Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 566 ｜ The Data Is In： Mask & Vaccine Mandates Don't Work ｜ Guest： Ian Miller

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Thursday. This episode, as always, is brought to you by

00:00:05.760 our friends at Good Ranchers. American meat delivered right to your front door. Go to

00:00:10.460 goodranchers.com slash Allie. Okay guys, I am so excited about today's episode. We have Ian Miller.

00:00:28.560 If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because every time we have talked about masks,

00:00:33.580 we cite the graphs that he creates using publicly available and accessible data about masking and

00:00:42.340 vaccine passports and if they have actually had any effect whatsoever on case counts or even death

00:00:48.960 counts or anything, not just in America, American cities and American states, but also abroad.

00:00:54.620 He has been so useful to me in understanding the data and understanding how these policies have

00:01:03.580 affected COVID case counts. Spoiler alert, they really haven't. And so that's what we're going

00:01:11.560 to discuss today. We're going to talk about the data, how he compiles this, where he is getting

00:01:16.080 his information. He recently wrote a book, which is a bestseller on Amazon, which is awesome. And

00:01:23.880 it is called Unmasked, the Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates. I'm also going to put some links

00:01:31.100 in the description of this episode because we've talked about this several times. I hate how mask

00:01:36.320 mandates have so disproportionately negatively affected children because children are necessarily 0.82

00:01:43.680 compliant. They have to listen to adults who have an authority over them and whom they're supposed

00:01:49.320 to trust. And that has really broken my heart, especially to see the hypocrisy of the politicians

00:01:56.020 that are putting these rules in place and have imposed them upon kids while they are not even,

00:02:04.180 these politicians are not even following the rules themselves. It just drives me mad. And I'm not

00:02:09.280 coming from an ideological position on this. I am coming from a data-driven perspective on this. There is

00:02:17.360 no data, there's no science that supports mask mandates or universal masking. There just isn't,

00:02:24.400 especially not for kids, especially not for kids. And so we're going to talk about that today with Ian.

00:02:30.500 This is going to be an awesome episode. And like I said, I'm going to include those links in the

00:02:35.880 description of this episode. The several studies that are, some of them are 20 years old that show

00:02:42.980 that masks don't mitigate the spread of this type of virus. I put a blog post together several months

00:02:49.460 ago that compiles links to all of these different kinds of studies. I'm going to include a couple

00:02:55.960 articles that dig into the CDC studies that purportedly show that masks work. These articles

00:03:03.300 reveal that the data doesn't actually prove that. And so we're going to get into all of that today

00:03:08.840 too. You guys, I know we're going to love this episode. Ian is super insightful on this subject.

00:03:14.460 So without further ado, here's our new friend, Ian Miller.

00:03:20.020 Ian, thank you so much for joining us. Can you first tell everyone who you are and what you do?

00:03:25.960 Yeah. So I have been on Twitter mostly and then started a sub stack last year writing about,

00:03:33.040 you know, the failure of mask mandates and a lot of other COVID policy in general. And

00:03:37.880 so that became kind of a thing for me starting in mid 2020, I would say just tracking the information,

00:03:44.580 tracking the data, putting in these annotations showing what we did and when and what were the

00:03:49.440 results afterwards. And how did this start for you? Are you a political person? Are you someone

00:03:56.420 who reads data for a living? Why did you decide to start charting this?

00:04:03.220 Yeah, I did some like data management analysis and stuff and for my day job. And so that was,

00:04:08.460 I had some background in it and I personally wanted to see it. I wanted to see the results.

00:04:13.200 You know, I live in California, so a few places on earth have been more dedicated to COVID

00:04:17.500 interventions in the state of California, especially Los Angeles. So, you know, I kind of

00:04:22.120 was seeing in 2020, you know, LA's in California, we're doing all these things. We're closing

00:04:25.880 everything. We have mask mandates everywhere. What's been the impact? Is it working? And so

00:04:30.960 it was, it's a lot of this, this information, it's very easy to find. It's all publicly available.

