Horowitz: The danger of the momentum behind N95 respirators



Were the cloth masks just for psychological training purposes to get us to the main course of obsequious servitude to the gods of Fauci?

It took nearly two years, but the “public health experts” are finally admitting what industrial hygienists knew from day one: Masks do not work against airborne viruses. Yet rather than immediately remove these draconian restrictions – including masking 2-year-olds on airplanes and schoolchildren for hours on end in many states – they are seamlessly gliding into the new position of promoting N95 respirators. Following the inveterate patterns of the past two years, they use the failure of their first position to their advantage to further panic people into blindly following their next recommendation ... until that becomes a mandate as well.

On Jan. 2, former FDA administrator Scott Gottlieb, the media’s go-to “expert” on all things pandemic, admitted what we all knew since 2020 but that got us banned from social media for saying so. “Cloth masks aren't going to provide a lot of protection, that's the bottom line,” said Gottlieb on Meet the Press. “This is an airborne illness. We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission.”

Well, some of us knew that early on in the pandemic.

Two days later, the New York Times ran an article telling people where to get N95s, states began mailing out N95 variations, and the CDC put out a new message, which between the lines, gives the impression that if you are not wearing an N95, you don’t really have protection. The Biden administration plans to distribute millions of them to local pharmacies. But is there really any evidence that the same people who were wrong about masks are now suddenly connected to God’s word when it comes to respirators? And who says it is safe for people to wear something like that for long periods of time, which until now required rigorous testing, medical exams, and training?

Yes, N95s, unlike masks, actually meet the standard for PPE in hazardous environments. But for which sort of hazard? Not an airborne respiratory virus. Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and hazardous exposure expert, sent me a copy of an N95 usage label made by 3M that he enlarged into an infographic. It turns out the company's own disclosure blows up the myth of using an N95 for viral protection.

The label confirms what everyone understood prior to the mask mania of COVID: Neither masks nor N95 respirators can stop aerosols, certainly not viral ones, which are much smaller than bacteria. What's truly revealing is that the label recommends against relying on them for source protection even against asbestos particles, which are on average 5 microns – 50 times larger than SARS-CoV-2 virions.

A large randomized controlled trial published just months before the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 — before masking became a political and social control tool — showed no benefit to N95s over surgical masks in terms of protection against the flu. "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza," concluded the authors of the large trial, published in JAMA on Sept. 3, 2019.

Also, remember, that most people are not wearing sealed N95s. They wear the respirators loosely on their faces as they do surgical masks. Also, many of them are the Chinese version KN95s. Even the CDC admits, “About 60% of KN95 respirators NIOSH evaluated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 did not meet the requirements that they intended to meet.”

The same study (Shah et.al.) that found just 10% and 12% reduction in aerosols for cloth and blue surgical masks respectively, actually found that KN95s worn improperly with 3mm gaps between the face and the respirator, as most people wear them, only offer 3.4% filtration efficiency – less than the cloth masks.

And remember, these studies are all conducted in labs, not in the real world, where no study has shown a statistically significant benefit to masks, and the basic epidemiological data has disproven the efficacy for two years.

Take Austria, for example, where they have been mandating N95 respirators in stores. Can you spot the efficacy?

With N95 mandates, vaccine passports and 2 months of a lockdown for unvaccinated people, cases in Austria have reached a new high\n\nIt\u2019s amazing how consistently and comprehensively COVID authoritarianism and The Science\u2122 fails & how uninterested media outlets are in covering itpic.twitter.com/O1ABBdOOOO
— IM (@IM) 1642530717

The notion that children can properly wear a form-fitted N95 that effectively seals is both absurd and dangerous. And anything else will absolutely not work. There’s clearly an inverse relationship between safety and efficacy. The only thing that might possibly work will cause danger, which is why the federal government has long mandated very specific criteria for wearing respirators.

