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July 2, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – The embattled World Health Organization (WHO) is using the specter of the recently-discovered delta variant of COVID-19 to renew its calls to keep wearing masks in public regardless of whether one has received a COVID-19 vaccine.
“The Delta variant is a dangerous virus,” said WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove. “It is more transmissible than the Alpha variant, which was extremely transmissible across Europe — across any country that it entered.”
While “our public health and social measures work, our vaccines work, our diagnostics work, our therapeutics work,” she argued that those who have availed themselves of such measures should resume mask wearing anyway because “there may be a time where this virus evolves and these countermeasures don't.”
But available evidence suggests that masks played a relatively small role, if any, in reducing the virus’ spread across the United States over the past year. Early in 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams counseled against wearing masks, as did White House COVID-19 czar Dr. Anthony Fauci. But the public later learned that health officials actually wanted to discourage the general public from buying masks to conserve the supply for health workers.
Despite the popular insistence that masking is essential outside one’s home, there remain reasons to doubt their effectiveness, such as the CDC’s September acknowledgement that masks cannot be counted on to keep out the coronavirus 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.”
In late May, another study found that, though mandates effectively resulted in higher levels of mask wearing, “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 decrease cognitive precision,” and interfering with communication, as well as impairing social learning among children.
As for the delta variant, The Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz wrote that “if people would actually look at the data, they'd realize that the Delta variant is actually less deadly … India has one-seventh the death rate per capita of the U.S.; it's just that India got the major winter wave later, when the Western countries were largely done with it, thereby giving the illusion that India somehow suffered worse.”
Horowitz cited a British government report showing a lower case-fatality rate (CFR) for the delta variant than for previous COVID strains and the same rate as the flu. “This is exactly what every respiratory pandemic has done through history: morphed into more transmissible and less virulent form that forces the other mutations out since you get that one,” he summarized. “Nothing about masks, lockdowns, or experimental shots did this.”