GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – Good to see so much mask use

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The Daily Blog
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Good to see so many people wearing masks in public in the area of Auckland where I live.

Not so great to see some selfish ones not wearing them.

Why selfish?

Because wearing a mask isn’t so much about you breathing in the virus, as you not spreading the virus if you happen to have it and don’t yet know it.

Spreading Covid-19 will result in a very sick economy for a very long time.

Keeping each other healthy, on the other hand, is the best way to help our economy recover.

So c’mon Auckland!

We had over 100 days without community transmission We did it before we can do it again.

TDB Recommends NewzEngine.com

Let’s beat this thing, by doing the right thing.

Kia kaha.

PS Conspiracy theorists please find somewhere else to post.

Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.

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8 COMMENTS

  2. MASKS?!!
    Read Denis Rancourt, physics professor & Dr Russell Blaylock – physician of international repute, on the uselessness/dangers of masks-wearing.
    Being a NZRN, I constantly see people incorrectly wearing their masks – constantly touching them, pulling them down below chin to so as to smoke, & & &. Dr Blaylock wrote common sense (to me as a NZRN).
    Suggest start with him.

    • Isabel H

      I prefer actual scientific evidence to “common sense” when I make my own health choices. Is it usual to still refer to someone, like Blaylock; who has had their licence to practice medicine in multiple states revoked due to repeated fraudulent claims, as a Doctor?

      But yes, incompetent mask wearing can cause problems. Face touching, especially around the mouth and nose is still a bad idea. Like wearing an unbuckled crash helmet – that somewhat defeats the entire purpose of the thing.

      • Forget now: “I prefer actual scientific evidence to “common sense”…”

        When Isabel H refers to “common sense”, there is science underpinning it. Common sense and science aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. I note that both Denis Rancourt and Russell Blaylock have fallen foul of authorities for different reasons (Rancourt’s case says nothing good about the University of Ottawa), but it doesn’t follow that their opinions about masks are wrong.

        I spent many years in the health services. We wore masks for clinical procedures. At the time, I read the research. Disposable surgical-grade masks have a relatively short timespan of efficacy as a barrier to bugs. Once they’re wet from breath moisture, they’re ineffective as a barrier to anything much. I’m deeply sceptical about home-made masks being as effective. Were they any use at all, I’m sure that we’d have worn them: when I worked there, the health services were looking for any means to save money. You can bet your boots we’d have been encouraged to make our own, were it the case that they did the job required of them.

        Viruses behave the same way they always did. That includes the coronavirus. All other things being equal, they afflict people in the same way, regardless of ethnicity, gender and geographic location. It is therefore necessary to explain how it is that most of Australia has had very low numbers of cases and deaths. Queensland, for instance, has since the beginning of the year had 6 deaths (last I looked, coupla days ago). We have family in that area; Queensland has a population about the same size as NZ. Moreover, those towns from the Sunshine Coast all the way down to Tweed in NSW are full of old people, as anyone who’s been there can attest. No masks, at least not in the earlier months, though that may now have changed. And a much, much more liberal quarantine than here.

        Note that mask-wearing is almost de rigueur in much of east and south-east Asia, yet looky here: we still get waves of epidemic diseases coming out of that part of the world.

  3. How do you define ‘conspiracy theorist’, Bryan?

    After all, the term was coined by the CIA in the early 1960s to discredit and silence perfectly valid questioning of the entirely faux narratives generated by, and promoted by, the [American] industrial-military complex.

    Nearly 60 years later, the industrial-military-complex (that Eisenhower belatedly warned about in his valedictory speech, and which now includes phony finance) generates more phony narratives than it did in the 1960s. In fact practically everything that comes out of the US military these days is utter either utter nonsense or lies -as clearly demonstrated by Wikileaks.

    I suppose Galileo was a conspiracy theorist, since he conspired with other rational thinkers to question the [now regarded as utterly absurd] notion that the Sun goes round the Earth.

    And Semmelweiss must have been a ‘conspiracy theorist’ since he conspired with others to others to introduce the washing of hands and equipment with disinfectant in hospitals -much against the thinking of the so-called experts of the times, who wouldn’t have a bar of it and blithely went from one patient to the next without so much as a hand rinse, causing the deaths of thousands.

    Describing someone as a conspiracy theorist and banning comment is a sure way of shutting down the information flow. And a sure way of ensuring catastrophe for the bulk of population, who are trapped by the mainstream into thinking the ridiculous is valid and trapped into thinking that anyone who questions the [absurd] narratives of empire is a nutter.

    If we are to believe what comes out of the goggle box, we must believe that the wearing of masks is unnecessary, bordering on dangerous -as pronounced by the ‘expert’ Souixie Wilde early on in the pandemic, when masks were generally unavailable, the entire stock in NZ having been bought up by wiser New Zealanders who ignored the ‘expert advice’ of ‘Candy Floss’.

    Despite her major faux pas, TV1 managed to wheel her out in front of the camera several times more to talk a lot of drivel about Covid-19.

    It is interesting that TDB won’t have a bar of discussion about one of the biggest lies in all of history -that concrete and steel buildings subject to low temperature fires in the upper storeys can collapse at free-fall acceleration, and that titanium alloy aircraft engines can evaporate upon low-speed impact with grass. If you believe that kind of drivel you deserve to go down with the ship. Yet the vast majority of New Zealanders do believe that concrete and steel building subject to low- temperature fires can (and did) collapse at freefall acceleration, and that aircraft engines can (and did) evaporate on impact with grass.

    Does suggesting that a group of wealthy individuals conspire to influence government policy to suit their own agendas constitute a conspiracy theory? Because if that is the case, President Eisenhower was a ‘conspiracy theorist’, and President Kennedy definitely was. Which is why he was shot! (Or is that a conspiracy theory?)

    By the way, anyone who hasn’t planned their [permanent] escape from Auckland has probably left it too late.

    The ‘authorities’ that govern Auckland couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, so it comes as no surprise they cannot organise a transport system that functions properly, that they cannot organise a water system that isn’t dependent on sucking filthy water from the Waikato, that they can’t organse a sewage system that doesn’t spill raw sewage onto beaches every time there is a major downpour.

    Incompetence, nepotism and rorts reign supreme (along with subservience to banks and corporations.

    That’s probably why NZ ranks 39th out of 45 developed nations when it comes to welfare, Auckland contributing disproportionately to the dismal data.

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