“While some misrepresent N95s as masks, they are actually respirators and will require one to follow the OSHA requirements for respirators under the Respiratory Protection Standard (RPS) 29 CFR 1910.134 (e.g., written program, medical clearance, initial fit testing, annual fit testing, no facial hair, worker training),” said Petty in an interview with TheBlaze. Stephen Petty has served as an expert witness in hundreds of industrial hazardous exposure court cases and now serves as a witness for those bringing lawsuits against irresponsible mask mandates. Here is a list of OSHA requirements, per Petty’s presentation, that would have to be met for usage of N95 respirators:

There’s a good reason why these requirements were put in place by OSHA. To the extent one actually properly seals an N95 respirator to the face (which few will do), it causes significant medical concerns. Here are some findings from an extremely exhaustive qualitative and substantive evaluation of 65 mask studies by German researchers:

In nine of the 11 scientific papers (82%), we found a combined onset of N95 respiratory protection and carbon dioxide rise when wearing a mask. We found a similar result for the decrease in oxygen saturation and respiratory impairment with synchronous evidence in six of the nine relevant studies (67%). N95 masks were associated with headaches in six of the 10 studies (60%). For oxygen deprivation under N95 respiratory protectors, we found a common occurrence in eight of 11 primary studies (72%).

Thus, to the extent anyone could achieve a meaningful degree of efficacy against virus particles with a respirator – something yet to be proven – it will come at a terrible cost. Even with regular masks, before our public health officials lost their minds (and hearts), it was understood that they are not harm-free. Here is a write-up from the Missoula, Montana, city health department recommending against the use of masks during wildfire season in Montana:

Masks are uncomfortable (they are more comfortable when they are leaky – but then they do not provide protection). They increase resistance to airflow. This may make breathing more difficult and lead to physiological stress, such as increased respiratory and heart rates. Masks can also contribute to heat stress. Because of this, mask use by those with cardiac and respiratory diseases can be dangerous, and should only be done under a doctor’s supervision. Even healthy adults may find that the increased effort required for breathing makes it uncomfortable to wear a mask for more than short periods of time. Breathing resistance increases with respirator efficiency.

The Montana Department of Health emphatically writes in bolded letters that N95s that seal are the only things that might help against smoke particles (which are around 1 micron, 10 times larger than most viral virions), but warns of health risks. “Note that respirator masks should be a last resort, as they are difficult to fit correctly, decrease oxygen intake, are hot, and can easily leak when worn improperly.” They go on to add, “People who are not physically fit may experience difficulty going about daily tasks due to reduced oxygen intake. It is more important to have enough oxygen than to have clean air - if you are using a respirator and feel faint, nauseous, or have trouble breathing, take the mask off.”

On the Washington Department of Health’s website guidance for wildfires, it is made clear that “masks are not approved for children” and that “it is harder to breathe through a mask, so take breaks often if you work outside.” The Sacramento County Department of Health Services states, "N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe due to carbon dioxide buildup, which reduces the intake of oxygen, increased breathing rates, and heart rates."

Just a year ago, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky swatted down the idea of wearing N95s. “They're very hard to breathe in when you wear them properly," Walensky said. "They're very hard to tolerate when you wear them for long periods of time."

Thus, whether we are talking about masks or N95s, it’s quite evident that they are either unsafe or ineffective. They can often be both unsafe and ineffective, but they can never be effective without being unsafe, unless worn by the right person with the right training in limited environments for short periods of time.

And this is just the scope of physical harm. One speech therapist in Palm Beach County is seeing a 364% increase in referrals from pediatricians for babies and toddlers with speech delays. "It's very important that kids do see your face to learn, so they're watching your mouth,” said a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach.

How our governments can mandate something this immoral and illogical on our bodies indefinitely without due process, evidentiary standards, or a constitutional interest balancing test is astounding. Every state needs a constitutional amendment explicitly banning this from ever happening again. Biden promised 100 days of mask-wearing, but we are now approaching a full year without any end in sight.

Just remember, if a government can criminalize our breathing without due process, what can it not do to us without recourse?

Former FDA commissioner admits: 'Cloth masks aren't going to provide a lot of protection'



Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb admitted that cloth masks do not provide a high level of protection against COVID-19. Gottlieb — who sits on the board of directors of Pfizer — delivered his insight on face masks as well as stating that the omicron is a milder variant during an appearance on "Face the Nation."

"Cloth masks aren't going to provide a lot of protection, that's the bottom line," Gottlieb told host Margaret Brennan on Sunday morning.

"This is an airborne illness," he continued. "We now understand that, and a cloth mask is not going to protect you from a virus that spreads through airborne transmission."

"It could protect better through droplet transmission, something like the flu, but not something like this coronavirus," explained Gottlieb, who was a clinical assistant professor at New York University School of Medicine before becoming the 23rd FDA commissioner in 2017.