00:04:36.040 It's just, you can download it yourself from the CDC or the New York Times or Johns Hopkins. And

00:04:40.060 so I just went through and started downloading all of the data for a lot of different locations. And,

00:04:45.580 you know, people would reach out to me and say, could you put something together for Chicago or

00:04:49.540 for New York or for Philadelphia or anything like that? So I realized there's a lot of people looking

00:04:54.300 for this and it just kind of became something I would do consistently to try to just download the

00:04:57.940 data, put these annotations in, here's the policy and here's what happened afterwards. And

00:05:01.540 unfortunately, the results are pretty consistent, but it never really actually seems to work.

00:05:05.960 Yeah. So basically all you've done is you said, okay, this is the case rate or the death rate or

00:05:10.220 whatever metric you want to use. And this is when a mask mandate was put into place. This is when a

00:05:16.860 vaccine passport was put into place. And very often you compare that, you compare the case rate or

00:05:22.660 hospitalization rate against a state or an area that did not impose the same restrictions. And what we

00:05:30.040 often find is that the conclusion is basically the same. Really across states, countries, cities,

00:05:37.060 we have not seen a very significant difference either in cases or deaths, depending on the kind

00:05:44.980 of mask mandates and passports and restrictions that have been put into place. Is that correct?

00:05:51.100 Absolutely. That's 100% correct. And that's one of the best ways to kind of disprove these

00:05:55.960 arguments is to show, you know, you can't say that a policy mattered if a similar area that didn't

00:06:01.520 have the policy also had the same results. It's a very consistent pattern everywhere you look.

00:06:06.320 Recently, the governor of New York came out and said that, oh, because of our mask requirement,

00:06:10.820 we brought the, you know, the Omicron winter surge has ended because of our mask requirement,

00:06:15.640 except New Jersey had exactly the same results, in fact, slightly better results, but basically

00:06:20.280 identical numbers over the winter period without a statewide mask mandate. And so, you know, I realized

00:06:25.980 pretty early on, and it's been a consistent pattern, unfortunately, that a lot of, you know,

00:06:30.060 media outlets, CNNs and New York Times of the world, you know, they don't call them out for this.

00:06:34.440 They don't say, how could this be possible when New Jersey didn't have this policy? So that became

00:06:39.280 kind of my goal is to show you can't credit masks when these areas that didn't have it had the same

00:06:43.740 results or better results. Yeah. And I think, though, sometimes the pushback that you'll hear from

00:06:49.180 these Democratic political leaders is that they'll say, well, it's just because not enough people

00:06:54.880 complied. We put our mask mandate in place and it is really effective, but the people are just

00:07:01.160 disobedient and rebellious and they're just not compliant enough. And that's why, I mean,

00:07:06.020 that's what I get a lot when I say, when I share some of your charts and I get some detractor that

00:07:11.260 says, well, that's just because people aren't compliant enough. If we had a 100% masking and

00:07:16.000 compliance to the mask mandates, then, you know, those numbers would be going down. What do you think

00:07:21.260 about that? Well, there's a few things there. One of which is that if anything you're doing requires

00:07:27.760 100% of people to comply with it in order for it to work, it's never going to work because 100%

00:07:32.480 of people are never going to comply with anything anywhere. The other thing is that you can do some

00:07:37.620 measurements with compliance. Recently, Los Angeles County, the public health department went around

00:07:42.200 to businesses, did some surveys and observational data. I think they tracked something like 1200

00:07:46.040 businesses and said that over 90%, 95% of people were complying with the mask mandate. This is in mid

00:07:51.500 December 2021. And then just a couple of weeks later, LA broke every record that they had previously

00:07:56.580 had cases went up 20, 25 times higher than they'd ever been in LA. So, you know, when they even do

00:08:02.240 when they do measure the data on people asking actually complying, it doesn't help them. And

00:08:07.080 there's also some survey data that has been done throughout the pandemic, like YouGov did a track

00:08:11.320 to survey in the United States. And I show this in the book where the mask compliance from YouGov is

00:08:15.680 consistent pretty much the entire time, but the cases go up and down, regardless of the compliance.

00:08:21.100 So, and there's also been a lot of international survey data that I pulled and used in the book too.

00:08:26.020 So even when you do measure how many people are actually wearing it, it doesn't make a difference.

