Face masks: ‘Are we being gagged at our peril – until the holy grail vaccine is ready?

• ON Tuesday, to help justify making wearing face masks in shops mandatory, health secretary Matt Hancock announced that “the death rate of sales and retail assistants is 75 per cent higher among men and 60 per cent higher among women than in the general population”.

We heard from BBC Breakfast TV the following morning that Marks & Spencer boss Steve Rose said that “his firm had 126 Covid cases out of 78,000 staff and only three of these were fatal… and that this was just a small sample of what other shop owners were saying”.

Hancock’s reply to being asked, “Have you overstated the dangers faced by shop workers?” was that he’d been given the statistics and information and the whole approach was to be “as transparent as possible”; but made no mention of where those figures came from.

These statistics could only have been for the essential shops open during lockdown and the rest in the subsequent relaxation.

Why hasn’t this shockingly humongous figure been reported before now and all essential “sales and retail assistants” supplied with full personal protective equipment (PPE)?

And, given this huge loss of their fellow workers, wouldn’t grieving staff have insisted on wearing face masks by now?

How were these figures arrived at – are they registering the profession of everyone who’s died with Covid-19? Where is the breakdown?

Isn’t this just more scaremongering of the highest order, especially for the shop workers who must suffer wearing masks for eight hours a day, five days a week, when the “new deaths” on  Monday were right down to +11?

According to retired United States neuro-surgeon Dr Russell Blaylock, “by wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.”

According to a UNSW study “The widespread use of cloth masks by health care workers may actually put them at increased risk of respiratory illness and viral infections and their global use should be discouraged” [BMJ Open. Updated BMJ 2020;369:m1422]

Are we being gagged at our peril – until the holy grail vaccine is ready?

CLARA WEISS
Address supplied