Op-Ed: Panhandle Mendacity District

By Brent Regan • July 25, 2020

Panhandle Health District, the people who supervise septic systems, has mandated that everyone in Kootenai County (with a few exceptions) must wear a face covering in public. Where they get the power to compel citizens, under penalty of law, to buy and use a product, something even the US Congress can’t do*, remains a mystery.

During testimony, Dr. Richard McLandress held up a study from The Lancet. He says the study was published June 27th, it was the basis of the CDC and WHO changing their recommendation in favor of mask use, is the correlation of 172 studies, and that it presents with a degree of certainty that we can reasonably expect an 85% reduction of transmission of the COVID virus with mask use.

The problem is, other than appearing in The Lancet, none of what McLandress said is true. The Meta-Study (a study of studies) was published June 1st, well after the CDC and WHO changed their position in April. The study was commissioned by the WHO, presumably to justify their policy change. It surveyed 604 full text articles and culled that number down to 172. Of those culled from consideration were 118 studies which had the “wrong outcome” AKA results that weren’t “cool”.

39 of the 172 studies dealt with mask vs. no mask but 10 of these studies had their results “adjusted”. Only 4 of the studies studied COVID-19 with the others being MERS or SARS.

Most of the 39 studies dealt with N95 or Surgical Mask use in a health care environment. Of the remaining handful of studies that reviewed mask use in a non-health-care setting they showed that if you wore a surgical grade mask (12 to 16 layers of cotton or similar) you had a 15% chance of being infected if you came in contact with an infected person and if you did not wear a mask you had a 21% chance. 6% is nowhere near the 85% reduction claimed by McLandress. Keep in mind that PHD did not mandate N95 or Surgical Masks, only “face coverings”, which have
unknown, but likely much lower efficacy.

McLandress held up as the Gold Standard a study commissioned by the WHO that reviewed selected studies, while rejecting those with the “wrong outcome”, to support the WHO’s new policy. Even with that, he misrepresented nearly every aspect of the study to support his position.