00:08:30.860 Yeah. And the mask thing is just, it's very confusing to me. And I talked to, I'm sure you

00:08:35.540 know who Dr. Scott Atlas is. He was a part of the COVID task force. And we had a conversation where

00:08:41.040 basically he said when he asked Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci to present the scientific literature

00:08:45.800 that proves that universal masking is actually going to mitigate the spread of COVID, that they didn't

00:08:50.540 have anything, that Deborah Birx actually cited this one CDC study that proved that two, two

00:08:56.520 employees of a salon who tested positive for COVID, but wore masks, apparently did not spread it to

00:09:02.560 their clients. Like that was the extent, apparently, according to Scott Atlas, of the scientific

00:09:07.360 literature that supported it. Of course, it's come out now through the reporting of journalists like

00:09:12.300 David Zwing, that even the studies that the CDC says supports masking, especially masking in schools,

00:09:19.140 that actually the data doesn't prove that. I think the CDC just came out with another study that they

00:09:25.300 say shows the efficacy of masking. And yet when journalists have broken it down and looked at the

00:09:30.820 actual data, that's not actually what it proves because it fails to account for all of the other

00:09:35.300 measures that were taken in schools and different places like that. And I just, I have a really hard

00:09:40.140 time understanding the why. If there is so little evidence to prove that masks and especially mask

00:09:46.500 mandates work, either in the general public or in school, why? Why the about face from Dr. Fauci in

00:09:54.600 March of 2020 basically condescending the idea that, you know, masks could ever work for something like

00:10:01.080 this to, if you don't wear a mask, you're a grandma killer by the summer of 2020. I mean, were you 0.99

00:10:06.960 surprised by that change? And if you were to guess kind of why they keep on doubling down on this

00:10:11.760 ineffective policy, what would you say? There's a lot of great points in there. One of the first

00:10:18.600 things that just to go back to that hairdresser thing for a minute, one of the flaws with that was

00:10:21.880 that only half the people that went to see these hairdressers even got tested. So there's another

00:10:25.980 half of the people that were clients of theirs that never even got tested. The CDC completely ignored

00:10:29.760 that. As far as the research, and I go into this in the book as well, where early on in late March

00:10:36.020 of 2020, Fauci was sent an email from one of his employees at the National Institute of Health saying

00:10:41.020 that they reviewed all the high quality evidence on masking in the general public, and it all

00:10:45.600 suggested masks would not have a significant impact. Literally just a few days later, I think

00:10:49.600 it was April 4th, like three or four days later, CDC and Fauci come out and say everybody should wear

00:10:54.360 a cloth mask. So clearly there was no science that changed in order to support this. So the why is a

00:11:01.440 very difficult question to answer because it's clear that they weren't, they always say we're

00:11:05.480 following the science. It's clear they weren't following the science because the science, all

00:11:08.580 this evidence and trial data had showed it wouldn't work. I think that they were, initially they were

00:11:14.580 thinking that the kind of Asian countries had done well because of masking. That was their thought.

00:11:19.580 I think they also wanted to be seen as doing something, you know, saying, well, we're fighting COVID

00:11:24.020 by telling everybody to wear a mask. And then I think it's kind of become this doubling down

00:11:29.500 because as you say, they promote it, promote it, promote it, say it's the most important thing to

00:11:33.020 do. The results aren't working, but they can't go back and say, actually, we were wrong. It never

00:11:38.300 really worked. They have to just kind of keep doubling down on what they're selling and promoting.

00:11:43.100 Yeah, I think it's that piece. Like if we're, if we could guess in the most charitable way,

00:11:49.280 what is behind these mandates, it's the, at least I'm doing something, thing, line, defense,

00:11:58.180 that at least I'm not doing anything. And that is why, I mean, obviously it's because he's a

00:12:03.140 Republican, but that's why I think DeSantis is demonized because even if the case and

00:12:07.500 hospitalization and death rates are similar in Florida to somewhere like California, well,

00:12:12.060 the bad thing is, isn't actually the result of the policy. That's what I've realized when it comes to

00:12:16.460 these COVID fear mongers. It's not the result. It's the, um, the intention or what is actually

00:12:22.700 done. So if a governor puts all of these restrictions in place and say they have a

