Arthur Firstenberg, author of The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, wrote in his August 11 newsletter:

“As a person who went to medical school, I was shocked when I read Neil Orr’s study, published in 1981 in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Dr. Orr was a surgeon in the Severalls Surgical Unit in Colchester…. They wore no masks for six months, and compared the rate of surgical wound infections from March through August 1980 with the rate of wound infections from March through August of the previous four years.

“And they discovered, to their amazement, that when nobody wore masks during surgeries, the rate of wound infections was less than half what it was when everyone wore masks.”

While I haven’t been able to find any evidence that mask wearing stops primary or secondary infections, I still assumed they provided some protection when you were removing some poor soul’s appendix or transplanting his heart. I decided to look at Orr’s study myself.

It opens with a statement very relevant to the mask-craze we are witnessing today: “A review of the very considerable literature on prevention of infection in theatre shows a heavy bias in favour of history and hypothesis. Most of the facts relate to contamination, not infection.”

The study concluded “that the wearing of a mask has very little relevance to the wellbeing of patients undergoing routine general surgery and it is a standard practice that could be abandoned.”

Firstenberg says: “I was so amazed that I scoured the medical literature, sure that this was a fluke and that newer studies must show the utility of masks in preventing the spread of disease. But to my surprise the medical literature for the past forty-five years has been consistent: masks are useless in preventing the spread of disease and, if anything, are unsanitary objects that themselves spread bacteria and viruses.”

Firstenberg’s newsletter lists 16 such studies. I’ll be looking at them in detail in future Red Pill emails.

Even more revealing, Orr’s study notes that there is evidence that mouth breathing can lead to wound infection; much like I shared in Monday’s post on nasal breathing. He actually recommended that surgical teams minimize talking. In other words: Shut your mouth and ditch the mask.