Question– Does the Covid-19 vaccine cause heart attacks?

Answer– It does, and researchers are closer to understanding the mechanism that triggers those events.

Question– How can I be sure you’re telling the truth?

Answer– Well, for starters, there’s a research paper that appeared recently in the prestigious Circulation magazine that draws the same conclusion. Here’s an excerpt from the paper:

“We conclude that the mRNA vacs dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium (layer of cells lining the blood vessels) and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle and may account for the observations of increased thrombosis (clotting), cardiomyopathy, (a group of diseases that affect the heart muscle) and other vascular events following vaccination.” (“Abstract 10712: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning”, Circulation)

It’s actually quite rare for researchers to be so blunt in their analysis, but there it is in black and white. As you can see, they didn’t pull their punches. Here’s how Alex Berenson summed it up on his blogsite at Substack:

“A new study of 566 patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines shows that signs of cardiovascular damage soared following the shots. The risk of heart attacks or other severe coronary problems more than doubled months after the vaccines were administered, based on changes in markers of inflammation and other cell damage. Patients had a 1 in 4 risk for severe problems after the vaccines, compared to 1 in 9 before. (“If you like heart problems, you’ll love the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines”, Alex Berenson, Substack)

“Doubled”? “The risk of heart attacks.. more than doubled” after vaccination?

Apparently, so. No wonder cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra is so flabbergasted. Here’s what he said in a recent interview:

“Extraordinary, disturbing and upsetting. We now have evidence of a plausible biological mechanism of how mRNA vaccine may be contributing to increased cardiac events. The abstract is published in the highest impact cardiology journal so we must take these findings very seriously.”

Indeed, we must, but our public health experts continue to pretend that nothing has changed, even though more and more professionals continue to speak out. Here’s Malhotra again:

“I have alot of interaction with the cardiology community across the UK, and anecdotally, I have been told by colleagues that they are seeing younger and younger people coming in with heart attacks…. Now since July, there’s been at least 10,000 non-covid deaths, and most of those have been driven by circulatory disease, in other words, heart attack and stroke. And there’s been a 30% increase in deaths at home, often because of cardiac arrest…. (So) The signal is quite strong… This needs to be investigated… And I think it is high-time that policymakers around the world put an end to the mandates, because –if this signal is correct– then history will not be on their side and the public will not forgive them for it.” (Dr Aseem Malhotra reveals increase in risk of heart attack following the mRNA COVID vaccine, Bitchute, Minute-1:35)

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Shocking, right? And what’s more shocking is the media’s response which is aimed at concealing the fact that these toxic injections pose a clear threat to the lives of millions. Is that overstating the case?

No, not at all.

So, what conclusions can we draw from this new research? What is the science telling us?

It’s telling us that the vaccine can reduce the flow of blood to the heart, damage heart tissue, and greatly increase the risk of a heart attack. The authors are telling readers point-blank that the vaccine can either kill or severely injure them. Can you see that?

Question– I can’t say. I haven’t read the report.

Answer– No, you haven’t, and you probably won’t either since the big news organizations and social media giants are going to make sure it never sees the light of day. But just read that one paragraph over again and try to grasp what the authors are saying. They’re saying that many people who choose to get vaccinated will either die or have years shaved off their lives. And–remember–this isn’t an opinion piece. It’s science. It’s also a straightforward repudiation of a mass vaccination campaign that is demonstrably killing people.

Question– You always exaggerate. This is just one report from one group of researchers. I could easily provide you with research that refutes your theory.

Answer– I’m sure you could, in fact there’s a small army of industry-employed propagandists (aka– “fact checkers”) who spend all their waking hours cobbling together fake news stories that do just that; discredit the science that veers even slightly from the official narrative. The truth is, the pro-vaxx disinformation campaign has been vastly more effective than the vaccine itself. I don’t think even you’d disagree with that.

Question– I do disagree with that, and I resent your characterization of the widespread support for these essential procedures as “pro-vaxx disinformation”. That is an extremely biased and ignorant statement.

Answer– Is it? In the last few weeks, we’ve produced hard evidence that a great many people who died after vaccination, died from the vaccination. We showed, for example, that two German pathology professors, Arne Burkhardt and Walter Lang, found that in five of the ten autopsies, “the two physicians rate the connection between death and vaccination as very probable, in two cases as probable.” These same doctors found that “lymphocytic myocarditis, the most common diagnosis.…(along with) autoimmune phenomena, reduction in immune capacity, acceleration of cancer growth, vascular damage “endothelitis”, vasculitis, perivasculitis and erythrocyte “clumping”.. In other words, the whole ‘dog’s breakfast’ of maladies that have been linked to the “poison-death shot”. (See full report here; “Lymphocyte riot’: Pathologists investigate deaths after Corona vaccination”, Free West Media)

These same pathologists found evidence of a “lymphocyte riot”, potentially in all tissues and organs. (Note– Lymphocytes are white blood cells in the immune system that swing into action to fight invaders or pathogen-infected cells. A “lymphocyte riot” suggests the immune system has gone crazy trying to counter the effects of billions of spike proteins located in cells in the bloodstream. As the lymphocytes are depleted, the body grows more susceptible to other infections which may explain why a large number of people are now contracting respiratory viruses in late summer.)

The autopsies provide hard evidence that the vaccines do, in fact, cause significant tissue damage. So, my question to you is this: How do you brush aside the rock-solid proof that the vaccines inflict significant injury on people who get injected? Do you need to examine the maligned corpses yourself before you change your mind and admit you’re wrong?

Question– Nothing can be deduced from just 10 autopsies. More than a billion people have been vaccinated so far, and the deaths are still within an acceptable range given the severity of the disease.

Answer– “The severity of the disease”? You mean a virus that is survived by over 99.98% of the people who catch it? You mean an infection that –according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins– killed 351,000 in the US in 2020 which is roughly half the number of people who die from heart disease every year? And when you say: “Nothing can be deduced from just 10 autopsies”, you are very much mistaken. You can detect a pattern of vaccine-generated disease that is produced by the injection of a toxic substance (spike protein) that causes bleeding, clotting and autoimmunity even in the people who survive. “Survival” does not mean undamaged. Oh, no. And anyone who has seen the many videos of healthy athletes dropping dead on the field of play months after being jabbed, should understand that “There go I but for the grace of God.” Bottom line: If you get injected, you’re never going to know whether you’ll be struck-down without warning by a similar cardio-type event. (See: “At least 69 athletes collapse in one month, many dead”, freewestmedia.com)

Do you think that if these athletes knew they could die from the vaccine, they would have made the choice they did?

Question– You’re being overly dramatic. Naturally, not everyone is going to react the same to an emergency-use drug, but– on balance– the vaccines have mitigated the impact of a deadly pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen for more than a century.

Answer– You really believe that, don’t you? Just like you really believe that Covid-19 is a totally unique and “novel” virus. If you just researched it a bit, you’d know that that theory has been thoroughly debunked. The Coronavirus isn’t new; it is an iteration of numerous other infections that have spread through the population for a least 2 decades. Take a look at this except from a research paper by the Doctors for Covid Ethics and you’ll see what I’m talking about:

“Several studies have demonstrated that circulating SARS-CoV-2-specific IgG and IgA antibodies became detectable within 1-2 weeks after application of mRNA vaccines... Rapid production of IgG and IgA always indicates a secondary, memory-type response that is elicited through re-stimulation of pre-existing immune cells…. Importantly, however, IgG rose faster than IgM, which confirms that the early IgG response was indeed of the memory type. This memory response indicates pre-existing, cross-reactive immunity due to previous infection with ordinary respiratory human coronavirus strains….

Memory-type responses have also been documented with respect to T-cell-mediated immunity. Overall, these findings indicate that our immune system efficiently recognizes SARS-CoV-2 as “known” even on first contact. Severe cases of the disease thus cannot be ascribed to lacking immunity. Instead, severe cases might very well be caused or aggravated by pre-existing immunity through antibody-dependent enhancement.

This study confirms the above assertion that the immune response to initial contact with SARS-CoV-2 is of the memory type. In addition, it shows that this reaction occurs with almost all individuals, and particularly also with those who experience no manifest clinical symptoms.

Conclusion– The collective findings discussed above clearly show that the benefits of vaccination are highly doubtful. In contrast, the harm the vaccines do is very well substantiated, with more than 15.000 vaccination-associated deaths now documented in the EU drug adverse events database (EudraVigilance), and over 7.000 more deaths within the UK and the US.” (“Letter to Physicians: Four New Scientific Discoveries Regarding COVID-19 Immunity and Vaccines – Implications for Safety and Efficacy”, Doctors for Covid Ethics)

Repeat: If the vast majority of people already have robust, pre-existing immunity, “then the benefits of vaccination are highly doubtful.”

​ Is that a reasonable “evidence-based” conclusion? And, if it is, then shouldn’t there have been a debate on this matter before over a billion people were inoculated with an experimental substance that causes, bleeding, clotting, autoimmunity, strokes, and heart attacks? And how could it not be true, after all, if there was no pre-existing immunity in a US population of 330 million people, then the number of fatalities would be exponentially higher. Instead, after a full two years of exposure– the percentage of deaths in the US is still less than one-third of one percent, a veritable drop in the bucket. Would that be possible with a truly super-contagious “novel” virus?

No, it would not be possible, which means that Fauci and Co lied. And the reason they lied was to convince people that they’re more vulnerable than they really are. It’s just one of many fearmongering scams they used to promote the vaccine: “Get vaccinated or die”, that was the message.

Doesn’t that bother you? Doesn’t it bother you to know the government and public health authorities twisted the truth in order to dupe you into an invasive and potentially-lethal medical procedure?

Question– I think our public health officials did the best they could given the circumstances.

Answer– I think you are wrong about that. I think they have lied repeatedly in order to advance a predominantly-political agenda. But, let’s assume you’re right for a minute. Then why do they continue to ignore groundbreaking research that conflicts with their political objectives? Have you thought about that? I already mentioned the shocking report above that indicates the vaccine reduces the flow of blood to the heart and increases the risk of a heart attack. Have you heard a peep out of Fauci or Walensky about that report?

No, not a thing.

Why do you think that is? You’d assume that if Fauci had our best interests in mind, he’d use his sway with the media to spread-the-word far and wide. But, no. He’s made no effort to confirm what the research indicates; that there’s a clear link between the production of the spike protein and cardiovascular damage. He hasn’t lifted a finger in that regard, and it shows. The surge in fatalities and the sharp uptick in excess deaths in the vast number of countries that launched mass vaccination campaigns earlier in the year, are mainly circulatory deaths, that is, heart attacks, strokes and the like. The latest example of this phenom is the Netherlands which has seen a 20% spike in deaths over the previous year. Check it out:

“Last week the number of deaths was more than 20 percent higher than usual for this time of year. The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported 3 750 deaths, nearly 850 more than expected. According to the statistical office, the higher mortality can be seen in all age groups.

