Dear Ashley Bloomfield and PM Jacinda Ardern,
Whenever we, as the New Zealand public, receive information from the Beehive or the Ministry of Health or from scholars, it is always touted that our authorities or esteemed scholars are following the science to keep us safe, and obviously we would like to believe that.
The latest we have learned is that the whole country is back at level one, which is great, but that operators of public transport and passengers on flights should continue to wear masks.
When we look at the literature, however, there is no evidence that this decision is remotely science-based. Without going into a long argument for explaining this statement, I would like to refer you to The Science is Conclusive: Masks and Respirators do NOT Prevent Transmission of Viruses. In a nutshell, this is a review article of the medical literature pre-Covid mostly stating that masks don’t work and explaining why they don’t work.
As an ex-scientist, I acknowledge that science is developing all the time, but if we can’t produce a similar review article across many studies that prove that masks do work, we might be in trouble.
In the interest of the scientific argument, the logical process would be to look at the different articles covered in this review and produce evidence that refutes these claims.
The New Zealand public are not stupid, and some of us have a science background. We are interested in the narrative of the day and, when we can’t find compelling evidence showing that what the authorities are telling us is true, it is easy to come to the conclusion that it is all virtue-signalling or that the people that should know are ignorant or ill-informed, or at the worst, they are lying to us.
Please provide us with the evidence so we can change our minds and help the authorities to get the message out, or change your stance on mask-wearing.
Please share this BFD article so others can discover The BFD.