Facemasks in operating theatres cause infections, rather than reducing them, according to an extraordinary experiment conducted over 40 years ago

There is no evidence that wearing facemasks during surgery, or indeed at any other time, does anything to protect against infection. Indeed, they seem to increase infections in patients

The absolute mania for wearing facemasks in public during the COVID-19 pandemic was an extraordinary instance of irrational behaviour; a superstitious ritual designed to ward off evil. When the hysteria over becoming infected was at its peak, those failing to abide by this strange code, in some countries mandated by law, were regarded as public enemies and became the object of abuse by those who were determined slavishly to follow government diktats.

     The surgical facemask is one of the visual shorthand signs of medicine and the medical profession; the other being of course a stethoscope around the neck of somebody wearing a white coast. For surgeons, the obvious identifying feature is a facemask. Surgeons always wear such things during operations, don’t they? Why? Why do readers think that surgeons feel the need to wear a facemask when opening somebody up and performing surgery upon them? This sounds like a ridiculous question of course. Obviously, it is to protect wounds from infection. Imagine if the staff around somebody having his appendix out started coughing or sneezing and spraying germs everywhere. It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? As a matter of fact, it has been widely known in the medical professions for many years now that there is no evidence at all that surgical facemasks prevent infection. They were introduced a long time ago when the routes of infection were not understood as well as they are today. I do not invite readers to take my word for something which, to many people, sounds like a mad conspiracy theory of the kind popular during the pandemic, but rather offer them the evidence, to consider for themselves.

      In 1980 a hospital in the English city of Colchester decided to put the matter to the test. For six months, not one member of staff wore a facemask in the operating theatre during surgery. I give a link below to the academic study, which details the results of this test. It was published in the annals of the Royal College for Surgeons for England, so it is not some crackpot bit of research.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf

     I wonder if readers can guess what they found after six months of nobody wearing a facemask during surgery? Did wound infections go up? Remember that all the people, the nurses and surgeons and anaesthetist and all the rest of them were talking and behaving as usual. Even if people had coughs and colds, they still didn’t wear masks. The results of this experiment were even more startling than anybody could possibly have expected because wound infection actually went down during this period, rather than rising. Operating without masks was actually safer for patients. I quote from the published results of this experiment, ‘There was no increase in wound infections’. When masks were discarded for those six months in 1980, there was in fact a significant decrease in postoperative infections in wounds.  The author of the paper said, ‘The finding that there was an appreciable fall in the wound infection rate when masks were not worn certainly warrants further investigation.’ This is putting the case mildly.

     Just stop for a moment and reflect on that. Abandoning face masks during surgery, actually meant fewer infections for patients. This was forty-four years ago and of course everybody in operating theatres still wear facemasks, even though all the medical staff know that they do not prevent infections in patients. The reason that the practice has not been abandoned is very simple. Patients expect to see medical staff with face masks in that setting and feel scared and anxious if they don’t. The masks are purely for psychological purposes and have nothing at all to do with controlling infections.

     Which of course brings us to the strange situation when, for the better part of two years, it was illegal to get on a bus or train in Britain without wearing a face mask. Did the government know about the research to which I give a link here? I’m sure that even if they didn’t, the doctors advising them were well aware of it. This isn’t exactly a secret and doctors have been joking for years about the fact that facemasks don’t serve any useful purpose in the operating theatre. The only possible conclusion must be that when the law was changed to make them compulsory, those doing this knew that it was pointless but thought that it would at least, look as though they were doing something. All the fooling around with masks and the unpleasantness and shouting matches in shops and on public transport when people saw somebody who wasn’t wearing a mask were just nonsense. Even those in government who made us wear them  almost certainly knew that they were not doing anything useful.

     In years to come, it is likely that the images of crowds of people in the cities of the early twenty-first century, all wearing surgical masks, will be regarded with amused disbelief, in much the same way that we now look at picture of the so-called ‘plague doctors’ from centuries ago, like the one below. We look at this image and are amused that anybody could have thought that such an outfit might protect the wearer from catching the plague. So too will future generations gaze in fascination at pictures of the present generation wearing facemasks and thinking that this would stop their viruses from infecting other people.  

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf