I went to watch Hamilton in Sydney the other day with a good friend (mate in Aussie parlance), we were standing in line waiting to be QR coded and let in and I was looking around at the masks that everyone was wearing while they waited to get it.
I said something to my mate along the lines of “Look at all these Muppets wearing these disposable bullshit Chinese made face nappies and breathing in all the trace shit in them.” I don’t know why I was expecting a grunt of approval, but it didn’t come. Instead, he said something about how that didn’t make sense and doctors wear them all the time blah, blah, blah.
I love my mate and I wasn’t about to argue with him just before Hamilton about the pros and cons of disposable masks versus N95 masks versus masks as a useful NPI etc. So, I nodded, grunted, and left it there.
We went in to watch Hamilton, surprisingly I quite enjoyed it. Especially because I took the fucking mask off my face as soon as I was seated. But, almost everyone else in the seated crowd (about 1,000) kept them on for the whole show…in that dark!
I have been stunned by the compliance of the Australian population. The population that swims with Great Whites, lives among Brown Snakes and Funnel Web Spiders and is plagued by poisonous frogs…but now lives in terror of a virus that is asymptomatic in 90% of people and has an IFR of the flu. Anyway, I’m rambling…that is a discussion for another day.
The day after Hamilton, I decide to email my mate the following.
You are welcome to repurpose this email, or any of the others I have published to your own family and friends. As we know, some are more receptive than others, but we do have an obligation to those that we care about, to try to open their eyes so that they cause minimum harm to themselves and their families. I know that this is balanced against trying to maintain those relationships and not breaking them.
Discretion is required
Here is the email…
Hi Mate
Glad we did Hamilton yesterday, I really enjoyed it, especially that we did it together. The mask thing didn’t turn out that bad, especially considering that I didn’t wear it throughout the whole show 😊.
Just a quick note on the issue of masks, I didn’t want to debate it in line with you yesterday, but happy to discuss it at length if you are interested sometime. In one sense its simple, but in another it gets complex as you need to discuss aerosols vs droplets, asymptomatic spread, N95 surgical masks, real world evidence on efficacy (we have the data after 15 months) and proper large scale-controlled studies.
Bottom line, they don’t work, if by “work” we mean the stopping or even meaningful slowing of the spread of a respiratory virus. But I’m not going to unpack that here.
The simple point I was making was that if I had to wear one (because I want to see Hamilton with mate) and I had to choose between the disposable blue/white masks people are wearing and the simple cloth ones we had, I would choose ours because there is far less shit in ours to inhale.
The cheap disposables are not N95 masks that surgeons and hospitals use, they are being produced at the rate of about 200 million!! per day from China alone and are being shipped in without any quality controls worth speaking of.
Here is a good recent study from the UK.
Nanoplastics and other harmful pollutants found within disposable face masks - Swansea University
The research reveals high levels of pollutants, including lead, antimony, and copper, within the silicon-based and plastic fibres of common disposable face masks.
Here is another good read
“Graphene is a strong, very thin material that is used in fabrication, but it can be harmful to lungs when inhaled and can cause long-term health problems.”
“Health Canada has issued a warning about blue and gray disposable face masks, which contain an asbestos-like substance associated with “early pulmonary toxicity.”
We close by reiterating the warning in the JAMA publication that “Face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill.” We raise this issue of potential harm due to synthetic fibres, chlorine, and chemicals from Covid masks as a public health warning.
I could write a small book on masks, but the bottom line is that the list of negatives is very very long, and the list of positives is either non-existent or so tiny to be irrelevant. The cost/benefit is horrendous.
Anyway, you get the gist.
See you next week mate.
Unbekoming (not my real name)
He didn’t reply.
He didn't reply to your email, but did he show up to your plans for the next week? Did he dump you as his friend? So many people, trying to tell others the truth, have been dumped by friends and family, causing grief and heartache.