A GlobalNews report opens with hopeful footage of a hundred anti-maskers protesting outside Premier François Legault’s office in downtown Montréal. A young lady, with dark framed glasses, holds a handwritten sign:

CANADIAN DEATHS
Flu last year: 8,500 | COVID this year: 8,700

“I’m here to take back our freedom,” says protestor Vanessa Glavac, “and protest the absolute tyranny that is being opposed on us by our government with absolutely no scientific evidence.”

The news segment then switches to a clip of two masked police officers forcibly arresting a man at a Tim Horton’s coffee shop for not wearing face coverings. (The full smartphone video is even more demeaning, with the man being pepper-sprayed and then pinned to floor in a headlock.)

Even more eerie is the sudden switch to Dr. Raywat Deonandan, an epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa. He speaks in a slow, awkward and authoritative voice; yet see how his actual words contradict themselves:

“All we care about now is preventing the flow of air leaving your mouth more than a couple of centimetres. Absence a piece of cloth over your mouth and nose, droplets can be spewed up to two meters away. With the mask it can go a centimetre, couple centimetres maybe. So that small change, when adopted by tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people is sufficient to reduce the transmission of this disease noticeably.”

Did you catch the contradiction?

Deonandan says that “all we care about” is “preventing the flow of air leaving your mouth;” but immediately shifts to talking about stopping droplets, not air. Why? because masks can’t stop the flow of air. You don’t need a PhD to realize this. The air will go through the mask and around the edges.

It’s those lightweight, microscopic, virus-laden aerosols that are then suspended in the air and breathed in by others (as explained in Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to Covid-19 Social Policy). The larger droplets we are “spewing” will fall to the ground, not up somebody’s nose and into their lungs (as Professor Rancourt explained in a previous post).

The epidemiologist’s choice of words are also very vague and cautious. He says if hundreds of thousands wear masks it will reduce the spread of COVID “noticeably.” How much is noticeably? How does one notice this phenomenon? With those questionable PCR tests or even more questionable contact tracing? And how can they prove that masks – and not a hundred other factors (like hot, humid weather) – is the cause of this noticeable reduction?

If mask wearing produced such noticeable effects, I must ask, why do all seven randomly controlled trials cited by government’s own documents show that mask wearing makes no significant difference in the number of people infected?

Is not preventing people from becoming infected (and dying) the only result that could possibly justify pepper spaying and pinning to the ground another human being and forcibly dragging him to jail?

Apparently not. As Dr. Deonandan said: “All we care about now is preventing the flow of air leaving your mouth…”

Preventing the flow of air leaving your mouth.

Please, let that sink in.