In Defense of Masks

Frankly I don't get the resistance to them. If nothing else, they keep your face warm.

I’m coming out as a pro-masker.

Yes I’ve heard all the arguments against masks and I’ll address them in a bit. Most of the arguments against the effectiveness of masks are based on the mechanics of viral particles and whether or not the porosity of the mask material isn’t too many microns big to ensnare or ricochet most of them, but recently I’ve come up with a different perspective that renders such arguments utterly moot. This argument is ridiculously obvious, yet not commonly articulated even by the pro-masking community:

They keep your face warm.

You ever wonder why you get more colds in the winter? Because your immune system is not as active inside your nose when it’s at a lower temperature.

Here’s a paper about it:

Cold exposure impairs extracellular vesicle swarm–mediated nasal antiviral immunity - Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (jacionline.org)

According to this a drop of 5 degrees Celsius/9 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 15 minutes of exposure to the cold, reduces the immune defenses in the nose by about 50 percent. Supposing a mask can keep your nose temperature up that number of degrees in the cold, it just reaches the mark of being good enough to have gotten approved as a Warp Speed vaccine!

And that’s what this is all about, or should be all about - emancipating us from the coercive use of more medically invasive disease control measures while still controlling diseases just as well if not better.

Mind you that’s only 50 percent, at least through temperature alone and assuming that the mask doesn’t mechanically block viruses at all, and if everybody else is wearing a mask then your chances of catching COVID or other viruses from an infected person are through temperature alone reduced to 25 percent which is still far from perfect. But it’s worthwhile as long as you don’t change your behavior to take more risks as a result of knowing this. It adds a slice of Swiss cheese to the Swiss cheese model of COVID protective measures, as depicted here (I made some ahem, modifications to make it more accurately reflect the truth of the matter):

And the good news is that to gain the benefit of a warmer nose you don’t have to use any sort of special medical-grade mask, the virus-trapping benefits of which you may be skeptical of anyway. You can use an ordinary cloth mask or a scarf or bandana. If you’re walking outside you could benefit simply by putting it over your face 15 minutes before you go inside a warm place so that your nose will immediately be warm enough to protect from the people there if you want to take it off when you get there.

Now to address all the anti-mask arguments I’ve seen, some of which are deflated by this perspective:

The holes in the mask are too wide to block viruses out, it’s like guarding against mosquitoes with a chain-link fence.

Ok, but this is a moot point now because it doesn’t have to keep viruses out in order to keep your face warm. However I feel like I should push back against this just because it’s based on some misconceptions about how viruses travel outside of the nose.

To start with, the viruses themselves might be tiny, but they are generally suspended in a liquid droplet that’s considerably larger. Due to the hydrogen bonds from the water molecules and the negatively charged tips of the spike protein, the virion is unlikely to leave the droplet should it ricochet from the surface of a mask, that is, unless the surface is absorbent in which case it gets blotted up.

But perhaps the mask holes are too large to bump back or blot up even an average-sized liquid droplet. (I’ve worn a cloth mask clamped down with some goggles and my breath fogged the goggles and gave me eye boogers so I know that even with large holes this isn’t always the case, due to the effects of turbulence from an overly forceful wind I guess). If it’s made out of a triboelectric material with a positive static charge, then the particles will be like mosquitoes covered with tiny magnets. A lot of them will get stuck to the chain link fence (assuming it’s made of iron or other magnetic metal) even if they are small enough to fly through it. In fact this might be even more true for Omicron than for previous COVID variants since its spikes are more negatively charged.

This is all theoretical of course but it shows that the holes-are-too-big argument does not suffice as an a priori refutation of mask efficacy.

This study done by so-and-so shows that masks don’t work.

You don’t trust studies on the COVID “vaccines”; why would you trust studies done on the masks - perhaps even by the same people? Are these studies double-blind? Of course not, how can you not know whether you’re wearing a real mask or a placebo? Are they even single-blind? Doubt it, in most of these studies people aren’t randomly assigned whether to wear a mask or not, they choose whether to wear one and the choice they make depends on a lot of other factors that influence their chances of catching or spreading COVID. Maybe the people who mask are more likely to have gotten the mRNA injection thus turning themselves into immunotolerant Typhoid Marys. Maybe people that don’t wear masks are more likely to have already gotten the virus. Maybe people that already suspect that they’re sick or are going to be around people they believe are sick are more likely to wear a mask. Maybe the study was done during the brief honeymoon period when the mRNA shots still ostensibly worked and people who got them were taking their masks off while people who didn’t were asked to keep them on. Maybe wearing a mask encourages riskier behavior and causes more infections through sheer moral hazard. As you can see, there are way too many confounding variables to conclusively prove anything on this matter.

Masks trap CO2 and deprive you of oxygen.

I see this argument a lot from the same people who think that masks cannot trap viruses, which are MUCH larger than oxygen or CO2 molecules by the way.

To understand the scale, picture a hole size such that oxygen molecules can pass through like mosquitoes through chain link fence. COVID-19 virions would pass through more like mosquitoes - or maybe June bugs - through a very finely meshed mosquito net.

If wearing the mask for you is really borderline asphyxiation, you have to grant that it’s at least somewhat obstructing the flow of viruses. If it doesn’t stop viruses to any worthwhile degree at all, then it should be plenty breathable. If you’re wearing a mask to keep your nose warm and not at all minding how well it traps viruses however, then you can use the warmest and most breathable fabric and you don’t have to worry about it.

Masks are filthy and collect germs.

You’re supposed to change it every hour. If it’s cloth you wash it.

You can still catch COVID through your eyes if you’re wearing a mask.

