Mitchel Cohen says: Wear your damn mask, while opposing mandatory vaccination for Covid-19! Commenting on: “The Risks vs. Benefits of Face Masks – Is There an Agenda?” by Dr. Alan Palmer, that was featured on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense website
I have no faith in the purity of products like vaccines, cutting corners and developed for profit under American capitalism. Thus, I join with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in opposing mandatory vaccinations.
Manufacturing, marketing and sale of all synthesized chemicals in the U.S. occurs without utilization of the precautionary principle, which would require manufacturers to prove that their product is safe for human and other animal use before it is introduced into the environment — be it in agriculture, waterways, or the human blood stream. The stated purpose of all vaccines is to provoke an immune system response, inducing the body to generate antibodies to the specific disease. But without sufficient and profit-free regulation and testing, aluminum-based adjuvants, impurities and other toxicants are knowingly allowed to be injected directly into children’s bloodstream. Vaccines — like GMOs, pesticides, and many other lab-created products — are thus anything but “safe”.
Food and Drug Administration regulators are hardly independent protectors of public health. They come from the same profit-driven corporations they’re supposed to be regulating, and they return to those same corporations when their time in “government service” has ended. That revolving door between Big Pharma and U.S. regulatory agencies is, to put it mildly, hardly inspiring of trust.
In fact, truckloads of documents fought for and forced to be released in the ongoing court cases brought by individuals poisoned by the Monsanto corporation and its best-selling herbicide Roundup reveal in excruciating detail what we’d already known from our own experience: that both industry and regulators “understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press,” according to the Bioscience Resource Project, which publishes groundbreaking and topical analyses of the science underlying food and agriculture systems in peer-reviewed journals. What were exposed in “The Monsanto Papers” are hardly unique, however, to Roundup; they detail the intricate collaboration between government regulators and corporate power and profits for every synthesized chemical, including vaccines. The Monsanto papers shockingly reveal “the fraudulence of what we think of as the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment,” in the words of Jonathan Latham, executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project.
“What is most striking about them is their heavy focus on the activities of regulators. Time and time again [U.S. government] regulators went to the extreme lengths of setting up secret committees, deceiving the media and the public, and covering up evidence of human exposure and human harm. These secret activities extended and increased human exposure to chemicals they knew to be toxic.”* Given what we’ve now learned in dramatic and nauseating detail, how could a person with any semblance of conscience not oppose unsafe and compulsory vaccinations? That is why I’ve supported Children’s Health Defense, as well as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s great environmental work.
Which is why I found the Children’s Heath Defense newsletter promoting Dr. Alan Palmer’s one-sided review against wearing facemasks during the Covid-19 pandemic without rebuttal or quotes from CHD supporters who hold opposite views to be so appalling.
It is thought by some that wearing a mask for extended periods and doing heavy workouts while wearing one may temporarily cause a shortage of oxygen, although they never explain how one can become “oxygen deprived” since the small size of the Oxygen molecule easily fits through most any kind of paper or cloth mask. So if one believes that masks slightly reduce oxygen intake (despite the actual facts on this matter), why not look for and present other solutions, if that is a real concern, instead of opposing masks outright and the important function that they can serve in times of a pandemic (as Palmer does)?
For example, if one is outdoors, how about either going inside or moving a sufficient distance away from other people and carefully taking your mask off every 15 minutes or so, to breathe freely? Why isn’t that even being considered here?
There are many possible work-arounds, but when one doesn’t even broach that possibility, then it becomes clear that the writer has his “line” set and is inventing so-called objective “facts” to justify it and to sell us a bill of goods. And when he cites studies alarming the reader about the dangers of oxygen deprivation and increased carbon dioxide inhalation — agreed, oxygen deprivation can cause serious problems — careful scrutiny of those studies provided reveal that they actually make no reference to masks as the cause of oxygen deprivation, despite what the writer had implied. It becomes a game of bait-and-switch in order to score rhetorical points to falsely justify the already decided-upon position.
I wear a mask when I am around others indoors or in narrow spaces, not only because it will diminish my chances of getting sick but because I don’t want my germs poisoning another person who may be at higher risk than even I am (and I am in the high risk category).
We live in a culture where people are currently thinking only of themselves, demanding what they misperceive to be their “freedom” (as per CHD’s disgraceful picture of the young white female whipping off her mask), when in some areas like Washington D.C. Black people are contracting and dying from Covid-19 at two and three times the rate of whites, in some areas even more. The Guardian writes that “across the country, African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans.
“More than 20,000 African Americans — about one in 2,000 of the entire black population in the US — have died from the disease.
But, the people CHD pictures rip off their masks as though that represents “freedom”. They’re always “white” (they wouldn’t dare show that doing so signifies “freedom” to a Black person”. Those mask refuseniks exhibit not a care in the world for anyone else. And the image encourages readers to do likewise, which puts others (like me, and most everyone I know) in jeopardy.
Dr. Palmer — a chiropractor — turns to the country Sweden, which he claims as having successfully “flattened the curve” without lockdowns. But that is not true, and CHD should have corrected his error. In fact, Sweden’s more limited shelter-in-place order primarily for elderly and immune-impaired people, and with relatively free movement for others, kept restaurants open for business. That resulted in a Covid-19 contagion rate higher than any of Sweden’s Nordic neighbors, and a death rate actually higher than even that of the U.S.! Like Boris Johnson in England, Sweden’s prime minister ultimately acknowledged that they’d made errors in their approach, but by then thousands of people had unnecessarily died.