At this stage of the pandemic, cloth masks don't provide much protection against COVID-19, according to @ScottGottliebMD.pic.twitter.com/pvX5McVnzX
— Face The Nation (@Face The Nation) 1641139038

Last January, Gottlieb shared a CNN opinion piece titled: "America needs better masks to fight Covid-19."

Part of the reason is that new Covid-19 variants are more transmissible – meaning you are possibly more likely to be infected with even less exposure time and from greater distances than before. As Dr. Walensky herself mentions, ongoing studies are evaluating the efficacy of cloth masks in light of new variants. Without definitive answers, the precautionary principle – erring on the side of caution – should be invoked before more people become infected. Secondly, because -- regardless of variant -- the virus is still transmitted by both droplets and aerosols, the latter of which are best trapped by electrostatic charges found in N95 caliber masks.

In November 2020, Gottlieb wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled: "Some Masks Will Protect You Better Than Others."

In the article, Gottlieb noted that at the beginning of the pandemic, health agencies advised the public to use cloth masks because "medical masks were in short supply."

"A cotton mask offers far less protection than a surgical mask," he wrote, adding, "An N95 or equivalent mask offers the best protection and, if used properly, will filter out at least 95% of infectious particles."

During Sunday's "Face the Nation" interview, Brennan asked Gottlieb if schools should mandate COVID-19 booster shots for 12- to 15-year-olds.

"Well, look, I certainly don't think schools should be mandating boosters," he replied. "I think this should be left up to the discretion of parents and their physicians."

"You know, it's going to depend on the individual circumstance," Gottlieb said. "What is the risk that the child's facing? Are they in a setting where they're more likely to come into contact with the infection? Do they have some underlying health conditions that put them at increased risk of bad outcomes?"

Gottlieb stressed that schools need to remain open.

"I think the imperative needs to be to try to open schools," he stated. "What you're saying by closing schools preemptively, and even colleges, is that you can't possibly control outbreaks in those settings. And I just don't think that that's the case. I think with the tools we have with prudence, with the knowledge we have about how to control this infection in those settings, you can do pretty- a pretty good job of trying to control large outbreaks, certainly within the classroom."

Gottlieb said the Omicron variant "does appear to be a milder strain of coronavirus and we also have a lot of immunity in the population."

"There is a very clear decoupling between cases at this point in hospitalizations and ICU admissions," he said. "There's a very clear, as I said, decoupling between cases and hospitalizations and does appear now based on a lot of experimental evidence that we've gotten just in the last two weeks, that this is a milder form of the coronavirus appears to be a more of an upper airway disease and a lower airway disease that's good for most Americans."

"The one group that- that may be a problem for his very young kids — very young children, toddlers who have trouble with upper airway infections, and you're in fact seeing more croup-like infections and bronchiolitis in New York City among children," he added. "So, that could be a challenge for young kids, and we are seeing rising hospitalizations among that pediatric segment."

Gottlieb believes that the current wave of the Omicron variant will begin to decline in most of the U.S. by the end of February.

"Now this is a big country, this will affect different parts of the country at different points in time," he said. "But if the UK is any guide, London's already peaking. If South Africa is any guide. This is about a two-month epidemic wave from start to finish. And so, parts of the country that were affected earlier, like New York, probably are going to start to peak in the next two weeks, other parts within the next four weeks. So, I think certainly by the end of February, we will be through this if businesses need a guide of when prevalence is going to start to decline in terms of school."

Last month, Gottlieb predicted that 2022 "is going to be a transition year." He said we will likely "go from a pandemic into a more endemic phase."

Gottlieb says Omicron appears to be a "milder form" of COVID-19, but pediatric danger remains www.youtube.com

Horowitz: No, N95s won’t stop the virus either



We all knew this was coming. The same people who were wrong for over a year about the power of surgical masks — at a very painful cost to our children and society — are now seamlessly pivoting to their new position without ever apologizing for their original mistakes. They now want children to wear the even more cruel N95 masks. The twisted irony is that after causing more discomfort and potential medical harms to children, they will still not provide protection against the virus.

