The Great Facemask Debate
A recent article in Nature Medicine proclaimed that simply wearing facemasks today in the COVID-19 era will save 130,000 lives by February, an outlandish statement that was immediately discredited by many, including economist Phillip Magness.
Penning an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Magness says the mandate won’t save 130,000 lives because the vast majority of Americans are already wearing masks. And this revelation comes on the heels of Joe Biden saying he would impose a national mask mandate should he become President. Bad data in the medical journal’s seminal study is fueling the push, inferring that less than 50 percent of Americans today wear masks, when in fact more than 80 percent wear them, despite President Trump’s somewhat cavalier attitude toward face coverings. In other words, don’t tell us to do what we’re already doing.
Says political commentator Bill Whittle, the reason people are wearing more masks than the medical journal assumed is because they are making common sense assumptions. “This entire lockdown and all of the panic was predicated on one computer model by one guy at Oxford University. And that model predicted two and one-half million Americans dead on the basis of an infection rate of 85, 89 percent of the population, when the flu pandemic of 1919 was around 22 percent and Swine Flu a couple of years ago was 26 percent. So the entire planet, including the United States, got locked down on the basis of one computer model from one guy, whose initial statement was four orders of magnitude out of place.” Here’s more with Whittle and moderator Scott Ott.
