Vaccines don’t work, masks don’t work: Everything government told us about COVID-19 was wrong

OPINION:

Remember when the federal government told you masks were effective against COVID-19?

Yeah, they’re not.

Remember when the government told you vaccines will keep you from getting the virus?

Yeah, they don’t.

And remember when the federal government told you COVID didn’t come from a lab in Wuhan, China? Well, it did. Who says? The federal government. 

The narrative laid out by the administrations of both former President Donald Trump and President Biden has rapidly fallen apart in the past couple of weeks.

The New York Times published a piece last week headlined “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” It was penned by Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist with the Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.

“The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.”

“‘There is just no evidence that they’ — masks — ‘make any difference,’ he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. ‘Full stop.’”

“But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks? ‘Makes no difference — none of it,’ said Jefferson.”

Hang on. Study after study in the early days of the pandemic asserted that masks worked, which prompted lawmakers at every level of government to enact mask mandates. But Mr. Jefferson says those studies were “non-randomized” and “flawed.”

So that raises the question: What about Mr. Jefferson’s study? Yeah, no. He and 11 colleagues conducted 78 randomized controlled trials with a total of 610,872 participants in numerous countries.

“Mask mandates were a fool’s errand from the start,” Mr. Stephens wrote. “They may have created a false sense of safety — and thus permission to resume semi-normal life. They did almost nothing to advance safety itself. The Cochrane report ought to be the final nail in this particular coffin.”

Also this week, researchers examined the efficacy of local COVID-19 vaccine mandates implemented across the United States in 2021 and found they didn’t work.

“These mandates imposed severe restrictions on the lives of many citizens and business owners,” the researchers said in a study conducted by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “Yet, we find no evidence that the mandates were effective in their intended goals of reducing COVID-19 cases and deaths.”

The researchers evaluated the District of Columbia, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle.

“We find no evidence that the announcement or implementation of indoor vaccine mandates in the cities listed had any significant effect on vaccine uptake, COVID-19 cases, or COVID-19 deaths, and this is largely consistent for all US cities that implemented the mandate,” the researchers wrote.

When COVID-19 arrived on our shores in early 2020, leaders of big cities — almost invariably Democrats — enacted major lockdowns, forcing businesses to close and shutting down entertainment and sports venues. They also ordered everyone to wear masks. When vaccines were created, those leaders issued mandates requiring millions to take them.

For instance, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, a Democrat, said in August 2021 that science shows mask and vaccine mandates would slow the spread.

But researchers found no evidence to back that up.

“Our findings put into question the efficacy of city-level vaccine mandates,” the researchers found. “Indoor vaccine mandates caused large disruptions for many individuals and businesses. New York City, for example, fired 1,430 city workers for failing to comply with its vaccine mandate. A survey found that over 90% of NYC restaurants reported having customer-related challenges, such as losing customers who objected to the mandate, and 75% having staff-related challenges. Those are just a small fraction of the disruptions caused by the mandates.”

“Most supporters of the mandates claim that the associated increase in vaccination rates, and its implied reduction in the spread of COVID-19, outweigh the cost of the disruptions. However, we find that the effects of the mandates on their intended outcomes are not statistically noticeable in any of the cities they were implemented in all empirical strategies used,” the report said.

Then last week we found out the global COVID-19 pandemic originated from a virology lab in run by the communist regime in China, according to a new U.S. Department of Energy document that was recently provided to key members of Congress and the White House.

Remember when social media squelched any mention of that? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

So now we know that the government didn’t know a thing about COVID-19. They told us things to make us do what they wanted us to do, but none of it was based in science.

And that should scare the hell out of you.

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @josephcurl.