus-laden respiratory droplets that are released by breathing and coughing. Perhaps just as important, breathing through a mask slows and deflects air as it is exhaled, potentially reducing the distance that viral droplets travel as aerosols.
Meanwhile, masks worn by uninfected people catch a fraction of the virus they’d otherwise inhale. If both infected and uninfected people wear masks, then these effects multiply. For example, hypothetically, if an infected person’s mask reduces the amount of virus spread by 75%, and the uninfected person’s mask reduces it by another 75%, then the total reduction of the virus spread is 94%.
It’s still possible that this reduction isn’t enough to prevent infection. However, masks could still protect people— because dosage matters. Lower dosing of virus means infection takes longer to build up, giving the immune system time to mount a response.
The immune system fights viruses, like a farmer trying to remove weeds from his field. How difficult those weeds will be to control depends on how many seeds there are. 1000 seeds in a field might not be a challenge, but 1,000,000 or 100 million make weeding far more difficult. In the same way, even when masks fail to prevent infection, by lowering the initial dose of virus they could conceivably make the difference between mild symptoms and a severe illness requiring hospitalization, or even leading to death.
Models suggest masks could work to control pandemics
Of course, it’s possible that masks might have only limited benefit in stopping the spread of COVID-19— for any number of reasons. Masks might provide limited protection, because they are less effective than suggested by some studies, because people misuse them, because of shortages of effective masks like surgical masks and N-95s— or all of these.
But to understand how they could still make a difference, we have to consider masks in the context of small reductions in viral transmission rates. Consider how epidemics grow— exponentially. Allowed to spread unchecked, one case of Covid-19 becomes 2.5 (assuming for this model an R0 of 2.5), each case causing 2.5 more, and so on. Over the course of 15 reproductive cycles, each taking 7 days, or about 3 months in total, one case becomes 2.5 x 2.5 x 25… or 2.5^15 = 931,323 cases (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. A simple model showing exponential growth in an uncontained outbreak over time (generation time = 7 days, R0 = 2.5) and with small reductions in the reproductive rate R.
Now, let’s suppose widespread use of masks cuts the growth rate by just 10%. Each person now infects 2.25 others, who infect 2.25 others, and so on. Over 15 cycles, 2.25^15 = 191,751 cases. An 80% reduction. Understanding this exponential growth explains how the virus caught the world by surprise even as the pandemic was monitored in real time. Exponential growth just doesn’t make sense, until you do the numbers, and even, they’re still hard to believe. But another counterintuitive aspect of exponential growth is that small decreases in the exponent greatly slow growth. A 10% increase in the exponent can have a massive effect, but even a limited intervention, with a 10% decrease over time, pays large dividends (Fig. 1).
These are very, very simple models. But sophisticated modeling also shows large scale use of masks could slow, even stop pandemics. A 2010 study found that above a certain threshold, widespread use of effective masks can reduce the reproductive number (R) of an influenza virus below 1, and the pandemic stops (25). If face masks were highly effective (well-designed, used properly and consistently), then public use of masks could stop a flu pandemic if used by just 50% of people. If masks were less effective, more than half the population would have to wear them to stop the pandemic. If masks were highly ineffective, they could flatten the curve of the epidemic, but wouldn’t stop it (25). We don’t know which model is most accurate. But does it even matter? In the context of the current pandemic, any of these scenarios would be a huge win.
Real world experience suggests masks work in pandemics
The most compelling evidence of the potential effectiveness of masks in the fight against COVID-19 comes from their use in the real world. Places that have controlled their coronavirus epidemics most effectively – China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, Kuwait, Czechia, Slovakia, Japan- use masks (Fig. 2). Aside from China, which was the epicenter of the pandemic and so played catchup in developing and implementing its strategy, virtually all of the worst outbreaks are in Western countries that officially advise against mask use, and where there is little culture or practice of mask wearing.
Figure 2. Western countries (US, Canada, Australia, UK, Western Europe) versus countries and territories using masks as part of official government or in practice policy (China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Kuwait, Slovakia, Czech Republic, in blues and greens). Countries with official or unofficial policies of mask usage have controlled the outbreak far better than those without. Note that Austria currently uses masks but has only revised its official policy recently.