In the Netherlands, 85 percent of people over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated, and many had their jabs only recently. …
Dutch officials have started injecting those 80 with boosters on Thursday, weeks earlier than planned…

Based on weekly data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, vaccinated people under 60 are twice as likely to die as unvaccinated people. And overall deaths in Britain are far above normal.

As in Germany, Swedes also appear to die at rates 20 percent or more above normal for weeks after receiving their second Covid jab, according to data from a Swedish study.” (“Dutch deaths more than 20% higher than previous year”, Free West Media)

And this isn’t just happening in the Netherlands and Germany either. It’s happening everywhere that mass vaccination campaigns were launched earlier in the year. Now, all of those countries are seeing a sharp uptick in cardiac arrests, strokes, vascular damage and blood clots. Why? What did we do differently in 2021 than we did in the years before?

Question– Where are you going with this? I feel like you’re setting me up for something?

Answer– I am. I want you to admit that the data now supports the case for terminating the vaccination campaign immediately. That’s my main objective, to convince people that we’re on the wrong track and need to stop this madness before more people die.

Did you know that the vaccines also damage the immune system?

It’s true, the injections are immuno-suppressant which means the body is less capable of fighting off infections, viruses and diseases. Think about that for a minute. The vaccine was supposed to protect its recipients from sickness and death, instead it does the exact opposite. It prevents cells from producing the antibodies that are needed to stave-off infection. Check out this short blurb from Dr. David Bauer of Francis Crick Institute who explains what’s going on:

“So, the key message from our finding is that, we found that recipients of the Pfizer vaccine– those who have two doses– have five to six-fold lower of neutralizing antibodies. These are the “gold standard” private-security antibodies of your immune system, which block the virus from getting into your cells in the first place. So, we found that that’s less for people with two doses. We also found that for people with just one dose of the Pfizer jab, that they are less likely to have high levels of these antibodies in their blood. And perhaps most importantly, we see that the older you are, the lower your levels are likely to be, and the time since you’ve had your second jab, the longer that time goes on, the lower your levels are likely to be. So, that’s telling us that we’re probably going to need to prioritize boosters for older and more vulnerable people, coming up soon, especially if this new variant spreads.” (“Dr David LV Bauer Francis Crick institute destroys the immune system”, Bitchute, 1 minute)

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6-times less neutralizing antibodies?

Yep. Like we said, the vaccine suppresses the immune system which opens a pathway to infection. Here’s how Alex Berenson summed it up in an article he posted recently on Substack:

“What the British are saying is they are now finding the vaccine interferes with your body’s innate ability after infection to produce antibodies against not just the spike protein but other pieces of the virus….

This means vaccinated people will be far more vulnerable to mutations in the spike protein EVEN AFTER THEY HAVE BEEN INFECTED AND RECOVERED ONCE...

… it probably is still more evidence the vaccines may interfere with the development of robust long-term immunity post-infection.” (“URGENT: Covid vaccines will keep you from acquiring full immunity EVEN IF YOU ARE INFECTED AND RECOVER“, Alex Berenson, Substack)

But how can that be? How can the government, the public health establishment and the drug companies push a vaccine that actually makes people more vulnerable to disease? It makes no sense, right; unless, of course, the object is to make people sicker and more likely to die? Is that what’s going on?

Indeed, it is. Here’s more from a Pfizer whistleblower:

“A former Pfizer employee, now working as a pharmaceutical marketing expert and biotech analyst, has provided evidence in a public meeting in September suggesting that Pfizer is aware that these shots can cause those vaccinated to be more prone to contracting COVID-19 and infections.

According to the whistleblower Karen Kingston, “So, when they weren’t injected, their infection rate was 1.3% and when they got injected, it was 4.34%. It went up by over 300%. They had less infection when they had no protection. So, that’s a problem.” (“VIDEO: Former Pfizer Employee Says COVID-19 Vaccine Causes Recipients to Become More Susceptible to the Virus”, Gateway Pundit)

Why isn’t this front-page news? Why is the science being suppressed? Why are the claims of credible professionals being swept under the rug, censored on social media, and brushed aside by our public health officials?

The only reasonable explanation, is that the authors of the mass vaccination campaign want to conceal the dangers of the vaccine from the public, because what they really care about is universal vaccination, making sure that all 7 billion people on Planet Earth are vaccinated come hell-or-high-water. As you can see, the science hasn’t deterred them at all. They are just as determined to implement their plan as they were on Day 1, maybe more so.

Take a look at this clip from an explosive paper that shows how the spike protein enters the nucleus of our cells causing incalculable damage to the immune system. This cutting-edge research has caused a furor in the scientific community.

“Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS–CoV–2) has led to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID–19) pandemic, severely affecting public health and the global economy. Adaptive immunity plays a crucial role in fighting against SARS–CoV–2 infection and directly influences the clinical outcomes of patients. Clinical studies have indicated that patients with severe COVID–19 exhibit delayed and weak adaptive immune responses; however, the mechanism by which SARS–CoV–2 impedes adaptive immunity remains unclear. Here, by using an in vitro cell line, we report that the SARS–CoV–2 spike protein significantly inhibits DNA damage repair, which is required for effective V(D)J recombination in adaptive immunity.

Mechanistically, we found that the spike protein localizes in the nucleus and inhibits DNA damage repair by impeding key DNA repair protein BRCA1 and 53BP1 recruitment to the damage site. Our findings reveal a potential molecular mechanism by which the spike protein might impede adaptive immunity and underscore the potential side effects of full-length spike-based vaccines.” (“SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro”, SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro”, mdpi.com)

What does it mean?

It means that the spike protein enters the nucleus of our cells and damages our DNA. That was not supposed to happen. The vaccine was not supposed to penetrate the inner sanctum where our genetic material is stored. Once it makes its way to the nucleus, the spike protein prevents the repair of broken DNA which, in turn, impacts the proliferation of B-cells and T-cells that are essential in the fight against infection. (Note– The spike also effects specific genes that are highly “predispositional for cancer development… so, this is clearly news of great significance that should not be taken lightly.” (See– “Spike protein inside nucleus enhancing DNA damage? – COVID-19 mRNA vaccines update 1″, you tube, 12 minutes)

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Here’s how Dr. Mobeen Syed explains the effects of the spike protein on the immune system: (I transcribed this myself and apologize for any errors.)

“The spike protein enters the nucleus, and not just the spike but also the non-structural proteins end up in the nucleus as well. They do not just contaminate the DNA, but also interfere with the machinery and repair of the DNA… When our cells are dividing, there are strict mechanisms to make sure the DNA is correctly repaired, and correctly copied, otherwise the cell will become a cancer cell. We have an elaborate mechanism to repair DNA…. There are multiple mechanisms for DNA repair, because there are multiple kinds of repair… These two mechanisms are important, because these two mechanisms of repair are impaired by the spike proteins presence.… When any infection occurs, the B cells and T cells proliferate. Increasing in number, means making copies of the DNA… Proliferation itself is an important immune response. The creation of the antibodies requires functioning DNA...

What I am explaining here is that DNA break-and-repair can also be done in immune cells intentionally for the normal function of the immune system. Every B and T cell needs a variable binding sight to attach to the antigen, and to create that variation we need the DNA to randomly restructure which needs DNA break-and-repair … Imagine there are repair enzymes in our body that go to the broken DNA and fix it. Now imagine that these repair enzymes no longer go to the site of the broken DNA or even are produced? Researchers found that when the nonstructural proteins are drawn into the nucleus, then reduced proliferation of the (B and T) cells occurs… and our ability to respond to infections will not be good.” (“Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair”Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair”, you tube)

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Imagine if someone or some group of powerful elites wanted to reduce the global population by many billions of people. And they figured the best way to achieve that objective would be to inject people with a mysterious pathogen that had been secretly developed in foreign labs for over a decade. Imagine if that lethal antigen not only triggered heart attacks, strokes and catastrophic vascular injury, but also disabled the body’s critical defense (immune) system, thus, increasing one’s susceptibility to infections, viruses and diseases by many orders of magnitude. Imagine if we saw signs that this plan was unfolding before our very eyes, from the mountain of corpses that were riddled with killer lymphocytes, to the sharp rise in excess deaths and all-cause mortality, to the unexplained surge in cardiac arrests, strokes, autoimmunity, bleeding, clotting, headaches, bruising, inflammation, heart-valve problems, brain bleeds, vascular, neurological and respiratory diseases all suspiciously linked to the initiation of a mass vaccination campaign.

Could such a thing could happen in this day and age? Could anyone be bold enough to launch a war against humanity? Is anyone capable of such evil?

Yes, they are. (read more)

First, though, a parable from my very formative and disturbing time in American academia: I abandoned my professorial career at the height of the Great Awokening. Before I fled, I endured two pretty difficult years, navigating tidal of waves of nonsense and trying to stay uncanceled. In the midst of it all, I had plenty of time to study the institutional workings of the Woke. The fundaments of their dogma were laid by specific critical theorists long before I entered graduate school, but the system as a whole did not become operative until a long while later, as its acolytes ascended to senior faculty and administrative positions, and a distributed consensus emerged that the tenets of Wokeness were right and necessary and just.

People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who now teach at even the most august American schools, the woke circus has its own attractions. It provides distraction from the unrelenting demands of objectivity and originality, and permits a pleasing, self-righteous indulgence in moral scolding. In Woke Studies, the answers are always predetermined and it is very easy to get anything published, provided you say the right things. For students, Wokeness has still other attractions—as a font of easy coursework [dumbed down so the Affirmative Action admits won't FAIL], as an opportunity for social networking, and as a locus for the periodic ritual entertainment of false moral outrages and protests.

All of this is to say that Wokeness was selected from many aspiring ideological and intellectual programs, because it gave the right things to the right people. The bottomless mediocrities who helped construct the subgenre of critical theory on which the whole Woke phenomenon rests are not in charge of the Wokeness Circus. The administrators who promote and participate in Wokeness are not alone in running it, and they could never turn off or redirect the machine over which they appear to preside. Stepping out of line would only mean their personal destruction. The donors, the trustees, the tenured faculty, the powerful committees – none of these hold the reins either. Wokery is a self-organising decentralised movement. It is the sum of all the actions and opinions of all the people who have opted into it.

