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SANTA CRUZ, California (LifeSiteNews) – A California county has imposed a mask mandate for all indoor gatherings regardless of vaccination status, including those in private homes. 

On Monday, Santa Cruz County announced that, effective Sunday, wearing masks will be required in all indoor settings where people from more than one household are present, including gatherings in private homes.  

“What it looks like to the public is that we’re going back and forth and can’t make up our minds. What it really is, [is] science evolving as we speak,” said Dr. David Ghilarducci, the county’s Deputy Health Officer, in the announcement. 

According to health officials, the cause for the reimposition of the mandate, which had initially been lifted in late September, is a reported 29% spike in cases over the past two weeks. 

Ghilarducci defended the on-again, off-again approach, saying, “Having a kind of endless mask mandate in the face of low cases and rapidly dropping cases, I think, may actually undermine credibility. More so than having to go on again and off again.”  

Despite governments around the world requiring their citizens to wear masks in the name of public health, an increasing amount of scientific evidence indicates that masking is not an effective tool in slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus. 

In November 2020, a major peer-reviewed study published by the Annals of Internal Medicine found that there is no statistically significant difference in COVID-19 cases between mask-wearers and non-mask-wearers. 

Additionally, according to a group of doctors and health experts who published an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 20 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.” 

Even worse, a whopping 32 scientific studies indicate that not only are masks ineffective, but their use is actually damaging.  

In a 2008 study on the effects of wearing surgical masks, researchers proved that surgeons that wore a mask in surgery for an hour or more had significant reductions in blood oxygen saturation, leading experts to conclude that prolonged mask usage is detrimental to overall health.