Why bother with face nappies?

Double Shot is a Melburnian, sharing Lockdown 5.0 with six million Victorians. Thanks to our fearless leader, Daniel Andrews, we wear face masks whenever we venture beyond our front doors, whether into crowded shops and offices or into distinctly uncrowded open spaces.

In NSW, beleaguered premier Gladys Berejiklian has been taking flak from WuFlu wowsers and political enemies about not masking up when walking out with her man despite her own quasi-lockdown. This despite her government’s ‘mask mandate’ not running to outdoors as does Andrews’s.

But indoors or outdoors, what good is done by face nappies? As mentioned previously, I wear glasses, and every time I mask up the world disappears into misty fog as my foetid breath pushes upwards and outwards from beneath my expiration-sodden mask. Were I carrying the dreaded WuFlu bug, surely that’s proof in itself that my mask will fail to prevent squillions of little viral particles forcing their way to their next host.

Professor Colin Axon, a British scientist who has been advising the British government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) about preventing the spread of infection, claims face nappies are about as useless in stopping the spread of Covid as tits on a bull. They are merely ‘comfort blankets’, he says, pointing out that not only can the virus force its way out the top of a cloth mask, but pushes through gaps in the fabric invisible to the naked eye, but 500,0000 times the size of Covid particles.

Even the super-duper N95 masks the health professionals use are no absolute guarantee of preventing transmission from gob and snoz, so bog-standard masks seem pretty pointless from a preventive viewpoint.

Double Shot isn’t advocating readers disobey governments’ lawful instructions on the wearing of face nappies. But they should be honest about their motives for imposing them. Masks are psychological rather than prophylactic tools. Compelling people to wear masks is about creating a climate of fear, of compliance, of permanent crisis. That suits our increasingly authoritarian political leaders, and certainly suits the unelected public health establishment determined the eliminate the uneliminateable, and who want you to cringe in their conviction that you so doing will make you more pliable and compliant with their edicts.

We wear face nappies because we have to, not because we need to. If you really want to make yourself safe from whatever variant of this damnable virus, get vaccinated.