Importantly, Wokeness is also self-radicalising, in the way that many university-incubated ideologies turn out to be. Administrators or department chairs are constantly in danger of being outflanked on their left, and so they must adopt and endorse the most radical line to maintain their position. Otherwise they will be accused of racism or sexism or whatever and replaced by even more unhinged dangerous people. Also too, diversity is increasingly managed by dedicated administrative offices and special committees, which end up peopled with the most racially obsessed, divisive, woke-enthused types imaginable. Finally, nobody can gain support for or argue on behalf of anything, unless it can be cast in Woke terms. Want a new Egyptologist? Need to renovate the library? Collecting support for shortening the spring semester by a week? Well, you and your allies better explain why these initiatives will help redress historical racial injustices. In this way, all internal discourse and management comes to be about Wokeness, all of the time.

While Wokeness provides many personal incentives for true believers, it is destructive for the institutions that foster it. Those schools that have advanced very far down the woke path face semi-regular hate speech hoaxes and student protests, hordes of incapable hostile junior faculty, and massive curricular disarray. They are pretty miserable places to work and study and they are bleeding talented people and rapidly burning through the cultural capital they accumulated in prior, more reasonable decades. Nor is Wokeness, at the end of the day, even the best thing for many of its most committed adherents. Alas, this doesn’t matter either. Nobody, not even Kimberlé Crenshaw, can redirect or modulate Wokeness any longer.

All of this matters, because American universities aren’t just eager sponsors of racial hysteria. They have also emerged as some of the most radical centres of Corona containment in the world. Their students endure all manner of unreasonable hygiene measures. Constant testing, quarantining, mask rules, enforced isolation, officially encouraged snitching, movement restrictions, vaccine mandates — all of this and more are routine for millions of students. Klaus Schwab is not making them do this. The culprit is a broad, distributed adherence to the dictates of containment ideology, probably driven in no small part by emotional and ideological exhaustion with the prior tyranny of Wokeness. Now that everybody agrees, the self-directed, self-radicalising elements are in place: Administrators and committee chairs that are perceived not to be taking Corona seriously enough will be removed or sidelined in favour of more radical people who take things more seriously than you could possibly imagine. All of these schools now operate with a wealth of Corona Committees, peopled by all the most lunatic germophobic faculty.

Like wokeness, containment is destructive to the institutions that embrace it. American universities in particular depend on attracting students with over-provisioned campuses and entertaining student-life programs. They are basically massive amusement parks for young adults. Sooner or later, people will begin to think twice about paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to live in a prison camp. The destruction will start at less selective schools and proceed upwards. How high it will go, nobody knows. Also like Wokeness, containment is probably bad even for many of its truest believers and most committed enforcers, who now live lives of fear, desperation and isolation, and see now way out.

It is very easy to confuse cause and effect when examining the emergence of ideological systems. People raised up as leaders and heroes of emerging movements are almost never its directors, but merely expressions of all the separate beliefs and aspirations of those involved. Ultimately it’s just extremely difficult for any confined group of people, no matter how wealthy or powerful, to implement any kind of coherent agenda in heavily bureaucratised modern states. Policies can only be realised via a bureaucratic machinery involving thousands and thousands of people, all of whom have different incentives and answer to different bosses. Even when a single person manages to sell a policy to the bureaucratic machine, he cannot predict how it will be implemented and he will have no control over what actually happens. The agency of any single person is illusory here. It is the demobilised, distributed, complex institutional system that selects items and policies, via largely hidden processes.

To further irritate my readers, I provide the following sloppy sketch. It is the best that I can do with my fingers on the train. The inverted triangle represents the growing volume of people in the apparatus of government who have bought in to Corona containment, as we move forward in time. At the beginning — the tip — there were just a few. Now almost everybody is on board. Even my little institute, which has nothing to do with viruses or hygiene or public health, is a firmly committed node in the bureaucratic Corona network.

The green zone represents a notional threshold. Below this area, most policy initiatives won’t come to your notice or achieve very much. Not enough of the bureaucracy is on board. Much beyond this zone, and this policy is a part of your everyday life. The little circle at the bottom represents the maximum possible size of any directed initiative or conspiracy within the bureaucratic machine. For any such confined initiative to be realised, the conspirators must hope for adoption vastly in excess of their own numbers and their own powers, at which point they will have lost all prospect of steering the juggernaut. Finally, the purple line represents the furthest possible institutional horizon of our conspirators. They may have vague hopes of getting their plan adopted at all levels of government, but the only people on whom they can directly act and whose reactions they have any expectation of predicting, are below that line.

These constraints don’t exist in every country, but in the world of liberal democracy, this is very roughly how governance happens. We have to fit our theories of What Is Going On to some version of this framework, or they just won’t be credible.

Tomorrow, I promise, I’ll get back to more technical Corona posts. There are many scientific and political developments to discuss.

For all the people preparing to tell me what an uninformed idiot I am, I’ve prepared this brief list of objections and answers. In my experience it covers about 80% of everything you want to shout at me right now:

These failures are too consistent to be accidental: The system is too large and unwieldy to act according to coherent strategies and basically lurches from one failure to the next. It is only good at sustaining itself and enforcing compliance.

Elites can’t be stupid, or they wouldn’t be elites: Yes, they can actually, but the behaviour of the system as a whole is more important to my argument. Because of these institutional constraints, the system is condemned to behave constantly in overtly stupid ways and there is nothing that any individual supergenius anywhere can do about it.

The system you’re describing is a just a facade, those bureaucrats are all pawns. There are secret actors pulling the strings behind the scenes: This is all but impossible, and one of the fundamental mistakes of conspiracy theorising on both the left and the right. Political power can’t be mediated in this way; power accrues to those who are perceived to wield it.

It’s absurd to say humans don’t plot and scheme: There are many, many plots and schemes all the time. But widely adopted, general policies are the reflection of a broad-based bureaucratic consensus and are by their very nature undirected.

It’s obnoxious that you think they’re acting in good faith: None of this necessarily presumes that anybody is acting in good faith. Plenty of people who participate in bureaucratic consensus politics do so for cynical reasons.

You’re ignoring the fact that this is evil: No, I say all the time that it’s extremely evil. I am arguing merely that the locus of evil is not condensed in any single actor, but rather distributed, like a foul-smelling gas, throughout the entire system.

In sum: If I could wave a wand and send the whole globalist crew on a twenty-year mission to conduct a thorough tree census of Siberia, I would. But that wouldn’t stop any of this. Containment would continue on its current path, and a new collection of clowns and loser philanthropists would emerge out of the woodwork to take their place. Before long, Siberia would be very full of tree counters, and we would still be facing vaccine mandates and lockdowns and all the rest of it.

UPDATE: Allusions to angry replies are about enraged emails, not the comments on the last piece. I learn a lot from disagreement and back-and-forth with my readers; I merely find the outrage that some of my theories provoke puzzling and no little amusing. (read more)

Containment is indeed overtly authoritarian, and perhaps that’s the only point that analogies to communism or fascism are trying to make. Nevertheless, these policies are not rooted in the hard authoritarianism of a Stalin or a Mussolini. Excepting the special case of China – special because it is where all of this came from – there is a markedly reduced enthusiasm for Corona restrictions beyond those places that proclaim themselves bastions of freedom and democracy. Most of the hardest-line Corona regimes are members in good standing of the liberal West, and they prefer the softer, distributed authoritarianism pioneered by liberal democracies.

The truth is that no other political system could have produced Corona containment, as we’ve experienced it. First-world democracies are anything but systems for channelling the will of the people. Instead, with the rise of mass media and mass society, they have become elaborate consensus-farming operations. Unique in history, they are governing systems that use mass media to call into being the phenomenon of public opinion, which is then shaped by a combination of propaganda and political participation into a tool of governance and consensus in its own right. The majority is thus first acclimated to the agenda of the state, and then deployed to enforce governmental directives and to repress dissidents, the non-compliant and, increasingly, even the disinterested. Corona containment is an obvious product of a system like this, depending as it does on widely distributed consensus policies that are enforced less by the police than by enthusiastic majorities deputised by journalists.

So, there is an authoritarianism here, but if we’re being pedantic, it’s of a different nature than the kind we tend to encounter in history books. It’s highly significant, and a sign of desperation, that Austria is contemplating brief prison terms for those who refuse vaccination. Austria would much prefer the soft authoritarianism it has used until now, and that most of our countries still prefer: ‘Nudge’ behavioural engineering, disingenuous media messaging, regulatory harassment, and directed public opprobrium. Taken together, these things are more insidious than blunter tactics like imprisonment; they take aim at your will and your soul, not merely your body.

What is the purpose of all this enforcement, then? While nothing any of our countries do is ever at any point about just one thing, for me the most parsimonious theory is still that the underlying, originating policies really are, at their core, [superficially] about suppressing a virus. This doesn’t mean that the odious people running this circus are sincere, or that they have your best interests in mind. It’s very much the opposite. (read more)

Their virtue-signaling about equity and justice is well and good until they become victims -- or, at least, feel threatened.  The chickens are coming home to roost throughout blue America, to amend Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s famous dictum.

Here are samples of the growing havoc:

The culprits in this race to the bottom aren’t just awful elected officials, incompetent public servants, and law enforcement rendered impotent in tackling crime, but a corrupt worldview that permits thieves and thugs to run wild.  These brazen mass robberies aren’t a passing phenomenon.  They’ll only spread, increase, and worsen.  They reflect a perverse ordering of society that stems from progressive values and principles.

Making political changes in blue jurisdictions next election year would certainly slow the slide, but not arrest and reverse it.  There’s no exit for citizens in blue states and jurisdictions unless they cast off progressivism, which feeds societal derangement.  Otherwise, when fickle voters eventually return progressive politicians to office, lawlessness and rot will resume. 

By way of example, in the early 90s, crime-plagued New York City was made worse by the dreadful David Dinkins’ administration.  Dinkins was followed by 20 good years of law-and-order under Giuliani and Bloomberg.  New York thrived.  The de Blasio years mark a return to the Dinkins’ era, along with steeper decline.  It’s no coincidence that de Blasio began his government career under Dinkins.          
Progressives aren’t a demoralized lot.  That wouldn’t explain why and how they’re failing at practically everything they touch, including upholding law and protecting innocents from criminals.  Conceit, in part, insulates them from connecting the dots.    

Progressives haven’t lost their confidence in traditional values; they’ve consciously abandoned those values over decades.  They’re confidentially anti what America has long stood for; their disdain continues to grow.  

The breakdown of law and order is obviously a prerequisite to “transforming” America.  Left-leaning ruling classes rationalized or embraced and, in some instances, openly encouraged lawlessness and violence last year.  Kamala Harris’ public support for this degeneracy surely emboldened criminals, which includes BLM and Antifa.  Both groups act in loose cooperation with Democrats. 

Victims, like the McCloskeys in St. Louis, who last year defended their property from a mob, per Missouri law, were indicted by Democrat circuit attorney Kim Gardner while real criminals roamed free.  The McCloskeys agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges, which amounted to wrist slaps.  The anticipation of a pardon from Missouri governor Mike Parson spared the McCloskeys the time, costs, and uncertainty of lengthy criminal proceedings. 