00:12:27.180 higher death count than a state that does it, they are still deemed virtuous. And I mean, of course,

00:12:33.200 we saw the same thing with Donald Trump, that every single COVID death when he was president was

00:12:37.980 attributed directly to him. But of course, now that more people have died while Joe Biden was

00:12:43.700 president, no deaths are attributed to Joe Biden because at least he's doing something that's very

00:12:49.520 confounding to me. It's a great point. Um, same thing with Cuomo in New York, where New York has

00:12:56.180 had some of the worst numbers of anywhere in the world. And he was, you know, the Cuomo sexuals and

00:13:00.100 all these people that were so devoted to him, it's just completely absurd. Um, but I, yeah, I agree.

00:13:05.580 I think a lot of politicians realized that they would be criticized by the media for not doing enough

00:13:10.520 and not doing too much. So it became kind of this political benefit, politically beneficial for them

00:13:16.260 to kind of overdo it with policy because the media, I think a lot of them were scared and were

00:13:21.120 concerned. And so they were kind of advocating for further restrictions and more mask mandates and

00:13:26.260 more vaccine passports and all this. Um, so I think politicians kind of realized that they could get

00:13:32.000 away with doing more, but they couldn't get away as much with doing less. Uh, obviously if you're,

00:13:36.940 you know, DeSantis, there's really nothing you can do that will make them happy. Anything he does

00:13:40.260 is kind of criticized and, and, uh, screamed about, but yeah, I think that's a large part

00:13:45.420 the, what's kind of contributed to this.

00:13:51.860 What's crazy to me, and I'm sure this is maddening to you as well, is how accessible the data is that

00:13:58.360 you use to make your charts and how available it is to anyone. Like you don't have to have a special

00:14:04.740 password. You don't have to have a special degree to understand it. I don't have a background.

00:14:10.260 In data analysis. And it's very easy for me to understand and access these things.

00:14:15.540 If you have a search engine, if you have a connection to the internet, you can find these

00:14:20.700 things. And still you will have people say that if you don't support universal masking and

00:14:25.480 mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports, which you found the same conclusion there,

00:14:29.940 that that really doesn't make a difference to case rate and things like that. Um, that you are not

00:14:34.940 following the science and you are hateful and cruel and whatever. What do you think is inhibiting

00:14:41.400 people from simply looking at the data that is publicly available that shows the conclusions that

00:14:47.420 you are putting into very simple charts?

00:14:51.020 Right. And I've repeated that a few times, essentially saying, you know, this is,

00:14:54.680 it's their own fault. They made it easy to kind of disprove their arguments because this data is so

00:14:58.520 easily accessible and anybody can do it. I'll tell people, I can walk you through how to recreate

00:15:02.380 the chart yourself. It's not hard, but I think there's been this kind of, uh, turn mentally for

00:15:08.880 people where they, they were told for so long, you're a good person, you're doing the right thing.

00:15:13.680 You still see that where, when the governor of New York mandated mass again, in December,

00:15:17.260 she said, you know, 80% of adults have done the right thing and been vaccinated. Well,

00:15:20.880 if you're told over and over and over again, by everybody that you trust that you're a good

00:15:24.420 person and you've done the right thing and you've worn a mask and you've helped and contributed in

00:15:28.400 some way, it's a very powerful instinct for people to kind of maintain that. And it's also, I think

00:15:33.120 some people have been frustrated, the people that have gotten, you know, gotten vaccinated or

00:15:37.340 worn a mask the whole time that have feel like they've done the right thing. Um, I think they're

00:15:41.440 frustrated because they're also told it's the other person's fault. Um, so when, when you're given

00:15:46.160 that license to kind of be the police in a way where you get to say, Oh, you're the, you're the problem

00:15:50.500 here. You're not wearing a mask. You're not complying with, with what they told you to do.