Places like China, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Kuwait, Czechia and Singapore differ greatly in political organization, ranging from communism to democracies, and also in their level of economic development and population density. And strikingly, these countries also differ in their suppression strategies. China implemented a lockdown of Wuhan, shut down industry nationwide, implemented temperature checks and social distancing, tested extensively— and employed masks. Korea responded with an aggressive testing and contact tracing—and masks. Japan has done far less extensive testing than Korea, but shut down schools and large gatherings— and used masks. The pandemic management strategies used by these countries far more diverse than has been appreciated. Arguably one of the few things all these successes share is widespread wearing of masks. And on the other hand, one common factor shared by the pandemic suppression strategies of the US, Canada, the UK and Europe is the decision to discourage the use of masks by the public. This evidence doesn’t prove, but it does very strongly hint that masks are a critical part of these country’s suppression strategies. And by watching countries like Austria that have recently revised their policies, we can test this idea.
What kind of mask? Surgical masks as good as N95s; are improvised masks better than nothing?
Would cloth masks work? Research into the effectiveness of cloth masks is limited (34). Existing research shows homemade masks are- unsurprisingly- inferior to surgical masks. However, they appear to be better than nothing. One laboratory study found homemade masks were half as effective as surgical masks in filtering particles (35). Another study found homemade masks made from various materials stopped virus aerosols, but less well than surgical masks (36). A surgical mask stopped 90% of viral aerosol particles, a dish towel, 72%, linen, 62%, and a cotton T-shirt, 51% (36).
Conclusions
Strong scientific evidence and rational arguments exist for the widespread, public use of facemasks. The principle behind facemasks- they reduce the amount of virus exhaled by infected people, and inhaled by uninfected- suggest they should be a primary tool in combating any respiratory virus. Scientific research, including experimental studies, retrospective studies of the SARS epidemic, hospital studies of COVID-19, and modeling studies, all suggests masks are likely to be effective in controlling the pandemic. Most importantly, the experience of countries using masks against SARS and the current coronavirus pandemic imply that they are effective when used by the public. However, modeling studies and the real-world experience of countries like China and South Korea suggests that neither masks, nor anything else, provides a magic bullet against a pandemic. So strategies should not rely on any single intervention, but rather a wide range of interventions, potentially including masks. Further research and open debate on the effectiveness of masks and other strategies are urgently needed.
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From the Brownstone Institute
Only a few are curious about who was pushing the controls behind the scenes, how they managed to break through all restrictions on such schemes, the trillions doled out to business interests, and how these huge attacks on all civilized precepts of social and economic functioning swept the world.
Many took months or years to recognize that false premises had underpinned the government response that overturned their way of life. Those who resisted wish they had done so earlier. Those at the forefront wish they had been more vocal and effective.
Agitated masses of people abandoned their daily routines based on the error-ridden declarations of those in authority. Americans injected themselves with experimental shots and kept their children out of school. They castigated their neighbors and instituted systems of medical apartheid in cities and campuses. They shut down the kids’ schools, covered their faces, and taught the children that people are nothing but disease vectors.
The orthodox worshipers of Government edicts banned religious gatherings, insisted the elderly die alone, and offered indulgences for their political allies. Reprehensibly, the organs of power, intertwined in a conspiracy of shared interests, promoted the panic and exploited the destruction they sowed.
Homicides, childhood suicides, and mental illness skyrocketed while lockdowns gutted the middle class. The Federal Reserve printed three hundred years’ worth of spending in two months, and fraudsters stole at least tens of billions from Covid relief programs. The federal deficit more than tripled, and studies suggest the pandemic response will cost Americans $16 trillion over the next decade.
Corporate interests looted the public treasury. Mayors criminalized Easter worship, and bureaucrats used GPS data to monitor church attendance. Millions of unvetted men from the third world poured into our country while unvaccinated Americans died after being denied organ transplants.
Supposed monetary experts flooded the economy with trillions in liquidity while keeping interest rates near zero. The military fired healthy men for refusing to take ineffective shots. Government policies transferred $4 trillion from the middle class to tech oligarchs and permanently closed businesses across the country.
The powerful heeded Rahm Emanuel’s advice and capitalized on the crisis. The Constitution was designed to restrain the powerful, but public health became the pretext to unshackle aspiring tyrants from its limitations. The Intelligence Community, through bribes, deception, and coercion, overturned the republic. Government and private industry merged forces to unleash remarkable tyranny and unprecedented wealth accumulation.
In March 2025, Dr. Scott Atlas, the White House’s chief voice of dissent protesting Coronamania in 2020, reflected: “The mismanagement of the pandemic hit us personally and exposed a massive, across-the-board institutional failure. It was the most tragic breakdown of leadership and ethics that free societies have seen in our lifetimes.”
After ten weeks of lockdowns, the regime revealed its true aims. Fifteen days to flatten the curve was merely the “first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions,” as Birx admitted in her memoir.
