Do Not Look At Face Masks For Covid Avoidance, Look At Obesity, Or A Host Of Other Meaningful Comorbidities, But Especially Obesity
Reason #40 that Face Masks Hurt Kids
Dear Reader,
The wearing of a face mask to protect against a respiratory virus is an act of grand deceit. It is a behavior that defies research on the topic. Wearing a face mask, as this article (one of many) points to — is unsafe to do and is ineffective.
Until the narrative around mandatory masking has changed, each day by 6am Eastern, I will both post here and send out a science-based reason why no one should wear a face mask.
I ask that you help me circulate these pieces to those around you who you believe could most benefit from them. It is important not to remain silent on this topic. These are important discussions to be having with friends, family members, business owners, healthcare practitioners, public servants, and others in the community.
-Allan
J.B. Pritzker has been the Governor of Illinois through Covid. He has the highest body mass index of any US governor, empirically making him the most obese US governor1 during Covid.
Governor Pritzker spends a considerable amount of time talking about his desire to protect the people of Illinois from Covid.
Covid would be a perfect time for Governor Pritzker to focus on approaches to public health that save lives during Covid, instead he has focused on face masks and lockdowns, neither of which work.
A far more meaningful factor to draw his attention to would be diet, exercise, and obesity.
For whatever reason, the most obese governor in America did not want to talk about that.
I lost some weight during Covid-19. I have made it a point to keep myself and those around me healthy. There are things you can do to take control of your life and protect you from Covid-19 and other problems during this time. Face masks are not one of them.
In the article “Why Covid-19 is more deadly in people with obesity – even if they are young,”2 dated September 8, 2020, Meredith Wadman writing for Science points out that obesity plays a huge role in Covid-19 outcomes:
“in the first meta-analysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people3 with obesity who contracted Sars-Cov-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.”
Wadman states that obesity plays a role in hospitalization as well:
“The largest descriptive study yet of hospitalized US Covid-19 patients, posted as a preprint last month by Genentech researchers, found that 77%4 of nearly 17,000 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 were overweight (29%) or obese (48%).”
Wadman delves into some of the reasons why obesity plays such a role:
“The biology of obesity includes impaired immunity, chronic inflammation, and blood that is prone to clot, all of which can worsen Covid-19.”
About the physical pathologies related to people with obesity, Wadman goes on to explain:
“The physical pathologies that render people with obesity vulnerable to severe Covid-19 begin with mechanics: Fat in the abdomen pushes up on the diaphragm, causing that large muscle, which lies below the chest cavity, to impinge on the lungs and restrict airflow. This reduced lung volume leads to collapse of airways in the lower lobes of the lungs, where more blood arrives for oxygenation than in the upper lobes. ‘If you are already starting [with] this mismatch, you are going to get worse faster’ from Covid-19.”
Obesity creates mechanical problems with the lungs and as Wadman points out, also causes problems with the blood, making Covid more lethal for the obese:
“Other issues compound these mechanical problems. For starters, the blood of people with obesity has an increased tendency to clot – an especially grave risk during an infection that, when severe, independently peppers the small vessels of the lungs with clots.5 In healthy people, ‘the endothelial cells’ that line the blood vessels are normally saying to the surrounding blood: ‘Do not clot,’ says Beverley Hunt, a physician-scientist who’s an expert in blood clotting at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals in London. But ‘we think that signaling is being changed by Covid,’ Hunt says, because the virus injures endothelial cells, which respond to the insult by activating the coagulation system.
“Add obesity to the mix, and the clotting risk shoots up. In Covid-19 patients with obesity, Hunt says, ‘You have got such sticky blood, oh my — the stickiest blood I have ever seen in all my years of practice.’”
Wadman describes how in the obese, important immune system tissue is replaced by fat cells, thereby weakening the immune system:
“‘Immunity also weakens in people with obesity, in part because fat cells infiltrate the organs where immune cells are produced and stored, such as the spleen, bone marrow, and thymus,’ says Catherine Andersen, a nutritional scientist at Fairfield University. ‘We are losing immune tissue in exchange for adipose tissue, making the immune system less effective in either protecting the body from pathogens or responding to a vaccine,’ she says.
“The problem is not only fewer immune cells, but less effective ones,’ adds Melinda Beck, a co-author of the Obesity Reviews meta-analysis who studies obesity and immunity at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Beck’s studies of how obese mice respond to the influenza virus demonstrated that key immune cells called T cells ‘do not function as well in the obese state,’ she says. ‘They make fewer molecules that help destroy virus-infected cells, and the corps of ‘memory’ T-cells left behind after an infection, which is key to neutralizing future attacks by the same virus, is smaller6 than in healthy weight mice.’