So why would Robert Kennedy Jr. leave standing such wrong information to be presented by his organization, as if it were true?
Why not stop opportunistically catering to and egging on people who are following their president in not thinking or caring about how their actions may affect others? That lack of empathy is truly sickening.
Another “reason” Dr. Palmer provides for not wearing masks is that quality N95 masks are in short supply, so better to save them for health professionals who really need them. What? Are you serious? The United States of America is crumbling because the government has decided or is not able to supply masks for nurses and doctors? And yet, all over the internet there are advertisements for businesses selling masks. I watch my friends dying; I watch medical personnel risking their lives with improper equipment, and these greedy corporate bastards are trying to profit from others’ misery by simply hoarding masks to sell for profit. If those businesses have a single N95 mask left in stock that they have not DONATED to the heroic nurses and doctors busy saving our lives at great risk to their own, frankly those business owners should be dragged off to the guillotine.
So why hadn’t the government, at all levels, prepared properly for this? Why are Trump and Pence directing FEMA to hoard equipment, instead of dispensing it? Why did Cuomo shut down hospitals in the years leading up to this pandemic, and why has he now submitted a NY State budget that CUTS Medicaid? What is wrong with these people, Democrats and Republicans alike? The choice — now more than ever — is the capitalist system vs. the immune system.
Palmer’s medical observations are as bad as his political views, and they are equally invalid. Over and over again he argues that “there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill”. Not exactly — there’s lots of evidence that face masks protect from the virus. Doctors, nurses and medical technicians wear surgical masks, day in and day out, and have no deleterious health effects from doing so. Health professionals, including dental hygienists, oral surgeons (and their staff), dentists, nurses, surgeons, anesthesiologists, all wear masks for 12 hour shifts their entire working life and have no negative health effects. Since O2 (the oxygen molecule) is only 1.2 angstroms (.12 nanometers) in diameter, and the pores in N95 masks are around 100nm, Oxygen molecules have no problem getting through the mask just fine.
The SARS CoV-2 virus — the virus that causes Covid-19, on the other hand — is a large virus, approximately 120 nm in diameter, larger than the pores in the N95 mask, which keep the virus from getting through the mask under usual circumstances. There is no doubt that masks — even cloth bandanas — block droplets of moisture containing the virus from one’s exhale, reducing the transmission of Covid-19. But even if “there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill,” as the article on CHD states, so what? Just because poorly done or inconclusive research “have not confirmed” that a mask is able to contain the virus, that doesn’t mean that it cannot! What kind of ridiculous argument is Palmer presenting (and it’s not even true)? There is no evidence to suggest that my pointing a gun at you will necessarily mean I will pull the trigger. Do you want to find out, the hard way?
We can go through the other medical rationalizations for not wearing a mask one by one — some concerns may be valid, but need to be weighed for the much greater and possibly devastating effects that could occur if the doctor happens to be wrong in his assessment, as has been shown from time to time to occur. But Children’s Health Defense doesn’t present those alternative arguments for readers to weigh, and failing to honestly present the research here leads me to distrust other things that CHD has written. It becomes evident that such a “report” is just sophisticated propaganda on behalf of a particular pseudo-libertarian agenda. In trying to manipulate the reader through fraudulent means into adopting what Palmer and CHD has decided is “the correct line” it undermines its credibility on other important topics. I have defended CHD in many arguments (including on vaccines), but I now find my intelligence insulted by the one-sidedness of its presentation, while it pretends to be objective.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a powerful spokesperson against Monsanto’s and the U.S. government’s lies and their complicity in poisoning the planet. He’s very good in fighting against mandatory vaccines for children. That’s why I find this article so shockingly dangerous, as it comes with RFK’s imprimatur.
I always hate it when medical professionals are so cocksure of themselves and their “line” that they never ask themselves, “What if I’m wrong?” Here, the claim that so-called “healthy” people should not wear masks could, if Palmer and CHD are wrong, lead to people contracting the illness and dying. And it’s such a small thing, to wear a mask, given the circumstances! If a so-called healthy person had been exposed to the virus, even if they themselves are asymptomatic, they may be carriers and pass the virus along to others who are not as healthy or have access to quality medical care, to Black people, to Latinos, to heart patients, to immune compromised people, to people with high blood pressure, to obese people, to those who are pregnant — all of whom they’re putting at risk.
So wear a f$*&n mask; help protect OTHERS — a foreign concept, I know, in this era of me me me me. Wearing a mask in crowded public places (like stores, laundromats, elevators, subways) presents a very small risk to healthy carriers of the virus, but not wearing one presents a great risk to many others.
And to Bobby Kennedy and CHD: Please publicly retract Dr. Palmer’s story now, and rethink what are the consequences for others when one refuses to wear a mask, in the name of “freedom”.
————————————–
* Excerpt from Mitchel Cohen, The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides (Skyhorse Publishing: 2019).
Mitchel Cohen, Coordinator
No Spray Coalition against pesticides
https://www.NoSpray.org