Their aspirations were far more grandiose. As Dr. Fauci later wrote in Cell, they were prepared to “rebuild the infrastructures of human existence.” Then, a Minnesota police officer put his knee on the neck of George Floyd, a career criminal with heart disease, a Covid infection, and enough fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system to classify as an overdose.
With Floyd’s death, the pretext of “public health” disappeared, and social justice catalyzed their mission to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence.” School curricula, social media content policies, investment criteria, corporate hierarchies, Supreme Court nominations, Vice President selections, and every aspect of American life became dominated by a pernicious new ideology under the innocuous banner of inclusivity.
Meritocracy, tradition, and equality were quickly supplanted by diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those new buzzwords were merely covers for the ideology of nihilism and iconoclasm they mandated.
As the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights disappeared from daily life, so too did the physical connections to the American past. The statues came tumbling down, and shared language became taboo. While the churches remained shuttered, radicals preached a creed of anti-white, anti-Western vitriol. Freedom became reserved for those who subscribed to the new and amorphous creed. The nation added trillions to its deficit and destroyed institutions that took generations to build.
When the panic swept over the public and its representatives, the Supreme Court remained derelict, greenlighting the steamrolling of civil liberties. The Bill of Rights proved to be no more than “parchment guarantees.” As Justice Antonin Scalia explained, these enumerated rights – habeas corpus, freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of movement, the right to jury trials, equality under the law – were “not worth the paper they were printed on.”
The Framers designed a structure of government and the accompanying separation of powers to protect those liberties. Federalism intended for states to resist national tyranny; a bicameral legislature created systems meant to combat radicalism; separating the power of “the purse and the sword” – of spending and of executive power – was intended to limit despotism; judicial review would protect individual rights against the fervor of the mob; separate spheres of public and private entities would create an antagonistic balance between the rule of law and innovation.
But in the Covid response, a cabal, led by forces in the Intelligence Community and the US Military, abolished those safeguards. The federal government worked to punish insubordinate states. The legislature and the Federal Reserve opened the public coffers for the country’s most powerful forces to loot at will. The Supreme Court abandoned its role as a protector of liberty as the Chief Justice conjured a pandemic exception to jurisprudence. Unmitigated hysteria opened the opportunity for a coup d’etat as the regime marched in lockstep toward tyranny.
Five years later, fundamental questions remain unanswered, and threats are unabated. The origins of the pandemic remain clouded in confidentiality and mystery.
There has been no effort to curb the extra-constitutional excesses of the Intelligence Community. President Trump’s appointments of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Marty Makary present an opportunity for reform, but the pharmaceutical industry maintains its outsized and pernicious influence on government. Their liability shields remain intact, as do the corrupt arrangements of shared profiteering for public and private employees.
It remains to be seen whether President Trump and Elon Musk will be able to defeat, or even impair, the racket of taxpayer-funded NGOs that facilitated the destruction of 2020. The US has continued its development of quarantine camps, and pandemic frauds remain unrecovered. In March 2025, the Supreme Court denied President Trump, the head of the Executive Branch, the ability to halt foreign aid payments in a 5-4 decision, demonstrating the Chief Justice’s continued subservience to the D.C. establishment.
Many people have learned, lost faith in authority, and swear that they will not comply next time. It’s not so easy for industries that must comply or else lose their right to do business. When the health inspector tells the chicken farmer to slaughter his stock because of a PCR test, not complying will only lead to permanent closure. In other words, the lockdowns and mandates can easily come not through the front door but through the back door, basement, or attic.
It is an undeniable truth that the entire machine that unleashed mayhem is still in place. The industrial interests that pushed all these schemes still retain their access. The laws in states and the federal government have not been changed. Indeed, the quarantine camps could appear and be deployed in an instant with no real institutional blocks, and people can be rounded up and put there for reasons of politics masked as health concerns.
More optimistically, however, the resistance to lockdowns, mandates, and madness brought millions together in a coalition against tyranny. It raised awareness to the pestilent forces in our society that so many assumed were latent. The threat to fundamental rights led that amalgamation of political forces to reconsider and reaffirm the value of the first principles it had largely taken for granted. A jolt has awoken the somnambulant saunter of post-War America, creating the potential for real reform.
For now, however, that’s all there is: potential. And there is no clear indication as to the direction of that future. The President who oversaw lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed built a coalition of dissidents in his return to the White House. His second cabinet appears remarkably more resilient than the advisors of his first term. Alex Azar, Mike Pence, and Jared Kushner have departed the West Wing to make room for those who appear unphased by the uphill nature of the fight for liberty. The presence of RFK, Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Bhattacharya, and J.D. Vance represents a deliberate and monumental shift in the Executive Branch, but their capacity to make a lasting dent is still in doubt.