“Beck’s work suggests the same thing happens in people: She found that people with obesity vaccinated against flu had twice the risk7 of catching it as vaccinated, healthy weight people. That means trials of vaccines for Sars-Cov-2 need to include people with obesity, she says, because ‘coronavirus vaccines may be less effective in those people.’”
Wadman points out, how obesity leads to further inflammation, an issue for Covid patients:
“Beyond an impaired response to infections, people with obesity also suffer from chronic, low-grade inflammation. Fat cells secrete several inflammation-triggering chemical messengers called cytokines, and more come from immune cells called macrophages that sweep in to clean up dead and dying fat cells. Those effects may compound the runaway cytokine activity that characterizes severe Covid-19. ‘You end up causing a lot of tissue damage, recruiting too many immune cells, destroying healthy bystander cells,’ says Ilhem Messaoudi, an immunologist who studies host responses to viral infection at the University of California, Irvine. Of the added risk from obesity, she adds: ‘I would say a lot of it is immune-mediated.’”
Covid is not lethal because it is from a lab, Covid is so lethal because Americans are so willing to lie to themselves. Being fat is really unhealthy for you. Really. Masks do not change that. Lockdowns do not change that. House arrest does not change that. Church closure, school closure, and declaring people non-essential does not change that.
Nope. Being fat is really unhealthy for you, and if you cannot be honest about that, you have got a large, unhealthy population bringing about its own demise, all the while telling lies about how masks and experimental shots are the real solution.
Masks and experimental shot are both unsafe and ineffective. That has been what so much research over the past year has unquestionably proven. We should not be experimenting in this way upon ourselves. However, what we know for certain works against Covid and against many other diseases to keep people healthy and to prolong life is to live life more healthfully.
Losing some weight seems to be one of the most meaningful solutions to Covid. Healthy people get sick less. Healthy people get less sick. Healthy people die less.
77% of Americans are overweight or obese. Obesity is a big deal when it comes to Covid.
So why would you let anyone lie to you about a mask rather than talking about the real issues at play: poor health, bad diet and nutrition, lack of exercise, comorbidities, and age drive virtually all illness, Covid-19 being among them.
Masking merely starves a person of oxygen and does much further harm. Lockdowns starve society of freedom and prosperity, alongside further harm. Obesity is a serious topic to talk about. Masks do almost nothing positive and make an illness-prone obese person at greater risk of sickness, isolation, and harm. Lockdowns deny the obese freedom and prosperity.
Obesity is a real problem, causing greater death. No one is dying from a lack of a face mask or a lack of a lockdown.
List of governor name, state, weight, and height, and estimated body mass index.
Wadman M. Why COVID-19 is more deadly in people with obesity—even if they’re young. Science. 2020.doi:10.1126/science.abe7010
Popkin BM, Du S, Green WD, et al. Individuals with obesity and COVID‐19: A global perspective on the epidemiology and biological relationships. Obesity Reviews. 2020;21(11). doi:10.1111/obr.13128
Chawla D, Rizzo S, Zalocusky K, et al. Descriptive epidemiology of 16,780 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the United States. 2020. doi:10.1101/2020.07.17.20156265
Matacic C. Blood vessel injury may spur diseases fatal second phase.Science. 2020;368(6495):1039-1040.doi:10.1126/science.368.6495.1039
Karlsson EA, Sheridan PA, Beck MA.Diet-Induced Obesity Impairs the T Cell Memory Response to Influenza VirusInfection.The Journal of Immunology. 2010;184(6):3127-3133. doi:10.4049/jimmunol.0903220
Neidich SD, Green WD, Rebeles J, et al. Increased risk of influenza among vaccinated adults who are obese.Int J Obes(Lond). 2017;41(9):1324-1330. doi:10.1038/ijo.2017.131
The bestselling book "Face Masks In One Lesson" by Allan Stevo describes how to never wear a face mask again. The follow-up to the book, "Face Masks Hurt Kids," describes why to never wear a face mask again. We must defeat the awful, narrative around the mandates.
Examples of how face masks hurt kids will be posted to the Lockdown Land Substack each morning by 6am Eastern until the narrative around this ineffective and harmful medical intervention has shifted. Face masks are, in fact, not just harmful to children. Face masks are harmful to everyone. Thank you so much for helping me circulate this research.