Then wear goggles for fuck’s sake. Even Fauci recommended that people wear eye covering to protect against COVID-19. If you’ve already wearing glasses then that gives you some protection, but you might want to invest in glasses that have an airtight fit like goggles.

Masks contain microplastics that can scar your lungs and cause cancer.

Luckily that’s only disposable masks with a pretense of blocking viruses which are unnecessary for keeping your face warm. Use a natural fiber cloth mask made of cotton, hemp, wool, woven cat hair, anything that doesn’t irritate your lungs, or irritates them less than whatever particles it blocks out of your surrounding atmosphere at any rate.

Masks are a means of control/training you to follow authority/get the vaccine/etc.

Well it didn’t work did it? Not for me anyway. I wore masks all throughout 2020, and even more throughout 2021 since I read about how pseudouridinated RNA works and became afraid of the mRNA injections making people proliferate the virus even more. Most “vaxxed” people don’t even wear masks anymore, and some jurisdictions are even considering banning mask wearing because of its association with crime (Antifa, etc.) Seriously if you were the type of person who normally wears a balaclava or a scarf over your face in the winter, but you decided not to do it now and let your face freeze just to stick it to the man or whatever… I don’t know if anybody really does that, but if they do, well, that’s just stupid.

Masks make it hard for babies and young children to learn language.

Welcome to my world - of autism! Autistic children tend not to look others in the face when they’re talking - I can’t explain why, it’s just overstimulating in an almost painful kind of way - which might be why they’re late in learning how to talk or have speech impediments. This will cause problems with learning sign language too since making faces is part of communicating in ASL. Basically this means there will be a huge rise in diagnoses of autism, every kid will be a little bit high-functioning autistic even if they weren’t born that way; I wouldn’t say it’s the worst thing in the world, at least on an individual basis… however, I don’t want the whole world to be autistic like me. That would be a disaster. It takes all sorts, man. Some people have gotta be neurotypical in order to keep certain things running. So if you have a baby or young child and you want them to see you smile or make sign language facial gestures then you can try something like this:

Should be fine unless you’re a mouth breather. But the mouth keeps a lot warmer than the nose anyway - well maybe not if you’re constantly opening it for breath.

Oh shut up. Even the Deaf community doesn’t communicate using nose gestures.

Masks are pointless because the virus is just a cold/doesn’t exist/I’ve got natural immunity.

First of all it’s not just a cold. It was the weirdest poison-flavored simulated serotonin fever dream I’ve ever had. And that was with my unusually healthy immune system meticulously fending it off. Even if your immune system is good now, it might get worse when you get older. And even if you already had it, Omicron can still sneak a few cell invasions before your immune system kicks into gear and nips it in the bud. In the meantime though, particularly if your nose is cold, you might spread it to one of your poor mRNA - injected loved ones whose IgG4-mediated immune tolerance has gotten to the point where every Omicron infection is worse than the last.

If you think the virus doesn’t exist… hmm, you must be one of those germ theory deniers. But you believe in terrain theory right? Do you really think it’s good for the bodily terrain of your nose to be so cold? Maybe you think the common cold is just nature’s way of detoxing, but do you really want to detox right now? Or watch as your loved ones coincidentally detox at the same time - and to a more dangerous degree than you - because, I dunno, they breathed in the same miasma as you I guess?

I know masks don’t work because I wore one and I still got COVID!

No it doesn’t work 100 percent, I already said that. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t benefit from it. It could have prevented you from getting COVID earlier. Or it could have reduced the viral load you inhaled thus decreasing the severity of the infection. I know, I sound like some mealy-mouthed ribosomal rape - sorry, mRNA apologist right now. But I’ve never seen a serious study demonstrating that a mask, however imperfect, may actually INCREASE the odds of getting infected or WORSEN said infection. Only a handful of armchair epidemiologists positing such things. So don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. (Unless the only masks you can get are made out of asbestos fiber; in which case it’s not a matter of the perfect being the enemy of the good, but the unacceptable being the enemy of the adequate, and you have every right to demand something that’s at least adequate, though you deserve the good if not perfect for your troubles.)

Don’t let the good be the enemy of the perfect either. Maybe your mask didn’t work because it simply wasn’t warm enough. Try a long snuggly scarf or a ski mask, something that can at least raise your extremities above room temperature. Now, if simply raising the temperature of your nose from room temperature to body temperature halves the replication rate of the virus, then imagine how much it would be hindered if you raised the temperature of your nose to fever temperatures? Without literally having a fever of course. If you can tolerate it, how about raising it all the way to around 70-75 degrees Celsius, a temperature hot enough to kill these viruses with a rate of virtually 100% after 3-5 minutes’ worth of exposure? (depending on the surface; apparently it takes an hour to kill viruses stuck on a N95 at such temperatures). Even if it doesn’t kill them all it will at least debilitate any that do make it to your nose, make them replicate nice and slow, make your immune cells warm and revved up to take them out fast.

That is to say, a mask that electrically heats your face is the next step:

Amazon.com: Nose Warm Cover, 3 Gears Timing Nose Warmer with Hot Compress, Washable Avoid Snoring Heating Nose Cover for Men Women : Health & Household

I don’t know how long that lasts or how hot it gets but I bet if everybody in the world wore one 24-7 for a month or so all respiratory viruses without animal reservoirs would go extinct.

And why not make the birds wear something too? Instead of cutting off their beak and whatever other cruel factory farm practices? No more avian flu? Turn their coop into an infrared sauna for just 3-5 minutes every day?

Speaking of which the electric ski mask is just a cheap pocket version of an infrared sauna. How about infrared sauna for humans? Should we study that for the effect on viruses?