The perpetrators of all the outrages of the last five years, carefully documented in this series, have every hope of creating in the opposition the feel of victory without the reality. So far, the wins are pyrrhic and await instantiation in budgets, laws, and practice.
From the Brownstone Institute
Deborah Birx, who became the White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator on February 27, 2020, came directly from USAID – the department everyone now knows to be a front for CIA propaganda and regime change operations. [ref]
She served as U.S. Special Representative for Global Health Diplomacy, a joint USAID and State Department office that had ” developed a strategic approach to accomplish their shared mission that focuses on robust diplomacy and development as central to solving global problems.” [ref]
Almost exactly five years ago, the public was told that Deborah Birx was appointed by Vice President Mike Pence who, on February 26, 2020, took over coordination of the U.S. government’s response to the novel coronavirus. [ref]
The announcement said:
Ambassador Birx is a world-renowned global health official and physician. She will be detailed to the Office of the Vice President and will report to Vice President Mike Pence. She will also join the Task Force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She will be supported by the National Security Council staff. [ref]
This announcement contains hints that Birx was not chosen by public health agencies or officials. Rather, she appears to be coming from the national security apparatus, and “will be supported by the National Security Council staff.”
Further supporting this supposition, on March 11, 2020, at a Heritage Foundation Talk, Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, when discussing what the White House and NSC were doing about the virus, said:
We brought into the White House Debi Birx, a fantastic physician and ambassador from the State Department. We appreciate Secretary Pompeo immediately moving her over to the White House at our, well at the President’s, request. [min. 21:43 – 21:56]
In other words, Birx was “moved over to the White House” by the Secretary of State, at the request of the National Security Council.
The National Security Council Was in Charge of the U.S. Government’s Covid Response
These facts about Deborah Birx’s appointment to the Task Force are consistent with the government pandemic planning documents that show the NSC – not the HHS, CDC, NIAID, or any other public health agency – was in charge of the U.S. government’s Covid response policy.
Investigating Deborah Birx’s Role in the Covid Response
In August 2022 I published a series of articles investigating how Deborah Birx got the job on the Task Force, the bogus science she promoted, and her relationship with the public health officials on the Task Force.
Here are excerpts from, and links to, those articles:
How Did Deborah Birx Get the Job?
Deborah Birx, an immunologist and Army Colonel who worked for the Department of Defense and US Military on AIDS research, served as Directory of the CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS and as the US Global AIDS Coordinator [ref], was appointed White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator on February 27th, 2020.
She had no training or experience in epidemiology, novel pathogen pandemic response, or airborne respiratory viruses like the coronavirus.
She was offered the position by Matt Pottinger, Deputy National Security Advisor for China, who told Birx that if she did not take the job American lives could be lost.
In her “excruciating story” of the pandemic, Silent Invasion, Deborah Birx does not even try to make coherent scientific or public health policy arguments in favor of the Chinese-style totalitarian measures she advocated. Instead, she provides self-contradictory assertions – some downright false and others long disproven in the scientific literature.
We know Birx was not working with President Trump, although she was on a task force ostensibly representing the White House. Trump did not appoint her, nor did the leaders of the Task Force, as Scott Atlas recounts in his revelatory book on White House pandemic activity, A Plague Upon Our House. When Atlas asked Task Force members how Birx was appointed, he was surprised to find that “no one seemed to know.” (Atlas, p. 82)
Yet, somehow, Deborah Birx – a former military AIDS researcher and government AIDS ambassador with no training, experience, or publications in epidemiology or public health policy – found herself leading a White House Task Force on which she had the power to literally subvert the policy prescriptions of the President of the United States.
It is my (as yet unproven) theory that the lab-leak cabal, for which Birx was a primary agent in the US government, wanted to impose strict lockdowns all over the world.
Whatever their motives, the goal seems very clear: Get as many countries as possible to lock down for as long as possible, at least until vaccines become available.
But locking down entire countries full of healthy populations was never an accepted or ethically/medically/scientifically supported pandemic response, and people might object to such draconian measures. So Birx+cabal had to create enough panic to make it happen.
Given this connection between the U.S. government’s Covid response, the CIA-adjacent USAID, and the National Security Council, maybe those who say they are interested in full transparency can answer the questions presented here:
Hey, Jim Jordan: Ask Fauci Who His Bosses Were!
And the crucial questions raised by the Covid Dossier.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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