This autumn, the nation watched the undeserved prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, who defended his life against assailants during the Kenosha riots last August.  Videotapes, showing Rittenhouse being menaced and assaulted, necessitating his killing two assailants and wounding another, were plainly exculpatory.

Rittenhouse was maliciously prosecuted.  Thomas Binger, Kenosha’s lead prosecutor, saw to it.  As with the McCloskeys, the Rittenhouse trial was, in a larger sense, an attempt by progressives to upend a civilizational norm.  What was really on trial was a right to self-defense.

Democrats Kim Gardner and Thomas Binger chose to weaponize the law, going after law-abiding citizens, attacking their moral right to protect themselves.  Soros-backed DAs in San Francisco (Chesa Boudin), Los Angeles (George Gascón), and Chicago (state attorney Kim Foxx) are lax on crime and grant passes to bad guys routinely.    

Gardner, Binger, et al, are only symptomatic of deeper trouble across blue America.  The deeper trouble is the polities that install these men and women in office or elect those who hire the Bingers.  Harmful policies and governance result from poor choices by citizens who are guided by faulty judgment.  The sorry spectacle of Christmas season in San Francisco is a testament to the community’s dysfunction.  Chesa Boudin wasn’t appointed by God.      

The good news is that Boudin and Gascón are facing recall efforts.  Not all San Franciscans and Angelenos are ready to accept their communities’ suicides.  Likewise, in a fit of sanity, Seattle voters elected Republican Ann Davidson as city attorney in a tight contest.  Minneapolis voters turned out two anti-police city council members and voted down an initiative to effectively dismantle the public safety department.  But do these results truly represent the beginning of sea changes in understanding or merely reactions to the moment?       

What we’ve seen in Washington, D.C. since January has been a concerted effort by Democrats to impose failed progressive beliefs and values on red (or traditional) America.  Behind every Biden and congressional Democrat measure is an attempt to alter the nation in fundamental ways… to refashion the country so it more closely resembles declining blue states, New York and California being the premier examples.  And the aforementioned blue cities, where rot is as plain as day. 

If that seems perverse, it is.  Healthy minds, informed by healthy morality, measure actions as those actions play out in reality.  Consequences matter.  If failures occur, partial or whole, changes are made to align one’s perceptions and actions with facts.  That makes for healthier people and communities. 

Progressives have either lost or lack the very vital capacity to properly discriminate.  They’re enthralled by a belief system that omits the damaging facts of their actions if those facts offend or challenge their beliefs.  Failures are ignored or excused -- and if you listen to Jen Psaki’s yakking, spun as successes.  Through rampant crime, unsafe streets, ransacked stores, and more, blue communities are bearing the brunt of this obstinacy -- a communal obstinacy, no less.     

Such is the stuff of blind zealotry, too, and in a real sense, that makes progressives dangerous -- not only to themselves and their communities but to us… to the nation as a whole. 

Zealots can’t be reasoned or compromised with; they aren’t open to either, anyway.  They won’t stop unless they’re defeated and pushed to the margins.  If progressive zealotry prevails, and progressives succeed at imposing their worldview on us, the consequences will be similar to what’s happening in dreary San Francisco and Chicago.  Main streets in our communities will become mean streets.  Americans of good sense and goodwill can’t permit that to happen. (read more)

The next question is, "Are electric cars cheaper than gas cars?"  No, they cannot be cheaper, and that's even if you run them on renewables.  Take solar energy, for example.  Even if sunlight is free, the laws of thermodynamics still control.

Every time energy changes form, there is a loss factor.  Sunlight impinging on solar cells changes only 14–47% of the energy to electricity.  The forty-seven percent figure is state-of-the-art, so it is not available for everyday use.

Electricity is then stored in chemical-based car batteries (with a loss).  And then chemical energy is reconverted back to electricity (with a loss) and finally to mechanical energy, where the tire rubber meets the road (with a loss).  At a guess, not more than 5% of the original sun power turns the wheels of an E.V.  That's awful.  What this means is that it is more efficient to run a gas-powered vehicle.

You can do similar analyses with other renewables, whether wind or water power.  They simply aren't efficient.

That’s why they believe in a fake pandemic, and that is why the US government, which is doing every single thing that hurts America, can successfully say “Hey! Look over there! Look at those people with small eyes! They eat dogs! They are the REAL problem!”

Talking about any country other than the US being a threat to Americans is totally moronic. You could, I guess, say “Israel,” but even that isn’t really true, because Israel is only a threat because the Jews that control America allow it to be a threat.

It just makes you sick how easy it is to distract these peasants with gibberish.

RT:

More than half of Americans (52%) see China as the greatest threat to the country, according to a Beacon Research poll commissioned by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute (RRPFI), a conservative think tank. By comparison, 14% said Russia was the main threat, and 12% said the same about North Korea.

Only 21% listed Beijing as the chief threat to the US in 2018, when RRPFI published its first annual national defense survey.

Additionally, 65% respondents said they considered China an enemy, while 23% said they viewed it as an ally.

“There is bipartisan consensus about the threats we face. For the first time, a majority of respondents say a single nation poses the greatest threat to the United States: China,” RRPFI said in a statement.

Explaining what concerns them the most about China, those polled cited China’s economic practices (20%), military build-up (19%), alleged human rights abuses (17%), and foreign policy (13%). Separately, 23% said they were concerned with Beijing’s AI technology, and another 23% said they were concerned with supply chain vulnerability.

The number of Americans who think the US should concentrate its military forces in East Asia grew from 16% in 2019 to 37%, the survey shows. “Conversely, the percentage choosing the Middle East dropped from 37% in 2019 to 17%,” Beacon Research said.

As far as I can tell, both sides agree on some points.

They agree that N95 respirators, when properly used by trained professionals, help prevent the wearer from getting infected.

They agree that surgical masks help prevent sick people from infecting others. Since many sick people don’t know they are sick, in an ideal world with unlimited mask supplies everyone would wear surgical masks just to prevent themselves from spreading disease.

They also agree that there’s currently a shortage of both surgical masks and respirators, so for altruistic reasons people should avoid hoarding them and give healthcare workers first dibs.

But they disagree on whether surgical masks alone help prevent the wearer from becoming infected, which will be the focus of the rest of this piece.

1. What are the theoretical reasons why surgical masks might or might not work?

Epidemiologists used to sort disease transmission into three categories: contact, droplet, and airborne. Contact means you only get a disease by touching a victim. This could be literally touching them, or a euphemism for very explicit contact like kissing or sex. Droplet means you get a disease when a victim expels disease-laden particles into your face, usually through coughing, sneezing, or talking. Airborne means you get a disease because it floats in the air and you breathe it in. Transmission via “fomites”, objects like doorknobs and tables that a victim has touched and left their germs on, is a bonus transmission route that can accompany any of these other methods.

More recently, scientists have realized that droplet and airborne transmission exist along more of a spectrum. Droplets can stay in the air for more or less time, and spread through more or less volume of space before settling on the ground. The term for this new droplet-airborne spectrum idea is “aerosol transmission”. Diseases with aerosol transmission may be spread primarily through droplets, but can get inhaled along with the air too. This concept is controversial, with different authorities having different opinions over which viruses can be aerosolized. It looks like most people now believe aerosol transmission is real and applicable to conditions like influenza, SARS, and coronavirus.

Surgical masks are loose pieces of fabric placed in front of the mouth and nose. They offer very good protection against outgoing droplets (e.g. if you sneeze, you won’t infect other people), and offer some protection against incoming droplets (e.g. if someone else sneezes, it doesn’t go straight into your nose). They’re not airtight, so they offer no protection against airborne disease or the airborne component of aerosol diseases.

Respirators are tight pieces of fabric that form a seal around your mouth and nose. They have various “ratings”; N95 is the most common, and I’ll be using “N95 respirator” and “respirator” interchangeably through most of this post even though that’s not quite correct. When used correctly, they theoretically offer protection against incoming and outgoing droplet and airborne diseases; since aerosol diseases are a combination of these, they offer generalized protection against those too. Hospitals hate the new “aerosol transmission” idea, because it means they probably have to switch from easy/cheap/comfortable surgical masks to hard/expensive/uncomfortable respirators for a lot more diseases.

Theory alone tells us surgical masks should not provide complete protection. Coronavirus has aerosol transmission, so it is partly airborne. Since surgical masks cannot prevent inhalation of airborne particles, they shouldn’t offer 100% safety against coronavirus. But theory doesn’t tell us whether they might not offer 99% safety against coronavirus, and that would still be pretty good.

2. Are people who wear surgical masks less likely to get infected during epidemics?

It’s unethical to randomize people to wear vs. not-wear masks during a pandemic, so nobody has done this. Instead we have case-control studies. After the pandemic is over, scientists look at the health care workers who did vs. didn’t get infected, and see whether the infected people were less likely to wear masks. If so, that suggests maybe the masks helped.

This is an especially bad study design, for two reasons. First, it usually suffers recall bias – if someone wore a mask inconsistently, then they’re more likely to summarize this as “didn’t wear masks” if they got infected, and more likely to summarize it as “did wear masks” if they stayed safe. Second, probably some nurses are responsible and do everything right, and other nurses are irresponsible and do everything wrong, and that means that if anything at all helps (eg washing your hands), then it will look like masks working, since the nurses who washed their hands are more likely to have worn masks. Still, these studies are the best we can do.

Gralton & McLaws, 2010 reviews several studies of this type, mostly from the SARS epidemic of the early 2000s. A few are underpowered and find that neither surgical masks nor respirators prevent infection (probably not true). A few others show respirators prevent infection, but do not investigate surgical masks (probably right, but useless for our purposes). Two seem relevant to the question of whether surgical masks work:

Rapid awareness and transmission of SARS in Hanoi French Hospital, Vietnam was conducted in a poor hospital that only had surgical masks, not respirators. In the latter stages of the epidemic, 4 workers got sick and 26 stayed healthy. It found that 3 of the 4 sick workers hadn’t been wearing masks, but only 1 of the 26 healthy workers hadn’t. This is a pretty dramatic result – subject to the above confounders, of course.

Effectiveness of precautions against droplets and contact in prevention of nosocomial transmission of SARS is larger and more prestigious, and looked at a cluster of five hospitals. Staff in these hospitals used a variety of mask types, including jury-rigged paper masks that no serious authority expects to work, surgical masks, and N95 respirators. It found that 7% of paper-mask-wearers got infected, compared to 0% of surgical-mask and respirator wearers. This seems to suggest that surgical masks are pretty good.

The meta-analysis itself avoided drawing any conclusions at all, and would not even admit that N95 respirators worked. It just said that more research was needed. Still, the two studies at least give us a little bit of evidence in surgical masks’ favor.

