(NaturalHealth365) This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released updated guidelines regarding the use of face masks.  Among their Big Brother-esque guidelines: people who have received the COVID shot are now “allowed” to go maskless while at small outdoor gatherings.

These guidelines are already questionable to the millions of Americans who have been simply focusing on their health and living their lives throughout the pandemic.  But in light of a recently published and highly “controversial” paper highlighting the many adverse effects of face masks, the idea that a government would even offer mask guidelines in the first place is more worrisome than ever.

Effectiveness of masks remains highly questionable — meanwhile, the case against widespread mask use gets stronger and more concerning

In January 2021, the peer-reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses published a paper by a man named Baruch Vainshelboim, titled “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis.”  According to his public LinkedIn profile, Vainshelboim is a Clinical Exercise Physiologist; however, in the paper itself, he claims affiliation with the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and Stanford University in California.

According to Stanford Medicine (in a public statement, this affiliation is misleading (in a public statement, they admit that Vainshelboim had a “one-year term as a visiting scholar” in 2016).  But in a classic throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water move, mainstream media has now jumped on this opportunity to attack the author and completely discredit the paper in its entirety.

Are face masks harmful to your health? Findings from a NEW study may shock you

It’s not hard to imagine why — the scientific data he cites and summarizes does NOT fit the narrative which claims that face masks (along with COVID shots) are required to end the pandemic.  (Of course, you certainly won’t see this type of scrutiny over studies cited by CDC as evidence that face masks do work.)

Looking past the paper’s byline, let’s review some potential drawbacks to face mask use, as summarized by scientific data cited in the heavily lambasted Medical Hypotheses paper:

• Hypoxia (decreased oxygen in the blood)
• Shortness of breath
• Activated fear and stress response
• Increased stress hormones
• Immunosuppression
• Fatigue
• Headaches
• Decreased cognitive performance
• For kids, lack of access to lip-reading and non-verbal cues that are essential to healthy psychosocial development

Now, even if we are willing to set aside these damaging adverse effects, we are still faced with the reality that there is insufficient evidence from randomized controlled trials showing that masks actually work.  And Vainshelboim isn’t the only one sounding the alarm over mask use.

A jaw-dropping list of randomized controlled trials cited by Denis G. Rancourt, Ph.D., a researcher with the Ontario Civil Liberties Association, failed to consistently show that masks significantly prevent the spread of infectious diseases among healthcare workers or community members.  By the way, if you just read the outside of a face mask box … it says, ‘they are ineffective at protecting against the spread of COVID-19.’

CDC ignores science, continues to push mask mandates with no sufficient evidence to support their use

Despite all this evidence, the CDC continues to advise all people aged 2 years and older to wear masks in a majority of cases.  Meanwhile, both UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) clearly state that children under 5 “should not be required to wear masks” and that deciding whether children aged 6 to 11 should wear masks must weigh factors such as “the ability of the child to safely and appropriately use a mask” and the “potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychosocial development.”

One of the (for better or for worse) leading health authorities throughout the pandemic admits on their website that masks have a potentially harmful impact on its wearers — yet they offer no evidence as to why being 12 years old or older magically makes these health risks disappear.

The bottom line on face masks: Burden of proof lies with health authorities

It’s clear, despite what mainstream media and Fauci followers want you to believe:

Numerous scientific studies demonstrate that not only there is insufficient evidence that masks are effective at reducing transmission rates, but instead, there is significant and compelling evidence to the contrary.  Face masks may cause harm by triggering immediate and long-term physiologic and psychological effects that can both weaken the immune system and harm human health.

There is NO scientific evidence showing that non-professional use of face masks is effective at preventing the spread of microscopic COVID viral particles — yet governments and health organizations have been mandating their use for over a year now.  Not only that, but according to CNN and other major news outlets, some public health experts even criticize the CDC’s new mask guidelines for being “too cautious,” meaning they aren’t enough to incentivize people to sign up for the COVID shot.

Read that again.  We have mainstream media saying that mask mandates should be modified in order to convince people to take an experimental drug. 

This is nonsense, and it must stop.  The burden of proof should be on the health authorities and the government for determining how effective and safe face masks are.

Sources for this article include:

ACPjournals.org
WHO.int
RCreader.com
ScienceDirect.com
CDC.gov
CNN.com
Stanford.edu
OCLA.ca