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Love the part where you take the example of Boris Johnson and his staff, and instead of going “What wrong-headed idiots,” you instead somehow take away “It’s the epidemiologists who are wrong-headed idiots!”

There are plenty of political leaders who have treated the virus casually and died. Yes, many of them are hypocrites who say one thing publically and do another. I just have no idea who you get from your first paragraph to your second.

Yes, your third paragraph. Literally.

> There are plenty of political leaders who have treated the virus casually and died.

Are you referring to the completely coincidental and not all suspicious deaths of every single African leader that came out against lockdowns etc?

Explain the changing of definitions by the WHO then please. Just that alone.

Do you want to see a list of politicians who didn’t obey the speed limit and conclude that speed limits are a big conspiracy?

Sportsball players still allowed to sportsball (apart of course from those that are dropping down dead from mysterious 'underlying heart conditions'...). Celebrities and businessmen still allowed to travel. 'As healthcare professionals we do not condemn these protests'. 'We have no plans for vaccine passports'. 'Three weeks to flatten the curve'. This is fascism, totalitarianism, call it what you will - it's evil.

> But the people telling us to wear them don't even bother themselves! [...]

"Politicians aren't perfect, thus masks don't work"

> The official advice did a 180 swivel around March 2020 from 'masks don't work' to 'wear the mask or else'

The original panicked advice was that masks weren't needed for the general public, because they needed to be saved for health professionals.

When community spread is low and masks are rare, which group of people do you want wearing masks, the doctors and nurses who are ~100% likely to interact with the sick, or the general public who are ~1% likely to interact with the sick?

Note that that calculus changes when either masks become more plentiful or the disease spreads more commonly in the community. Which is exactly what happened.

> The masks are there purely to terrify and dehumanise people

> Nothing to see here though of course. All completely above board. I'm obviously a mad conspiracy theorist for noticing these types of discrepancies. Trust the science comrade!

Yeah, you're making insane inferences when much better inferences are available, and setting yourself up as a victim. That's about the usual for conspiracy theory nutters.

I don’t understand what the end goal of the governments are supposed to be by “dehumanizing” and “terrifying” the populace. When I ask this question I get the absolutely useless response of “control”. What kind of control? How? We have laws that limit behavior in a variety of ways already.

Yeah it's fundamentally kind of just confusing. My thinking is they can't really think of a real harm of people wearing masks, so they just go with an amorphous scary one and hope nobody notices that it basically makes no sense.

Funny, because I seem to remember the media bleating on at length about burkas etc. in Afghanistan being oppressive when it suited them.

If you can't see how the removal of bodily autonomy equates to control, there's no hope for you.

It's control the same way "no shirt, no shoes, no service" is the start of a distopian hellscape, except masks have far _more_ of a reason to be required.

That's not where it ends - where it ends is that you become a slave with a third party able to inject you with whatever they like whenever they like, and people that resist having their posessions stolen, their livelihood taken away and being herded into concentration camps - which is ALREADY HAPPENING in Australia. If you want this for yourself, you friends or your family you are insane.

What do masks have to do with any of that? Sketch out for me why mask requirements need to happen before a government imposes any of that, even assuming your premises are completely valid and that's the intent.

Also, would you say that vaccine requirements are new? Where did you go to school? Did you take required vaccines to attend? Are you familiar with other vaccines from history, in particular for smallpox and polio? How do you feel about how those were handled at the time?

Also...I mean seriously, try to get over yourself. "slavery" and "concentration camps"? You must know how hard everyone's eyes roll at this stuff right?

The exact quote from the Surgeon General Jerome Adams in March 2020 was:

"Seriously people - STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"

Yes, they wanted to preserve mask supply for healthcare providers, but there was also an explicit statement that they were not effective for preventing infection.

You can retrospectively split hairs over the exact meaning of "preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus", but the clear message being pushed at the time was that you shouldn't buy masks because they weren't going to work. Whether he actually believed this or whether this was a cynical manipulation to get the effect desired (lower demand for the limited supply of masks) is irrelevant. "Masks don't work" was the message being sold to the public.

If masks don't work, full stop, the entire message is nonsense. Because then what's the point of giving them to healthcare providers exactly? So it should be obvious with a little thought that it is context-specific, the context being low community spread and few available masks.

Also, I mean it's from a Trump appointtee, the man who spent most of the pandemic downplaying the seriousness of said pandemic. I'm not sure how much you're expecting here, but it's definitely too much.