00:15:54.220 Uh, I think it gives them this kind of superiority complex where they, they feel like they have the

00:15:59.080 license to blame other people for COVID not being over yet, which is never going to happen because

00:16:03.820 it's never going away. But those same people, it seems don't call out the politicians that have

00:16:11.080 put these rules in place that aren't following them themselves. It's always like other people who

00:16:16.880 aren't wearing their masks. It's always like the conservatives, the evangelicals who aren't 0.91

00:16:20.320 wearing their masks. It's never Eric Garcetti not wearing his mask. That's the problem. You know,

00:16:25.320 it's never Gavin Newsom not wearing his mask. That's the problem. It's okay for those people

00:16:30.260 to break the rules. But if someone like me breaks the rules, well, I'm the reason why people are still

00:16:34.860 dying from COVID, which of course isn't true. So that's also a little bit confusing to me,

00:16:39.880 like why there isn't more anger, um, about the hypocrisy of people like, you know, Stacey Abrams

00:16:48.320 sitting in a classroom full of masked little kids, totally unmasked herself. Of course,

00:16:52.900 she said the criticism was about racism. Eric Garcetti saying that when he took a picture

00:16:57.480 maskless with Magic Johnson, that he was holding his breath. I guess he was also doing that at the

00:17:02.300 Superbowl. All of these celebrities without masks on smooshed together in LA, which is apparently in a

00:17:08.080 state of emergency. So that little two-year-old still have to wear a mask to daycare. I know

00:17:13.200 that a lot of people do wake up because of that hypocrisy, but there are still so many people that

00:17:18.220 see that and they have no problem with it. There are parents that still send their little kid to

00:17:22.740 kindergarten with their mask on after they went to the Superbowl without a mask on and they're fine

00:17:26.740 with it. Is that crazy to you? It's absolutely crazy. Uh, there's a lot of, you brought up a lot of

00:17:33.220 great examples of this kind of inconsistency. And one of my favorites is, you know, Nancy Pelosi had a

00:17:37.440 fundraiser where all of the wealthy people that were at the fundraiser. Yeah, exactly. You know,

00:17:42.060 they're not wearing a mask, but everybody that's serving them food, they're all masked. Um, I think

00:17:46.180 a big problem is that the kind of a lot of media sources that people trust, like the New York Times

00:17:50.820 and the Washington Post, uh, the Atlantic have done a really terrible job of kind of calling out this

00:17:55.860 hypocrisy and saying, you know, if all these people don't actually think the rules are that

00:17:59.220 important that don't apply to them, well, why should we follow them? Um, they, they really just kind

00:18:03.520 of serve to promote and, and, and help this. Like I bring up examples in the book and I bring it up

00:18:07.840 on Twitter all the time where you see, you know, there was a story published, I think it was the

00:18:11.140 Washington Post that said, Iowa, welcome to Iowa state that doesn't care if you live or die because

00:18:15.200 they lifted their mask mandates. And there's never any follow-up to that. So people that read that

00:18:19.820 just see the story, see the headline and go, Oh my God, Iowa lifted their mask mandate. The numbers are

00:18:24.300 going to be terrible now. And they don't see the results after afterwards, which is that Iowa's has done

00:18:28.540 just fine. And their numbers have been much lower than states with mask mandates. So I think it's, uh,

00:18:33.680 it's this consistent problem of the hypocrisy, not being called out by the sources that these people

00:18:38.300 go to for information. And so they don't really hear the truth. They don't really hear the data and they

00:18:42.640 don't really kind of hear about the hypocrisy and, and, uh, you know, understand it and say to

00:18:48.920 themselves, this isn't, it clearly isn't that important because they're not doing it.

00:18:52.320 Yeah. And you know, now studies have come out, which I, there have been studies that were already

00:18:57.460 out there even before COVID that showed that, Hey, cloth masks and surgical masks really aren't

00:19:03.660 that effective when it comes to this particle size of COVID. It's just not. I mean, I was looking at

00:19:09.880 some, uh, uh, medical journals and I put them in a blog post several months ago, and I was just

00:19:15.940 stunned to find that really as far back as like the first SARS epidemic, there were studies that were

00:19:21.960 published in medical journals saying, Hey, masks really don't do anything when it comes to

00:19:27.440 mitigating the spread of this. And so again, this is publicly available data. And yet you will get

00:19:34.020 people who get very, who take it very personally, who will get very angry. And I do wonder how much

