To mark the fifth anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, Smile Free have released a short film – ‘Masking Humanity’ – focusing on the harms caused by mask requirements in health and social care.
THIS month marks the fifth anniversary of one of the most blatant reverse ferrets in public health history. Within little more than a month our political leaders, senior doctors and government scientists flipped from a stance of imploring us all not to wear a face covering in community settings to a totalitarian one of imposing mask mandates. The abrupt transition from a stance of ‘masks do more harm than good’ to the imperative that ‘we all must wear one’ was undertaken in the absence of compelling evidence that face coverings reduced viral transmission. Worse still, this abrupt change of policy had negative consequences: perpetuation of fear, speech-impaired toddlers, the social exclusion of the hard-of-hearing, reduction in the quality of health and social care, and the re-traumatising of those with histories of sexual and physical abuse, to name but a few.
Given the pervasive and unnecessary suffering caused, we should not let those responsible for this cruel restriction slip quietly away. So, five years since the first UK mask mandates, let us remember the complicit.
The unhinged fanatics
Some pro-mask advocates seemed to lose the plot completely. The most prominent member of this subgroup would undoubtedly be Trish Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Health Care Sciences at Oxford University. Who can forget her covid-era claims that science is the ‘enemy of good policy’, and that double masking in the form of a strategically placed pantyliner would be a sensible precaution? Greenhalgh was still at it in 2023 when, in an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, she said, ‘There’s absolutely no doubt that the virus can’t get through the holes in the mask’ – an assertion akin to claiming that a tennis net can block grains of sand. Indeed, her claims about mask efficacy in this interview were so wildly inaccurate that even the fact-checkers intervened.
A close runner-up in this category is Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University. As one example, in her testimony to the covid inquiry, Sridhar mentions that masks are worn ‘on construction sites’ to support her argument for efficacy, ignoring the fact that fragments of concrete and masonry are a gazillion times larger than a pathogen. In the same testimony she described how her and her fellow advisers ‘spent too long debating whether masks work’; when the counsel to the inquiry reminded her that the science had concluded face coverings achieved a ‘near non-existent’ degree of benefit, and asked: ‘Is this the sort of debate and discussion that you think we should have bypassed?’ Sridhar replied: ‘Exactly’.
The power-intoxicated
Another band of mask miscreants would be those with an inherent authoritarian streak who appeared to relish imposing restrictions on the populace. Energised by their formal positions of influence within the government infrastructure, this pro-mask subgroup – as revealed by journalist Isabel Oakeshott – would reasonably include Matt Hancock (former Health Secretary), Dominic Cummings (former Government adviser) and Nicola Sturgeon (former First Minister of Scotland). London mayor Sadiq Khan (now Sir Sadiq) also warrants a place on this list of the power-intoxicated as illustrated by his April 2020 comment: ‘I’ve lobbied the Government for some time now to make the wearing of face coverings obligatory on public transport.’
During the covid era, these key political figures repeatedly urged ever more extreme restrictions, imposing mask requirements on healthy adults and children.
The manipulators
Behavioural scientists (‘nudgers’) played a prominent role in enhancing the effectiveness of the government’s covid communications, deploying often-covert psychological interventions to frighten, shame and scapegoat people into compliance. During the covid era, many of these professional manipulators were on hand to advise policymakers about how best to persuade people to adhere to public health diktats, including mask requirements.
Arguably the best known UK nudger is Professor Susan Michie, a Communist Party member who during the covid years was a core member of both SAGE (the main advisory committee) and the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (a subgroup that offered expert guidance about how to maximise the impact of ‘pandemic’ communications). Her voracious appetite for compelling healthy people to cover their faces was starkly revealed in a 2021 interview when she said that we should wear masks ‘for ever’ as a means of suppressing future viruses. Perhaps in recognition for dispensing these pearls of wisdom, Michie was subsequently appointed chair of a behavioural science advisory group at the World Health Organization.
