BALTIMORE (LifeSiteNews) — Johns Hopkins University (JHU), one of the most prestigious medical schools in America, has announced it is intensifying its masking requirements for on-campus students, in a move critics interpret as betraying a lack of confidence in the student body’s status as almost entirely vaccinated for COVID-19.
“We will require the use of N95s, KN95s, or a combination of a cloth mask with a surgical mask,” the school announced January 14. “A cloth mask alone or a surgical mask alone will no longer meet the university’s mask requirement … We will distribute a variety of mask types at numerous locations around the university, on all campuses, beginning next week.”
As previously announced, the school also requires vaccinated students to receive booster shots by February 1 and “register it in the Vaccine Management System.” Students will be tested for COVID twice weekly, as well, and “test immediately upon their arrival” for the spring semester “and to quarantine in their rooms until they receive a negative result.”
The announcement cites as justification the high transmissibility of the omicron variant, while notably acknowledging “the near universal rate of vaccination within our community.” Townhall notes that on December 31 the school said that “although case counts continue to rise in our area and among our affiliates, we continue to see no transmission of COVID-19 on campus or in our workplaces when our rules and guidance are followed,” raising questions as to why stricter masking was deemed necessary.
Available evidence suggests that masks have played little, if any, role in reducing COVID-19’s spread across the United States, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) September 2020 acknowledgement that masks cannot be counted on to keep out COVID when spending 15 minutes or longer within six feet of someone, or a May 2020 study published by CDC’s peer-reviewed journal Emerging Infectious Diseases that “did not find evidence that surgical-type face masks are effective in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza transmission, either when worn by infected persons (source control) or by persons in the general community to reduce their susceptibility.”
Last May, another study found that, though mandates effectively increased the use of masks, that use did not yield the expected benefits: “mask mandates and use (were) not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among U.S. states” from March 2020 to March 2021. In fact, the researchers found the results to be a net negative, with masks increasing “dehydration … headaches and sweating and decreas[ing] cognitive precision,” and interfering with communication, as well as impairing social learning among children.
Johns Hopkins’ extreme COVID-19 policies also include denying a medical exemption to an anonymous student who wants to abstain from the booster shot because he had a documented adverse reaction to his COVID vaccine, including an emergency room visit for “fever, severe gastrointestinal issues, and breathing problems,” the Daily Caller reports. The university reportedly denied his request on January 19, claiming his paperwork “cannot be verified” and that his experience did not qualify as “allergy” or “severe anaphylactic reaction.”
Not everyone at Johns Hopkins is on board with COVID conventional wisdom, however. Professor Dr. Marty Makary of JHU School of Medicine is a vocal critic of the public health establishment’s refusal to recognize natural immunity, which numerous studies have found is longer lasting and more durable than vaccine-induced immunity.