00:19:40.520 the kind of public health bureaucracy has been a part of that, that people think that being educated

00:19:46.200 or trusting the science is really just listening to what Francis Collins has to say, or the summary of

00:19:53.540 a study by the CDC, which is actually misleading and who aren't actually looking at the data because

00:19:58.900 maybe they don't want to, or maybe they're intimidated or maybe they think it's political,

00:20:03.580 but you had Francis Collins, the head of the NIH. He did this interview. He was kind of the evangelist

00:20:09.660 to evangelicals about masks and vaccines. And, you know, he held up his cloth mask and he said,

00:20:14.700 this is a, this is a life-saving device. And basically you're not loving your neighbor and

00:20:20.520 you're not a good Christian if you don't wear it. And I think to your point, that's a very powerful

00:20:26.020 psychological and spiritual form of manipulation. Oh, wow. You're not a Christian. You know, 1.00

00:20:32.980 this is a Christian podcast. You're not a Christian. If you don't wear this mask, you're not a good 1.00

00:20:37.260 person. No one wants to be a bad person. No one wants to be seen as, as selfish. And I just think

00:20:43.320 that you make a really good point that that could be part of the reason why people feel so compelled

00:20:48.020 to stick to this narrative, despite the facts contradicting it. Absolutely. It's, it's a very

00:20:55.780 powerful instinct to try to help others. And especially for Christians and I completely,

00:20:59.520 you know, it's a good instinct to have. I mean, we should want to help everybody, help our neighbor

00:21:02.760 and, and be kind that way. But what wearing a mask isn't doing that. It's not accomplishing that.

00:21:08.840 And that's, that's the kind of, they've used these, these kind of tools to, to tell, get compliance,

00:21:14.180 to encourage compliance. And, you know, it's very funny. You mentioned how Collins holds up a cloth

00:21:18.840 mask and then CNN recently come to one of their, their top medical experts, quote unquote, comes on

00:21:23.040 and says the cloth master facial decorations. So I think that's one of the key things to, to bring up

00:21:28.140 to people is that, you know, it's a good thing to want to help others, but what you're doing isn't

00:21:32.320 really helping. And the CDC studies that when they've tried to justify their, their masking

00:21:37.140 recommendations have been so deeply flawed that it doesn't take somebody with a lot of credentials

00:21:41.580 to understand it. I wrote a whole chapter about this in the book where you show, you know, they

00:21:45.060 try to say, oh, masks dropped infections by 75%, but they don't show you that they, they also dropped

00:21:50.620 by 75% in counties that didn't have a mask mandate. It's things like that. And it's, it's very frustrating

00:21:56.620 that they've kind of used messaging this way. And, and I think that they've also done, they purposely

00:22:01.360 kind of came out and tried to discredit anybody that, that was telling the opposite story. You know,

00:22:06.240 the great Barrington declaration was kind of this famous article written to try to say, we need to

00:22:10.800 protect, focus on protecting the elderly and let the rest of us go back to normal. And Francis 0.98

00:22:15.960 Collins and Fauci were kind of colluding privately to try to discredit those people. And they called

00:22:20.380 them fringe epidemiologists and they were incredibly well-credentialed experts in their field. So it's,

00:22:26.580 yeah, it's very frustrating how they've used language to try to convince people to wear masks.

00:22:30.400 I posed a question on Twitter. I think it was on Sunday night because just you're looking at the

00:22:40.360 Superbowl and I don't care that everyone is maskless. I think it's great. I would love for

00:22:44.840 everyone to continue to be maskless. I don't care that people aren't following the so-called rules

00:22:50.060 of the Superbowl or LA County, which said that you had to wear masks in this place. That doesn't bother

00:22:55.400 me. Obviously what bothers me is we've kind of already talked about is the fact that the next

00:23:00.280 day, two-year-old kindergartners would go to their daycare, go to their school, being forced to wear

00:23:05.240 masks and that people don't have a problem with that. And so I asked on Twitter, like, how does

00:23:09.400 it make logical sense that my two-year-old, in order to get on the plane, she has to wear a mask. 0.60

00:23:13.980 She's never had to wear a mask before. And so there have been things that we've missed out on as a