Like a dog returning to his vomit, Scott Gottleib, a former FDA administrator under Obama, called for kids to wear N95s rather than confess the mistake of the failed social experiment. Last week, Gottlieb advised schools to begin using KN95 masks, the Chinese version of the N95. He also praised the Utah RINO governor for making KN95 masks available for school districts that want them. Since he called for these masks, there is now a torrent of N95 and KN95 articles in the media. Dr. Michael Osterholm, Biden's former COVID adviser, has also called for all adults to wear N95s after conceding that surgical and cloth masks failed to show any efficacy. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is very influential with Democrat policymakers, has also publicly recommended N95 respirators.

We've seen this nightmare before, and what begins as a bad dream rapidly descends into reality and soon turns into a mandate.

Aside from the fact that anyone pushing them on kids should be charged with reckless child endangerment, N95s really don't make any more of a difference against the virus than the other masks. Should we trust the same people who were wrong about surgical masks to now make kids suffer under their crueler cousin?

Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and hazardous exposure expert, sent me a copy of an N95 usage label made by 3M that he enlarged into an infographic. It turns out the company's own disclosure blows up the myth of using an N95 for viral protection.

The label confirms what everyone understood prior to the mask mania of COVID: Masks cannot stop aerosols, certainly not viral ones, which are much smaller than bacteria. What's truly revealing is that the label recommends against relying on them for source protection even against asbestos particles, which are on average 5 microns – 50 times larger than SARS-CoV-2 virions.

A large randomized controlled trial published just months before the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 — before masking became a political and social control tool — showed no benefit to N95s over surgical masks in terms of protection against the flu. "Among outpatient health care personnel, N95 respirators vs medical masks as worn by participants in this trial resulted in no significant difference in the incidence of laboratory-confirmed influenza," concluded the authors of the large trial, published in JAMA on Sept. 3, 2019.

Not surprisingly, we have seen no real difference in efficacy of N95s against this virus either. Bavaria and Berlin are two of the only known places to mandate the use of N95 masks, yet they failed to stop the subsequent wave, just as we saw with surgical and cloth masks elsewhere.

As “the experts” start pushing N95 masks for all, even kids, while tacitly acknowledging that cloth & surgical mask… https://t.co/D14859whQC

— IM (@ianmSC) 1628448366.0

So, for no gain, what sort of pain should children expect to experience after wearing these devices for seven hours? A 2013 study published in the American Journal of Infection Control found that a sample of nurses experienced significant increases in CO2 levels and "complaints of headache, lightheadedness, and difficulty communicating also increased over time." More recently, a study of 154 N95-wearing health care workers in Singapore found a significant increase in mask-induced blood carbon dioxide levels, which was associated with noticeable headaches in most of the trial group.

It's therefore not surprising that for wildfires, the California Department of Health warns that children should not wear NIOSH N95 or P100 masks. "Children should not wear these masks – they do not fit properly and can impede breathing," states the department of health on the Q&A page about smoke inhalation and wildfires. As the Sacramento County Department of Health Services states, "N95 respirator can make it more difficult for the wearer to breathe due to carbon dioxide buildup, which reduces the intake of oxygen, increased breathing rates, and heart rates."

Remember, gradual and subtle oxygen deprivation is worse for children while their bodies are still growing. Is this what we are prepared to foist upon our children now that we've thrown out the pre-political science we once abided by?

The sad irony, according to Stephen Petty, is that there is a much more effective way of controlling a hazardous environment based on the hierarchy of controls we apply in any other interaction with potential toxins. Here is a simple way to view the hierarchy of controls from a PowerPoint presentation Petty, who has testified in court cases on mask mandates, put together.

While endless isolation and PPE-wearing have proven unfeasible and ineffective, what we haven't tried is placing filters in major public areas that actually dilute and kill the virus particles. Petty recommends iWave-R Air Ionization filters in particular.

Our failed approach to source control is quite similar to the treatment approach of the virus. Rather than treating it early and effectively with cheap medicines, our government has spent a fortune investing in an ever-weakening vaccine and ineffective, expensive treatments like remdesivir. Officials are placing the onus on the people to experiment with their lives rather than helping empower people with reliable and safe, proven drugs.

Similarly, as it relates to source control, they focused on civilization-killing lockdowns and control of the human body, which never works as well as controlling the environment by killing the virus.

No, installing these filters will not permanently save us from the natural flow of the virus, but to the extent that anything will work to slow the spread indoors, it would be an ionization filter, not a piece of cloth. But our government refuses to focus on what actually works and helps people in the most efficient and cost-conscience way; officials seek to maximize the pain with no gain. After all, this is not really about source control, but about social control.