In his regular column for The Telegraph newspaper today, Philip Johnston says that masks “act as a useful control mechanism for a state that wants a compliant population.”
The journalist revealed that he reluctantly donned a face covering during his train journey yesterday, having not worn one since July’s “Freedom Day.” Johnston wrote:
“Masks are dehumanising devices that should be obligatory only in extremis, not as a go-to expedient for a panicky cabinet. Are we to evolve over the years into a species able to recognise emotions just through watching the eyes of others, unable to tell whether they are smiling or grimacing beneath the mask?”
Johnston points out that scientific evidence on the efficacy of wearing a mask is rather thin. He writes:
Let us all defer to medical experts such as Dr Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, who was interviewed on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday about the new measures introduced to combat the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
This was the same Dr Harries who, at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, stated that wearing masks was “not a good idea” and that “you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in”. In other words, coverings were as likely to cause infection as prevent it. Even as late as August last year, Dr Harries said: “The evidence on face coverings is not very strong in either direction.”
He goes on to point out that as recently as last summer, The World Health Organisation was against face coverings. The WHO said they were counterproductive.
In conclusion Johnston says:
Once more we are being ordered to muzzle up because it is seen as a community-minded thing to do. But masks also act as a useful control mechanism for a state that wants a compliant population. We are far more receptive to yet more restrictions on our freedoms if we inhabit a dystopian world of half faces and frightened eyes.
The penny in being to drop for some of the more experienced broadsheet hacks. This isn’t about a virus. It never was.
