These are closer to pop-sci articles than proper papers. Please read everything Macintyre ever published on the topic of masking in healthcare works before 2020. Start with this one:
Linking me a bunch of public health websites isn’t convincing because these organizations don’t actually maintain epistemiological rigor, they just parrot whatever the dogma is.
The only RCT of masking for COVID-19 ever performed showed an insignificant benefit in terms of self-infection at best.
Meanwhile studies in HCW can’t rule out cloth masks causing bacterial pneumonia and increased self-infection.
Literally all of them link scientific papers, if you'd care to read.
And it's not "self-infection" that masking is a protection of. Nobody has claimed that. You wear a mask to protect those around you, and they wear their's to protect you.
Though it figures you are obsessed with the self and have no regard for the other.
No studies exist of infection to others for the obvious reason (too hard to track accurately). If you had read any of the literature you would know this.
Schools are a huge transmission vector for every communicable disease. Gathering a bunch of people from different households causes diseases to jump between households. It doesn't matter if the kids aren't harmed, it's communicating the disease through the population.
This has not shown to be the case for COVID-19. Hell, school closures weren’t even recommended by the WHO for influenza which can directly harm children.
You need to provide affirmative evidence before undertaking societal interventions with guaranteed negative impact. Does the hippocratic oath ring a bell?
The people in charge certainly seem to think that our lives can be put on hold indefinitely.
For me the most annoying thing is the idea that lockdown is somehow "saving" lives. People who are dying from COVID would have died from something else 2-3 years from now. These are old, sick people, whose lives are (mostly) behind them.
If I was an 80 yo and my grand-kids were put in prison to allow me to live a couple more years, I would be even more angry than I am right now.