How concerned should we be that these studies looked at health care workers specifically? On the one hand, health care workers are ordinary humans, so what works for them should work for anyone else. On the other, health care workers may have more practice using these masks, or may face different kinds of situations than other people. Unlike respirators, surgical masks don’t seem particularly hard to use, so I’m not sure health care workers’ training really gives them an advantage here. Overall I think this provides some evidence that surgical masks are helpful.

I was able to find one study like this outside of the health care setting. Some people with swine flu traveled on a plane from New York to China, and many fellow passengers got infected. Some researchers looked at whether passengers who wore masks throughout the flight stayed healthier. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 people who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick passengers wore masks, compared to 47% of the healthy passengers. Another way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wearers got sick, but 35% of non-wearers did. This was a significant difference, and of obvious applicability to the current question.

3. Do surgical masks underperform respirators in randomized trials?

Usually it would be unethical to randomize health care workers to no protection, so several studies randomize them to face masks vs. respirators. But a few others were done in foreign hospitals where lack of protection was the norm, and these studies did include a no-protection control group.

MacIntyre & Chugtai 2015, Facemasks For The Prevention Of Infection In Healthcare And Community Settings, reviews four of these. Two of the four are unable to find any benefit of either masks or respirators. The third finds a benefit of respirators, but only if nobody tested the respirators to see if they fit, which doesn’t make sense and suggests it’s probably an artifact. The fourth finds a benefit of respirators, but not masks. It seems unlikely that respirators don’t help, so this suggests all these studies were underpowered.

In other words, respirators are better than masks are better than nothing. It would be wrong to genuinely conclude this, because it’s not statistically significant. But it would also be wrong to conclude the studies show masks don’t work, because they mostly show respirators don’t work, and we (hopefully) know they do.

Overall these studies don’t seem very helpful and I’m reluctant to conclude anything from them. In section 6, I’ll talk more about why studies may not have shown any advantage for respirators.

4. Do surgical masks prevent ordinary people from getting infected outside the healthcare setting?

The same review lists nine randomized trials with a different design: when the doctor diagnoses you with flu, she either asks everyone in your family to wear masks (experimental group), or doesn’t do that (control group), and then checks how many family members in each group got the flu.

How did these go? That depends whether you use intention-to-treat or per-protocol analysis. Intention-to-treat means that you just compare number of infections in the assigned-to-wear-masks group vs. the control group. Per-protocol means that you only count someone in the study if they actually followed directions. So if someone in the assigned-to-wear mask group didn’t wear their mask, you remove them from the study; if someone in the control group went rogue and did wear a mask, you remove them too.

Both of these methods have their pros and cons. Per protocol is good because if you’re trying to determine the effect of wearing a mask, you would really prefer to only be looking at subjects who actually wore a mask. But it has a problem: adherence to protocol is nonrandom. The people who follow your instructions diligently are selected for being diligent people. Maybe they also diligently wash their hands, and diligently practice social distancing. So once you go per protocol, you’re no longer a perfect randomized controlled trial. Only intention-to-treat analyses carry the full weight of a gold standard RCT.

According to intention-to-treat, the studies unanimously found masks to be useless. But there were a lot of signs that intention-to-treat wasn’t the right choice here. Only about a fifth of people who were asked to wear masks did so with any level of consistency. The rest wore the mask for a few hours and then get bored and took it off. Honestly, it’s hard to blame them; these studies asked a lot from families. If a husband has flu, and sleeps in the same bed as his wife, are they both wearing masks all night?

Of the three studies that added per-protocol analyses, all three found masks to be useful (1, 2, 3) . Does this prove masks work? Not 100%; per-protocol analyses are inherently confounded. But it sure is suggestive.

The review author summarizes:

The routine use of facemasks is not recommended by WHO, the CDC, or the ECDC in the community setting. However, the use of facemasks is recommended in crowded settings (such as public transport) and for those at high risk (older people, pregnant women, and those with a medical condition) during an outbreak or pandemic. A modelling study suggests that the use of face-masks in the community may help delay and contain a pandemic, although efficacy estimates were not based on RCT data. Community masks were protective during the SARS outbreaks, and about 76% of the population used a facemask in Hong Kong.

There is evidence that masks have efficacy in the community setting, subject to compliance [13] and early use [12, 18, 19]. It has been shown that compliance in the household setting decreases with each day of mask use, however, which makes long term use over weeks or months a challenge […]

Community RCTs suggest that facemasks provide protection against infection in various community settings, subject to compliance and early use. For health-care workers, the evidence suggests that respirators offer superior protection to facemasks.

Parts of this summary are infuriating. If the big organizations recommend that especially vulnerable groups wear masks, aren’t they admitting masks work? But if they’re admitting masks work, why don’t they recommend them for ordinary people?

It looks like they’re saying masks work a little, they’re too annoying for it to be worth it for normal people, but they might be worth it for the especially vulnerable. But then why don’t they just say masks work, and let each person decide how much annoyance is worthwhile? I’m not sure. But it looks like the author basically ends up in favor of community use of surgical masks in a pandemic, mostly on the basis of per-protocol analyses of community RCTs.

5. How do surgical masks and respirators compare in hokey lab studies?

Our source here is Smith et al 2016, Effectiveness Of N95 Respirators Versus Surgical Masks In Protecting Health Care Workers From Acute Respiratory Infection: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis. They review some of the same studies we looked at earlier, but then investigate 23 “surrogate exposure studies”, ie throwing virus-shaped particles at different masks in a lab and seeing if they got through. You can find the results of each in their appendix. Typically, about 1 – 5% of particles make it through the respirator, and 10 – 50% make it through the surgical mask. They summarize this as:

In general, compared with surgical masks, N95 respirators showed less filter penetration, less face-seal leakage and less total inward leakage under the laboratory experimental conditions described.

I think in general the fewer virus particles get through your mask, the better, so I think this endorses surgical masks as better than nothing, since their failure rate was less than 100%.

Booth et al, 2013 examines surgical masks themselves more closely. They hook a surgical mask up to “a breathing simulator” and then squirt real influenza virus at it, finding that:

Live influenza virus was measurable from the air behind all surgical masks tested. The data indicate that a surgical mask will reduce exposure to aerosolised infectious influenza virus; reductions ranged from 1.1- to 55-fold (average 6-fold), depending on the design of the mask…the results demonstrated limitations of surgical masks in this context, although they are to some extent protective.

The paper doesn’t discuss how particle number maps to infection risk. Does letting a single influenza virus through mean you will get infected? If so, any reduction short of 100% is useless. I have a vague sense that this isn’t true; your immune system can fight off most viruses, and the fewer you get, the better the chance it will win. Also, even respirators don’t claim to reduce particle load by more than 99% or so, and those work, so it can’t be that literally a single virus will get you. Overall I think modest reductions in particle number are still pretty good, but I don’t have a study that proves it.

6. Is it true that the public won’t be able to use N95 respirators correctly?

Yes.

I remember my respirator training, the last time I worked in a hospital. They gave the standard two minute explanation, made you put the respirator on, and then made you go underneath a hood where they squirted some aerosolized sugar solution. If you could smell the sugar, your respirator was leaky and you failed. I tried so hard and I failed so many times. It was embarrassing and I hated it.

I’m naturally clumsy and always bad at that kind of thing. Some people were able to listen to the two minute explanation and then pass right away. Those kinds of people could probably also listen to a two minute YouTube explanation and be fine. So I don’t want to claim it’s impossible or requires lots of specialized background knowledge. It’s just a slightly difficult physical skill you have to get right.

Bunyan et al, 2013, Respiratory And Facial Protection: A Critical Review Of Recent Literature, discusses this in more depth. They review some of the same studies we reviewed earlier, showing no benefit of N95 respirators over surgical masks for health care workers in most situations. This doesn’t make much theoretical sense – the respirators should win hands down.

The most likely explanation is: doctors aren’t much better at using respirators than anyone else. In a California study of tuberculosis precautions, 65% of health care workers used their respirators incorrectly. That’s little better than the general public, who have a 76% failure rate. Bunyan et al note:

The fitting of N95 respirators has been the subject of many publications. The effective functioning of N95 respirators requires a seal between the mask and the face of the wearer. Variation in face size and shape and different respirator designs mean that a proper fit is only possible in a minority of health care workers for any particular mask. Winter et al. reported that, for any one of three widely used respirators, a satisfactory fit could be achieved by fewer than half of the healthcare workers tested, and for 28% of the participants none of the masks gave a satisfactory fit.

Fit-testing is a laborious task, taking around 30 min to do properly, and comprises qualitative fit-testing (testing whether the respirator-wearing healthcare worker can taste an intensely bitter or sweet substance sprayed into the ambient air around the outside of the mask) or quantitative fit testing (measuring the ratio of particles in the air inside and outside the breathing zone when wearing the respirator). Attempts have been made to circumvent the requirement for fit testing, and it has been suggested that self-testing for a seal by the respirator wearer (see http://youtu.be/pGXiUyAoEd8a for a video demonstration) is a sufficient substitute for fit-testing. However, self-checking for a seal has been demonstrated to be a highly unreliable technique in two separate studies so that full fit-testing remains a necessary preliminary requirement before respirators can be used in the healthcare setting.

Operationally, this presents significant challenges to organizations with many healthcare workers who require fit-testing. Chakladar et al. pointed out that, in addition to the routine need for repeat testing over time to ensure that changes in weight or facial hair have not compromised a good fit, movements of healthcare workers between organizations using different makes of respirators would necessitate additional repeat fit-testing. Fit-testing is likely to remain problematic to health-care organizations for the foreseeable future. In addition to the requirement for fit-testing, ‘fit-checking’ is also required each time the respirator is donned to ensure there are no air leaks.

Is a poorly-fitting N95 respirator better than nothing? The reviewed studies suggest that at that point it’s just a very fancy and expensive surgical mask.

7. Were the CDC recommendations intentionally deceptive?

No, and I owe them an apology here.

I think the evidence above suggests masks can be helpful. Masked health care workers were less likely to catch disease than unmasked ones. Masked travelers on planes were less likely to catch disease than unmasked ones. In per protocol analysis, masked family members are less likely to catch disease from an index patient than unmasked ones. Laboratory studies confirm that masks block most particles. All of this accords with a commonsense understanding of droplet and aerosol transmission of disease.

None of these, except maybe the plane study, tell us exactly what we want to know. The SARS studies were all done in a health care setting, so they don’t prove that regular people can benefit from masks. But health care workers are closely related to homo sapiens and ought to have similar anatomy and physiology. Surgical masks aren’t as complicated as respirators and we can assume most people get them right. And although health care workers are in unusually high-risk situations, that should just affect the magnitude of the benefit, not the sign; obviously the level of risk ordinary people encounter is sometimes relevant, considering they do often catch pandemic diseases. So our default assumption should be that these studies carry over, not that they don’t.

Likewise, most of the community studies were done on family members. Most guidelines already say to mask up if you have a sick family member, so talking about subways and crowds requires a little bit of extrapolation. But again, being in a family is just one form of close contact. It would take bizarre convolutions to even imagine a theory where you can catch diseases from your family members but not from people you sit next to on a train. Our default assumption should be in favor of these results generalizing, not against them.

But the CDC has recommended against mask use. I hypothesized that the CDC was intentionally lying to us, trying to trick us into not buying masks so there would be enough for health care workers.

But that can’t be true, because the CDC and other experts came up with their no-masks policy years ago, long before there was any supply shortage.

Thus, the refusal of some to wear them has itself become a potent symbol of rebellion, especially by those who eschew the safety net of the lanyard. Abused in the Twittersphere as selfish granny-killers,  those who refuse to wear masks are now apparently racist too. 

In April of that year, Britain’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam stood at his podium to tell us that wearing face masks was ‘not recommended.’ 

Now, after 115 million vaccines against Covid-19 have been issued, masks are once again mandatory in England following the discovery of a new strain – Omicron – despite the doctor who discovered the variant declaring it ‘extremely mild.’ 

Nevertheless, the Government has been quick to implement mandatory mask wearing once more. Seasoned observers may surmise that ministers saw their grip of fear loosening and have pounced on Omicron as an excuse to re-tighten the leash.  

Masks are a measurement of how cowed the population remains. Masks are better than any manipulated YouGov poll or Jeremy Vine phone-in. So what can be done? Who will obey, who will disobey and who can be swayed? 

For the partisan tribal mask wearer, the issue is non-negotiable. Even if they believe the mask is a nonsense, their political allegiance, and identification of non-mask-wearing as a symbol of Right-wing extremism, will not permit them to discard the rag. 

This group finds its antithesis in the non-mask wearer. Although I am sure you will find them in all political shades, I’d put my money on very few in this group having ever uttered the words ‘check your privilege’.  

Some of them are long-term refuseniks from back in the day when both US government health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and the WHO pooh-poohed the suggestion that masks could halt virus transmission.  Others are more recent converts.  

They have witnessed world leaders at G7 and COP26, bigwigs at the Euros and celebs at the Met Gala, sans mask and living the old normal, whilst the plebs who serve them mill around resembling contestants at a Hannibal Lecter lookalike competition. 

The catalyst is unimportant. The decision to remove the mask is all that matters. We don’t care how you get here, just get here if you can. 

Between these two groups you can find three types of mask wearers. Firstly, those who believe the mask provides protection from a deadly virus. The mask comforts them.  

Those fully responsive to Project Fear see the Covid Bogeyman everywhere.  Naked faces are the greatest threat to humanity and the mask is their silver bullet, their clove of garlic. The announcement of each new variant strikes fear into their hearts as they wail about how it would all be over ‘if only everybody stuck to the rules.’ Non-compliant Florida? Texas? Sweden? They shake their heads and walk away, mumbling ‘Covidiot’. 

The second group consists of those who neither know nor care whether masks are an effective barrier against the virus, but they will follow orders and will continue to wear them until an authority figure tells them otherwise. Phrases which may help you identify this group include: ‘Are you a doctor?’ ‘We’re all in this together’, and ‘Did you watch the SAGE update last night?’ 

Finally, we have The Reluctant Mask Wearer. For sceptics, this group is key. The hundreds of thousands who know it is a nonsense, who hate the masks but keep going along with the theatre.  

These individuals wear the mask under duress. They despise it, but fear opprobrium if they remove it. They are easy to spot. A faint air of embarrassment when they catch the eye of the unmasked. When exiting the Tube, they pull the mask from their face shouting, ‘this bloody thing!’  

Some wear it under their chin, breathing in that sweet, sweet air, but ready to pull it into place at the first disapproving look. Others dangle the mask from one ear, dipping their toe in the shallow waters of rebellion.  

Infuriated by nonsensical rules – masks to walk to the restaurant toilet, crowded sporting events but pared-down school sports day – they question the logic, but are surrounded by family, friends and co-workers hermetically sealed into their masks.   

Peer pressure traps them in the cult. They need new peers. They need an example and encouragement. We need them and they need us. 

Whatever the Covid zealots may believe, it takes a strong character, and a fair dose of courage, to venture out with a naked face. It means going against the prevailing view, swimming against the tide, the only maskless person at the supermarket or on the bus.  

It is daunting, initially. But here’s the thing. As scary as it may be to lose the mask when all about you are keeping theirs, in doing so you will experience a feeling of overwhelming empowerment.  

Not a phony empowerment. Not an ‘I made a porn video and it’s so empowering’ or ‘I stopped shaving my armpits and it’s so empowering’, but a euphoric feeling of liberation. You followed your gut. You did not do what was easy you did what was right. 

Be the change you want to see. 

Lead by example. 

Ditch the muzzle. (read more)

But for those keen to live their lives forever in Covid’s shadow – always vigilant, always on guard – the return of a mask mandate was the best news they had received since last January’s lockdown. They love masks, you see. They’re obsessed with them.

Their only complaint was that the current mask mandate doesn’t go far enough. After all, if you’re going to organise your entire existence around a viral threat, partial measures just won’t do. A mask mandate in shops? Why not in cafés and pubs, too?

That was certainly the view of London mayor Sadiq Khan. ‘If you’re in a pub, bar or restaurant, particularly if you’re standing up in one of those’, he said, ‘wear a face mask’. The professional social distancers of Independent SAGE were also quick to demand the extension of the mask mandate. ‘We need to reinstate them in secondary schools, including in classrooms’, demanded Professor Christina Pagel. Fellow Indie SAGE member Professor Martin McKee went further and urged the wearing of face masks in all indoor settings. It must be quite the party chez McKee.

Perhaps if masks had a significant impact on Covid transmission and infection rates, the obsession with face coverings would start to make sense. But for all the claims made for their efficacy, and the overzealous reporting of such claims, their impact is still hotly disputed. At best we can probably say that masks, by themselves, have a small impact on the spread of Covid.

So, if it’s not their practical benefit, what is it about masks that drives their champions wild? The answer lies in the sheer theatre of it all.

First, masking up provides the performer with a sense of control over his environment. It makes him feel protected, as if he has some power over the virus. Like airport security checks, the putting on of a mask is a modern-day ritual in risk-aversion. It creates an illusory sense of safety.

Secondly, and more importantly, mask-wearing has become a symbolic performance. It is a way of signifying something about oneself as a person. It is no longer just a bit of fabric stretching over one’s nose and under one’s chin – it is a sign of one’s virtue, a projection of one’s good character. It says to the world, ‘I’m a moral person’.

As one prominent champion of lockdown measures wrote this week, ‘To me, everyone wearing masks signals a sense of community where people care for and look after each other, and we collectively protect everyone’. In other words, mask-wearers are people who possess ’empathy’, as a piece in Vox put it.

And, just as crucially, that makes mask-wearers very different to those who choose not to wear masks. The maskless are people who don’t care about others, who think only of themselves and their own so-called freedoms. As one pundit puts it, these people think their ‘right to ignore public-health advice… trumps someone else’s right to live’ – as if those who don’t wear masks are deliberately killing people with their germs.

One Guardian columnist paints a typically snobbish portrait of those she sees as archetypal mask refuseniks. They’re thoughtless types who are indifferent to the public good. They bang on endlessly about their pet conspiracy theories. And they’re nationalist ‘poppy shaggers’ who can’t help but always bring up the Second World War. Her piece is illustrated with a picture of two maskless middle-aged blokes.

This kind of derogatory stereotyping isn’t accidental. For mask-wearing to work as a symbol of virtue, those who choose not to wear masks have to be demonised. And that’s why the Great Covid Mask Debate is so angry and divisive. Because mask obsessives are not only saying something positive about themselves – they’re also saying something very negative about the unmasked. Face coverings may not have a huge impact on the spread of Covid — but they certainly impact on social solidarity.  (read more)

Buried in the Big Tech platform’s “COVID-19 medical misinformation policy” are clauses that allow YouTube to deplatform anyone who dares contest information about masks or “contradict local health authorities or WHO.”

“Claims that wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects” and “Claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19” both violate the Big Tech company’s “misinformation” terms and conditions. Later in the policy, YouTube clarifies that “Claims that wearing a mask causes oxygen levels to drop to dangerous levels,” “Claims that masks cause lung cancer or brain damage,” and “Claims that wearing a mask gives you COVID-19” will also be punished.

Other censored terminology and phrases include “Content that recommends use of Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID-19” and “Claims that an approved COVID-19 vaccine will cause death, infertility, miscarriage, autism, or contraction of other infectious diseases.”

Google: We’ll ban you from YouTube for letting people know masks don’t work pic.twitter.com/He1i7RE7lS

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) December 1, 2021

Any content that is deemed unacceptable under these terms could be punished with removal and a strike.

Repeat violators are subject to losing their channel or account. “If you get 3 strikes within 90 days, your channel will be terminated. You can learn more about our strikes system here,” the policy notes.

“We may also terminate your channel or account after a single case of severe abuse, or when the channel is dedicated to a policy violation,” YouTube states.

In the policy, YouTube reserves the right to grant an exception to violating videos “if that content includes additional context in the video, audio, title, or description.”

“This is not a free pass to promote misinformation,” YouTube claims. (read more)

To a surprising degree, I believe the political establishment in Washington, and perhaps across the country, is dramatically underestimating the importance of this case. This is typical — they frequently discount the electoral importance of the abortion issue — but there is another aspect that seems obvious to pro-lifers, but the consultant and leadership class doesn’t seem to understand: Nothing will be the same after this case no matter what.

The assumption of the leadership class is that politics only goes into a period of upheaval should SCOTUS rule in favor of Mississippi’s 15 week ban, while if they side against Mississippi, things essentially stay the way they’ve been. Pro-lifers will be disappointed and frustrated, Republican Senate candidates will take hold of that frustration and run with it into 2022, while Democrats will warn how close they came to losing and raise a ton of money on the issue. Nothing really changes, life goes on — status quo.

That analysis is reasonable if you’ve been observing abortion politics at a remove, which most media figures and consultants and staff have for ages. It’s also totally wrong. Whatever happens with this case, it presents the major test of the conservative legal project. Pro-life voters have held their tongues, done their loyal work, and elected pro-life Republicans and trusted choices for nomination with a transactional mindset on achieving victory above all else.

They trusted the process. If it lets them down, it will put a definitive end to the question of whether the next nominee to the Court should be a judge or a politician with a record. They won’t accept any promises any more. They’ll demand Mike Lee. The Court will become openly political in a way it has not been historically, and candidates will have to endorse known quantities in order to get any hearing.

