Someone ought to remind Dr. Jeff Duchin, health officer at Public Health — Seattle & King County, in Washington State, not only that masks do not pass muster, but that he, along with colleagues in public health, has lost credibility.

Still, with the alleged rise of the COVID-19 delta variant, panic-prone Duchin — on Friday — urged all residents above the age of five to mask up in indoor public settings again — notwithstanding vaccination status. 

So tell me: what's the point of being vaccinated with an experimental agent that has not been FDA-approved if we are still being bullied into covering our faces?

Duchin's fear-mongering comes even as the efficacy of face coverings has been refuted time and again.

"It boggles my mind when there is some notion that by wearing a face covering you are actually doing a 'service' to your neighbor and therefore everyone has to protect everyone by this," writes Roger Koops in The Year of Disguises (American Institute for Economic Research, AIER).  Koops is a 25-year veteran of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

"Actually, the opposite is true," he adds.  "You are now becoming an additional potential source of environmental contamination.  You are now becoming a transmission risk; not only are you increasing your own risk, but you are also increasing the risk to others."

Anti-lockdown critic and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson also takes the mask police to task in his third booklet ("Masks") in the series Unreported Truth about COVID-19 and Lockdowns.  "The evidence that face coverings do any good turns out to be even more porous than the masks themselves."

Duchin, meanwhile, claims the county's seven-day average of new cases per 100,000 has increased from 19 to 41.

Even so, his justification for reinstating indoor masking in public spaces lacks merit.  Here's why.

"A 'case' of coronavirus refers only to a positive test result showing someone has been infected," according to Berenson.  "It does not mean that a person will become sick — much less that he or she will be hospitalized, need intensive care, or die."

As fate would have it, now even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is abandoning PCR testing.

"In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test," reads the group's website.

PCR tests have long been blamed for the high number of false positive COVID-19 test results that served as justification for lockdowns.

We now know that lockdowns caused more harm than COVID itself.

From the outset of the outbreak, public health experts, like Duchin, failed to provide the necessary context for analyzing COVID-related matters.

Instead of obsessing over the rising number of cases, public health experts could have focused on the number of hospitalizations and the stratified nature of the casualties.  COVID-19 is deadliest among older and infirm populations, according to the data from the CDC.

Additionally, data from the CDC show that Americans are far more likely to die of something other than COVID-19.  In fact, of those 85 and older, only 13.3 percent of all deaths since February 2020 were due to COVID-19.

Like America's Frontline Doctors, public health advocates could have educated the public on the safety and efficacy of treating COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine or other home therapies, like ivermectin.  "The safety of HCQ is irrefutable," reads the group's website.

They also failed to promote natural immunity.

"There's ample scientific evidence that natural immunity is effective and durable, and public-health leaders should pay it heed," according to Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

For this and more, Americans, it seems, have tired of the hypocritical veneer of public health "experts," hell-bent on curtailing individual freedoms for some — with never-ending assists from the mainstream media.

A recent survey, conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, reveals that ratings of the nation's public health system plummeted from 43 percent in 2009 to 34 percent in 2021.

Not surprisingly, "[f]ewer than 4 in 10 adults report having 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot of trust' in the National Institutes of Health (37%), the Food and Drug Administration (37%) and the Department of Health and Human Services (33%).

Who could ever forget how public health experts demonized lockdown protesters while celebrating "Black Lives Matter" protests — as cities burned and lives and livelihoods were ravaged?  Whatever happened to the lofty ideal of "do no harm"?

In a brazenly ideological letter, meanwhile, more than 1,000 health experts defended their position at the time. 

"[A]s public health advocates, we do not condemn these gathering as risky for COVID-19 transmission," they wrote of the ongoing riots and protests.  "We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States."

All the while, others were not allowed to gather with loved ones, attend worship services, or provide for their families. 

It's no wonder trust in so-called public heath "experts" has deteriorated.

As for Washington state, residents there have every reason to feel betrayed.

Clifford Knopik, a data scientist, recently told Seattle radio host Todd Herman that COVID PCR test info that led to lockdowns is "garbage data."  "Never in my professional career [have I seen] this level of vagueness and corrupted data," he added.

Now what? 

Image via Pixabay.

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