Critical thinking and journalistic curiosity were woefully missing in the most recent COVID-19 press briefing hosted by county health workers and local hospital medical directors. In the six weeks since the last presser, a lot of information has come out in the independent media on how unvaccinated are documented in health systems. The devil's in the details, and how our local hospitals and county health officials conduct themselves relative to our local media inquiries has a major impact on how the Quad Cities populace perceives our collective and individual health status.

Numerous inconsistencies, controversies, and mass confusion relative to all things COVID-19 have prevailed thanks to mainstream broadcast, print, and social media's fear-soaked 24/7 narratives, bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies and public-health authorities including the NIH, CDC, HHS, and FDA. Still, many of us continued to believe that an abundance of caution would be the norm rather than the exception when it came to experimentally injecting our children against a disease they are provably at zero risk from getting or giving to others.

In June, we published Denis Rancourt's white paper titled “Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy.” As of this date, the article has been viewed over 460,000 times world-wide. And, as the Reader's publisher I pledged to publish all letters, guest commentaries, or studies refuting Rancourt's general premise that this mask-wearing culture and shaming could be more harmful than helpful.

There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles.

The present paper about masks illustrates the degree to which governments, the mainstream media, and institutional propagandists can decide to operate in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves their interests. Such recklessness is also certainly the case with the current global lockdown of over 1 billion people, an unprecedented experiment in medical and political history.