This is one more aspect of the post-Trump reality — his list was just the beginning.(VIDEO)

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that Planned Parenthood v. Casey rightly upheld Roe v. Wade in accordance with stare decisis, or binding precedent, saying that if the justices had overturned Roe based solely on the belief that it was wrongly decided, that would have been detrimental to the rule of law. This led Justice Samuel Alito to press the Biden appointee on erroneous precedents.

“Is it your argument that a case can never be overruled simply because it was egregiously wrong?” Alito asked, to which Prelogar said states would at least have to have come forward with materially new arguments or circumstances that warrant overruling.

“Really? So suppose Plessy v. Ferguson was re-argued in 1897, so nothing had changed,” Alito postulated, referring to the atrocious case that had enshrined state-imposed racial segregation just one year prior in 1896. “Would it not be sufficient to say, ‘That was an egregiously wrong decision on the day it was handed down, and now it should be overruled’?”

Prelogar conceded that “it certainly was egregiously wrong on the day that it was handed down,” but refused to say it should have been overturned simply on its merits if nothing else had changed. Instead, she appealed to later Supreme Court precedent in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which ruled that racial segregation in government schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment and overturned Plessy.

“So is it your answer that we needed all the experience from 1896 to 1954 to realize that Plessy was wrongly decided?” Alito asked, doubling down on his original question.

Prelogar once again acknowledged that the case was wrong but pointed to Brown v. Board as the remedy, saying that all the factors of stare decisis would have resulted in Plessy inevitably being overturned because that decision “[ran] counter to any notion of reasonable reliance” and was “not a workable rule.”

“Well, there was a lot of reliance on Plessy,” Alito pushed back, citing the South’s “whole society based on the idea of white supremacy.”

Alito tried his original question one more time — and in clinging to abortion precedent, Prelogar couldn’t bring herself to admit that cases should ever be overruled strictly because they are egregiously wrong.

“This court, no, has never overruled in that situation just based on the conclusion that the decision was wrong. It has always applied the stare decisis factors and likewise found that they warrant overruling in that instance,” Prelogar said. “If stare decisis is to mean anything it has to mean that that kind of extensive consideration of all of the same arguments for whether to retain or discard a precedent itself is an additional layer of precedent that needs to be relied on and can form a stable foundation of the rule of law.”

In other words, like Roe, even though the Plessy decision was appalling — and in that case racist — Prelogar defended it being upheld for nearly 60 years simply because it was precedent.

As the court considers a ruling in the Dobbs case, let’s hope the justices stand with preborn babies and the constitution, not with Biden’s appointee and racist case law. (read more)

Justices sat down for nearly two hours to hear arguments on whether laws such as Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban are unconstitutional. It’s a raging national debate that has set the stage for Roe v. Wade to possibly be overturned and could save countless unborn babies’ lives.

Here are three strong points the unusually outspoken Thomas raised during the hearing.

1. There Is No Constitutional Right to Kill Babies

Knowing full well that there’s no explicit, constitutionally guaranteed right to kill babies in the womb, Thomas asked U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar to explain just what exactly the United States’s governing document allows for abortion.

“Would you specifically tell me, specifically state what the right is? Is it specifically abortion? Is it liberty? Is it autonomy? Is it privacy?” Thomas asked.

Later, Thomas clarified that he understands “we’re talking about abortion here” but pointed out that certain constitutional amendments are very clear about what they protect and none of them mention the right to murder unborn babies.

“What is confusing is that we, if we were talking about the Second Amendment, I know exactly what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about the Fourth Amendment, I know what we’re talking about because it’s written, it’s there. What specifically is the right here that we’re talking about?” he asked.

Justice Thomas: "If we were talking about the second amendment, I know what we're talking about. Because it's written, it's there. What specifically is the right here [to abortion] that we're talking about?" pic.twitter.com/0JEPecy40z

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 1, 2021

2. There Are Two Lives at Stake in Every Pregnancy

During another line of questioning, Thomas repeatedly demanded both speakers on the pro-abortion legal team differentiate between prohibiting a mother from aborting her baby and stopping her from taking drugs or other substances that harm her baby.

“Does a mother have a right to ingest drugs and harm a pre-viable baby? Can the state bring child neglect charges against the mother?” Thomas asked.

Julie Rikelman of the Center for Reproductive Rights had no answer for Thomas other than the claim “that’s not what this case is about.”

Thomas later repeated the question to Prelogar.

“You heard my question to counsel earlier about the woman who was convicted of criminal child neglect. What would be your reaction to that as far as her liberty and whether or not the liberty interests that we’re talking about extends to her?” Thomas asked.

Prelogar claimed she’s not denying a state might have interest in that case but said they also need to consider the “interests of the woman on the other side of the scale and not being forced to continue with a pregnancy, not being forced to endure childbirth, and to have a child out in the world.”

“And the state’s arguments here seem to ask this court to look only at its interests and to ignore entirely those incredibly weighty interests of the woman on the other side,” Prelogar claimed. 

3. Roe v. Wade Can’t Legally Stand On Its Own

In an exchange with Rikelman, once again Thomas hinted that the supposed general legal precedent set by Roe v. Wade isn’t enough to justify the removal of states’ voices when it comes to abortion policy.

“What I’m trying to focus on, is if we — is to lower the level of generality, or at least be a little bit more specific. In the old days, we used to say it was a right to privacy that the court found in the due process, substantive due process clause, okay. … And I’m trying to get you to tell me what are we relying on now? Is it privacy? Is it autonomy? What is it?” Thomas asked. (read more)

Today, FPA will introduce a campaign called “After Roe,” which will feature a website designed to help educate Americans on their state’s abortion laws and connect them with opportunities to help defend the right to life, in preparation for a reversal of Roe — whether that happens in Dobbs or at some other point in the future.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, a case evaluating the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on nearly all abortions after 15 weeks, gives the court’s conservative majority an opportunity to overturn unconstitutional pro-abortion precedents in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Even now, before a Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, the pro-life movement has won state-level victories around the country, leading NARAL Pro-Choice America to declare 2021 “the worst year for abortion rights since Roe was decided.” A prominent example is the Texas law that went into effect in September, which empowered citizens to sue abortion providers for killing babies with detectable heartbeats, effectively banning abortion after unborn babies are six weeks old.

“No matter what happens with Dobbs, we are confident of two things. Roe’s time is short, and pro-lifers across the country need to prepare for that coming reality now,” Meridian Baldacci, director of strategy for Family Policy Alliance, told The Federalist. But a reversal of Roe by the Supreme Court would not automatically outlaw abortion across the country, either.

“If Dobbs is the case to overturn or dramatically undo Roe, the glass ceiling that Roe imposes on pro-life protections will finally be lifted, meaning that states that are ready to be strongly pro-life (or which already have a ‘trigger law’) will be able to fully protect life right away,” Baldacci said. “If it’s not Dobbs, but another case that will finally undo Roe, we will continue using this time to ensure that state laws are pro-life and citizens are ready for action in their state, so we can truly watch a pro-life transformation occur after Roe.”

If the Supreme Court hands authority on abortion to state lawmakers, many Americans will find themselves wondering: What are the abortion laws in my state? At a time the country too often turns to the federal government to solve its problems, lawmakers in state capitols will suddenly hold the political tools to direct one of the biggest moral and political issues in the nation.

With that proximity comes increased access to change, an opportunity that pro-life advocates can’t afford to pass up. Rather than rest on the laurels of a judicial victory, the pro-life movement should be prepared to step up the moment the Supreme Court lets them.

That’s the goal of the “After Roe” website. It will direct readers toward ways to partner with pro-life groups like Alliance Defending Freedom, the March for Life, the Susan B. Anthony List, Students for Life of America, and more. It will also provide an interactive map for users to quickly research what the abortion laws are in their states.

While the pro-abortion lobby loves to smear pro-life advocates as only concerned about banning abortion and not about caring for mothers, their babies, and their families, the website also makes a point to highlight opportunities to help the moms who consider abortion.

“We have a vision for 50 states where not only are babies saved from abortion, but their moms (and dads) get the real care they need, and pro-life options like adoption are advanced and improved,” Baldacci told The Federalist. “When you visit AfterRoe.com, you’ll be able to connect with pro-life organizations that are already doing the hard work on the ground to protect and care for moms and babies.”

The focus by pro-life groups like Family Policy Alliance on state activism also leans into the American founders’ vision for governance via federalism. A Supreme Court decision overturning Roe would allow states to protect the lives and freedoms of their unborn citizens without being restricted by federal judicial mandates, but a working federal system requires popular involvement at the state level.

“Roe created a one-way road toward abortion. If your state wanted to loosen or remove abortion restrictions, it was welcome to do so. But if your state wanted to tighten those restrictions and protect life? The options were limited,” Baldacci said. “A decision that returns abortion to the states would free states from the artificial limitations of Roe and allow that state’s citizens – not nine justices – to decide how they would protect life.”

Explore the “After Roe” website here.

In questioning of attorneys before the court, Kavanaugh argued that because the right to abortion is not found in the Constitution, the Constitution is therefore “neutral” on abortion. That means abortion should be an issue for states or Congress to decide and the court should remain “scrupulously neutral on the question of abortion, neither pro-choice nor pro-life,” he suggested.

“Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this?” Kavanaugh asked. “And there’ll be different answers in Mississippi, in New York, different answers in Alabama than California, because there are two different interests at stake, and the people in those states might value those interests somewhat differently. Why is that not the right answer?”

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar disagreed, arguing the court had already “correctly recognized that this is a fundamental right of women and the nature of fundamental rights is that it’s not left up to state legislatures to decide whether to honor them or not.”

To the argument about stare decisis — the principle that the court should stick to its past rulings – Kavanaugh argued that “History tells a somewhat different story, I think, than is sometimes assumed.”

He listed a number of “the most important cases in this court’s history” that overruled precedent, citing Brown v. Board, Baker v. Carr, Miranda v. Arizona, Lawrence v. Texas, and Obergefell v. Hodges. If the court had followed stare decisis in those cases, Kavanaugh said, “the country would be a much different place.”

Julie Rikelman, the attorney for the Center of Reproductive Health, argued, “The view that a precedent is wrong has never been enough to overrule that precedent.” The state of Mississippi would need a “special justification,” she said.

Yet if the court finds the precedents set by Roe v. Wade to be “seriously wrong,” Kavanaugh said, then “why then doesn’t the history of this court’s practice [suggest] that the right answer is to return to the position of neutrality?” (read more)

Sotomayor asked legal counsel Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to explain “what has changed in science to show that the viability line is not a real line?” The justice’s questioning quickly turned into pro-abortion grandstanding when she compared a child in the womb to being brain dead and questioned whether or not a physical response by the baby such as a foot recoiling indicates that he or she can feel pain.