Michie’s zeal for muzzling human beings was surpassed by another prominent nudger, Professor David Halpern. The longstanding chief of the UK’s ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ (BIT) – aka the ‘Nudge Unit’ – Halpern energetically championed face coverings in the months prior to the June 2020 mandates. According to his witness statement to the covid inquiry, on March 31 he shared a note with the Cabinet Office on ‘Why the UK general public should use facemasks’, arguing that the government’s anti-mask position at that time was wrong. Two months later, Halpern took it upon himself to arrange the testing of masks at Porton Down (a military research facility) where he apparently discovered that ‘even cloth masks were effective’; he believed these results to be so important that he ‘sent them directly to Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Simon Case’. Given this level of commitment to the pro-mask cause – together with his acknowledged attempt to manipulate Prime Minister Boris Johnson into wearing one – it is reasonable to conclude that Halpern holds a significant degree of responsibility for the June 2020 mask mandates.
The ideologues
Several influential bodies which promoted mass masking during the covid event seem to have been primarily motivated by their ideological beliefs, construing a world where everyone covered their faces as a good fit with the type of society they were striving to create. To these groups, ubiquitous mask-wearing symbolised concepts such as collectivism, equality and the sense that ‘we are all in this together’. Sometimes their championing of universal face coverings had cruder underpinnings, primarily motivated by their left-wing political leanings and the desire to make things difficult for the then Conservative administration. The groups driven by ideology would include:
World Health Organization: A prominent mouthpiece for the globalist agenda that seeks greater control over the lives of ordinary people.
Independent SAGE: An outspoken collective of zero-Covid advocates who repeatedly pushed for longer and harsher restrictions; members included Professors Trish Greenhalgh and Susan Michie.
DELVE (Data Evaluation & Learning for Viral Epidemics): A group of remote scientists outside the formal SAGE advisory structure whose recommendations were pivotal in the UK government’s flip-flop on masking healthy people; Professor Devi Sridar was a member.
Royal Society: A staunchly pro-restriction scientific academy who hosted and endorsed DELVE. In May 2020 they promoted cloth masks as a ‘source control’ to counter asymptomatic transmission (a highly dubious concept), and the following month they published a paper that lauded the value of masks in conveying psychological messages to encourage general compliance with government diktats. In July 2020, Venki Ramakrishnan (the then Royal Society president) said that ‘refusing to wear a mask in public . . . should become as socially unacceptable as drink driving or not wearing a seatbelt’.
British Medical Association: A trade union and professional organisation for doctors, the BMA often campaigned for tougher restrictions, including the masking of children in schools.
The weak
Based on their contradictory announcements during the covid event, it is reasonable to suggest that there were many political figures and scientific advisers who recognised the ineffectiveness of strips of cloth and plastic as a viral barrier, yet still capitulated to pressure from the pro-mask mafia. As for the reasons for this surrender to the mainstream narrative, one can only surmise that it was because of an inherent weakness of character and/or a wish not to jeopardise their career prospects.
This category of the complicit would include:
Professor Chris Whitty(England Chief Medical Officer): ‘Wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that’ (3.3.2020).
Professor Jenny Harris (Deputy Chief Medical Officer): Wearing face masks is ‘not a good idea’ and ‘could increase risk of infection . . . you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in’ (11.3.2020).
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam (England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer): ‘We do not recommend face masks for general wear’ (3.4.2020).
Professor Jason Leitch (Scotland’s Clinical Director): ‘The global evidence is masks in the general population don’t work’ (3.4.2020).
Sir Patrick Vallance (Chief Scientific Adviser): The evidence on face masks has always been quite weak’ (April 2020).
Boris Johnson (Prime Minister): ‘Are we going to encourage people to wear masks? Are we going to continue with this bollocks?’ (July 2021).
Grant Shapps (Transport Secretary): Wearing a mask ‘could be counter-productive . . . do more harm than good’ (April 2020).
Because of the mask impositions in 2020, UK citizens were pressured to participate in a prolonged dehumanising charade. Under the pretext of keeping a pathogen at bay, the state deployed fear and shame in an attempt to coerce people to cover their faces when engaged in everyday activities. Those who resisted were abused and scapegoated. Millions suffered, many profoundly – the cognitively-impaired elderly in our care homes being one important group of victims as powerfully described in a new short film, Masking Humanity.
On this anniversary we must never forget those in positions of authority and influence who were collectively responsible for the multiple harms of ubiquitous masking.