“There are spontaneous acts by dead-brained people. So I don’t think that a response by a fetus necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness,” she said.

LISTEN: Here's Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor arguing that a baby recoiling from the pain experienced during an abortion is the same as an involuntarily nervous response from a person with brain-damage #DobbsvJackson: pic.twitter.com/z5WmRi1MWM

— John Cooper (@thejcoop) December 1, 2021

As Dr. Katrina Furth noted in the Charlotte Lozier Institute’s “On Science” series, as the baby’s brain develops, so does its capacity to feel pain. At 10 weeks, most babies begin to develop pain receptors in their skin. By 15 weeks, “the spinal nerves needed to transmit touch and pain information to the thalamus have formed.” Even though the cortex is still in early growth stages at this time in gestation, recent research suggests other parts of the nervous system such as the brainstem, insula, and thalamus all play a role in reading and processing pain. 

“Furthermore, pain processing appears to develop before the mechanisms that moderate pain signals, so the fetus may experience a greater intensity of pain at 15 weeks’ gestation than an older fetus or child,” Furth wrote.

During her line of questioning, Sotomayor also suggested that claiming that life begins at conception is a “religious view” that should be generally applied.

“The issue of when life begins has been hotly debated by philosophers, and it’s still debated by religions,” she said. “That’s a religious issue, isn’t it?”

“I think the philosophical questions your honor mentioned, all those reasons that they’re hard, they’ve been debated, they’re important, those are all reasons to return to the people because the people should get to debate these hard issues,” Stewart responded.

Later, in his response to a question from Justice Samuel Alito, Stewart noted that many non-religious people understand when life begins.

“I think there’s a wide array of people of kind of all different views and of no faith views who would reasonably have that view, your honor. It’s not tied to a religious view. … Otherwise this court’s jurisprudence would on this issue with run right into some of its religious exercise jurisprudence,” Stewart said.

Scientific authorities, medical textbooks, and others have long recognized that human life begins when an egg, carrying half of the genetic material required to create life, is fertilized by sperm, which carries the other half of the genetic information.

“[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual,” Dr. Keith L. Moore wrote in “The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology.” (read more)

Three women, reportedly from Shout Your Abortion, could be seen in a video dressed in all black with a giant “We are taking abortion pills forever” flag draped behind them.

“Abortion! Pills! Forever!” they could be heard chanting repeatedly, along with the surrounding crowd, while smiling and raising pills in the air. All three women then pulled out water bottles and appeared to swallow what were labeled “abortion pills” on camera, receiving cheers from other pro-abortion protesters around them.

Epic action from @ShoutYrAbortion — people took abortion pills outside the Supreme Court! pic.twitter.com/kKditao6Xd

— Erin Matson (@erintothemax) December 1, 2021

While it’s not clear from the video what types of “pills” the women were actually ingesting, earlier this year, 20 members of the U.S. Senate and 71 House representatives called on the commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to pull a “deadly” abortion pill from the market, noting the drug cost “more than 3.7 million preborn lives, caused 24 maternal deaths, and resulted in at least 4,195 adverse maternal reactions including hemorrhage, excruciating abdominal pain, and severe life-threatening infections.”

“Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease. Nevertheless, this pill that is specifically designed and intended to kill preborn children was raced to the market, with devastating consequences,” the congressional letter added.

The particular pill the letter condemned, Mifeprex, “kills the developing child by blocking the critical pregnancy hormone progesterone,” Lila Rose and Kathi Aultman explained for The Federalist. “As the uterine lining degenerates from lack of progesterone, the preborn child dies from lack of oxygen and other essential nutrients.”

The FDA allows Mifeprex during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, even though many babies at 10 weeks can already control their fingers, are getting pain receptors in their skin, and are starting to attempt breathing movements.

Drugs like Mifeprex can be reversed by taking the hormone progesterone if it’s taken in time. But despite the ability of abortion pill reversal to save babies whose mothers regret deciding to kill them, Google had banned ads for such treatments by pro-life groups such as Live Action, leaving many women in the dark about an option that could save their children’s lives. (read more)

Life inside and outside of the womb is a scientific miracle. While it may be tough to picture what exactly goes on inside of a woman’s pregnant belly, modern medicine and science have shown that unborn babies aren’t just a pile of goo; they are living, breathing, moving humans who are constantly prepping for life outside of the womb.

Here are some indisputable facts about unborn babies that the Supreme Court justices would do well to keep in mind when they hear arguments on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Wednesday.

1. Life Begins At Conception

For years, medical textbooks have recognized that biological life begins the moment an egg, carrying half of the genetic information required to create life, is fertilized by sperm, which carries the other half of the genetic information.

“[The Zygote] results from the union of an oocyte and a sperm. A zygote is the beginning of a new human being. Human development begins at fertilization, the process during which a male gamete or sperm … unites with a female gamete or oocyte … to form a single cell called a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual,” Dr. Keith L. Moore wrote in “The Developing Human: Clinically Oriented Embryology.”

Despite the scientific consensus that life is created at the beginning, it’s still a miraculous feat worth remembering considering the fact that the odds of conception during any particular month hover between 15 and 25 percent for most women who are trying to conceive.

2. An Unborn Baby’s Heartbeat Can Be Detected by Six Weeks of Gestation

In the womb, a baby’s heart can be detected by five or six weeks gestation, when it is beating at approximately 98 beats per minute.  This fact quickly became a point of contention earlier this year when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a “heartbeat law” that effectively banned abortion in the state once an unborn baby’s heartbeat is detected around six weeks gestation.

By 15 weeks, the unborn baby is pumping approximately 26 quarts of blood daily through its body.

3. All Major Organs Are Formed and Functional by 15 Weeks of Gestation

Speaking of heartbeats, as Dr. Katrina Furth noted in the Charlotte Lozier Institute’s “On Science” series, by 15 weeks gestation, all major organs in the unborn baby’s body are formed and “most are functional.”

“In fact, almost every organ and tissue forms within the first eight weeks after conception. The rest of the pregnancy is spent growing these organs larger and more mature to prepare for life outside the womb,” Dr. Furth wrote.

At 15 weeks, the baby’s skeleton is also present and has largely transformed from cartilage to bone.

4. Babies in the Womb Can Control Their Fingers

By 10 and a half weeks gestation, babies in the womb can control their fingers. Unborn babies typically begin to explore their new appendages by opening or closing their fingers into their hands before slowly learning to intentionally reach and grasp at the womb around them. By 27 weeks, Furth says a baby “will be able to support his own body weight momentarily by grasping!”

As early as 10 weeks gestation, unborn babies also learn to suck their thumbs and start to show a preference for a dominant right or left hand.

“When examining the same children over time, almost every fetus that preferred sucking his or her right thumb remained right-handed, but only a few of the fetuses that sucked their left thumbs in their mother’s womb changed preference and were right-handed by the age of 10,” Furth wrote.

5. Unborn Babies Can Touch and Taste

In addition to reaching, grasping, and sucking on their fingers at 15 weeks, babies in utero will often respond to external touches with reflexive movements. Light touches and tickles to the mouth are met with the baby’s natural instinct to turn “her head towards the object as if to prepare for nursing.”

Babies in the womb also react to taste delivered to them through the amniotic fluid from their mother’s bodies and, by 15 weeks, have tastebuds of their own.

“These flavors help train the fetus to enjoy food from the mother’s food culture; however, the fetus also has some preferences of his or her own! For example, if the amniotic fluid tastes sweet because of an injection of saccharin, the fetus swallows more amniotic fluid. If the amniotic fluid tastes bitter, the fetus swallows less amniotic fluid,” Furth wrote.

6. Babies in Utero Have Functioning, Developing Brains

“Throughout early development, the brain and nerves develop faster than almost any other body system. This is likely so that the brain can direct the other body systems,” Furth notes in her research.

This rapid development not only facilitates the growth of other essential bodily functions but also encourages the creation of neurons that are designed to settle into specific parts of the body.

“Babies are born with more neurons than the average adult – about 100 billion neurons,” Furth writes. “Each of these neurons is born in a special location where all the dividing cells stay, but each neuron must move or migrate to its final destination.”

The baby’s cranial development also supports brain connections stimulating memory, decision making, emotions, and more processes beginning as early as 15 weeks gestation that can “last into adulthood.”

7. Unborn Babies Can Feel Pain

As the baby’s brain develops, so does its capacity to feel pain. At 10 weeks, most babies are beginning to get pain receptors in their skin. By 15 weeks, “the spinal nerves needed to transmit touch and pain information to the thalamus have formed.”

Even though the cortex could still be “under construction” at this time in gestation, recent research suggests other parts of the nervous system such as the brainstem, insula, and thalamus all play a role in reading pain.

“Furthermore, pain processing appears to develop before the mechanisms that moderate pain signals, so the fetus may experience a greater intensity of pain at 15 weeks’ gestation than an older fetus or child,” Furth wrote.

8. Female Babies Have Millions of Eggs by 21 Weeks

By the time unborn female babies reach 21 weeks gestation, most have approximately 7 million eggs. Most are only born with close to 1 million after many cells die.

9. The Baby Practices Breathing

In preparation for the outside world, an unborn baby starts attempting to “breathe” using certain movements by 10 weeks gestation. At approximately 13 weeks, Furth said these motions turn more consistent and eventually follow a circadian rhythm by weeks 18-22.

“By 30 weeks gestation, the fetus breathes 30-40% of the day with respiration rates between 30 and 70 breaths per minute, and as the fetus gets closer to his due date, he breathes more and more often,” Furth noted. “Still, even late in the pregnancy, the fetus can stop breathing for up to 2 hours. This breathing practice only moves a small amount of fluid, and does not pull it deeper into the lungs than the trachea. All of the fetus’s oxygen comes from the placenta until birth.”

10. Babies Practice ‘Seeing’ and Hearing in the Womb Too

While unborn babies’ eyelids are fused shut, most of them are reactive to light and will begin rolling their eyes as early as 12 weeks.

“Sporadic eye movements begin around 14 weeks’ gestation, and rapid eye movements, such as those seen during sleep, are first detected around 18 weeks’ gestation. Therefore, the 15-week-gestation fetus mostly makes slower and infrequent spontaneous eye movements. The eyelids are fused shut at this age,” Furth wrote.

Babies in the womb can also hear and, later in pregnancy, will react to sounds or voices with movement. 

As Furth concludes, “it is clear from the science that unborn children at 15 weeks’ gestation are already amazingly complex human beings.”

“They can be treated as independent patients, they show preferences independent from their mothers, and they have goal-directed behaviors,” she added. “These humans deserve protection, too.” (read more)