00:23:17.940 family, or we had to drive 15 hours to go somewhere because I didn't want to put her in a mask 1.00

00:23:21.940 because am I going to get that flight attendant who gets angry that my toddler won't wear a mask

00:23:26.400 and it just seemed like too much. And so we have to go through all of that, but adults can be

00:23:32.480 smooshed together in a stadium without masks and not just there, but I mean, there have been plenty

00:23:36.920 of football games over the past several months where people have been, you know, smooshed together

00:23:41.260 without a mask, which again is great, but how does that make scientific sense? And the only real

00:23:46.300 response that I got from people trying to be like, oh, I'm so scientific, was, well, the Super Bowl

00:23:52.820 is outside. It's outside. And planes are really dangerous places for COVID to spread. And so that's

00:23:59.840 why, you know, two-year-olds have to wear masks. Do you think that argument holds water?

00:24:06.380 Definitely does not. Planes have these incredibly powerful air filters that filter the air

00:24:11.200 repeatedly. In fact, they're probably even, if not the same as outside, maybe better. Not that

00:24:16.780 masks have any impact anyway, but, you know, if theory, if you were trying to make that argument,

00:24:21.940 the planes have these air filters that filter air constantly. So it wouldn't be a significant risk

00:24:27.220 on a plane regardless. One of the things that, you know, we're kind of outliers on the United States

00:24:31.600 is that is the two-year-old masking two-year-olds. You know, hardly anybody does that. I don't think a lot

00:24:35.660 of parents know that. I think it's just kind of, you know, people are just told what they're told by

00:24:39.420 the media or from the scientists, and they don't know that a lot of other countries have never

00:24:43.420 masked kids in schools. Most other countries, because the WHO doesn't recommend it. The WHO,

00:24:47.920 even though I think the WHO is in itself very corrupt in a lot of ways, but they don't even

00:24:52.920 recommend. They actually recommend against masking kids under five years old. Exactly, exactly. And

00:25:00.100 especially one of the things that drives me crazy is in California, for example, Los Angeles and San

00:25:04.060 Diego, and I don't know if this is still the case, but for a long time they were masking kids

00:25:06.860 outside at recess. So if you're trying to say that the Super Bowl isn't a problem because it's

00:25:10.500 outdoors, you know, they're masking kids outside at recess, you know, three, four, five, six-year-olds.

00:25:15.960 It's completely unsupported by any kind of scientific data or evidence. There are real harms to it

00:25:20.200 and, you know, significant side effects from masking kids that young and from masking them at schools.

00:25:25.300 And so, and there's no benefit. So basically, you know, every policy has a trade-off. What's the

00:25:29.280 harms and what's the benefits? There's no benefit to mask wearing in schools. All we're getting are harms,

00:25:33.760 and a lot of people are still defending it and supporting it and promoting it. It's completely

00:25:37.540 ludicrous. And then another response, I forgot about this one, is, well, everyone at the Super 0.72

00:25:43.420 Bowl, they had to show a negative test or vaccine verification. And two-year-olds, they can't get a

00:25:51.380 vaccine yet. And so obviously, they still have to wear masks. What do you say to that?

00:25:56.640 Well, unfortunately, in a lot of countries that do a better job of tracking this data,

00:26:01.400 the rates of infection in people that are fully vaccinated is higher than those,

00:26:05.640 the rates among people that are unvaccinated. This is the case in Denmark. It was a case in

00:26:09.700 Scotland, UK, and Ontario, Canada. A lot of the places that, Iceland for another example.

00:26:15.600 So, you know, trying to say that vaccinations are going to prevent the transmission of COVID is just

00:26:20.920 not, it's not backed up by any kind of scientific data or evidence anymore. I think a lot of experts,

00:26:26.120 again, this is the same problem where these experts kind of go on TV and they say, oh,

00:26:29.180 you can't get COVID if you get vaccinated. Joe Biden said that. A lot of, you know,

00:26:32.580 vouchers out there, it's a dead end for the virus if you get vaccinated. That's just not the case.

00:26:37.640 It doesn't mean there might, you know, there might be benefits to it. But as far as children who we

00:26:42.060 know are at extremely low risk of severe cases or from death from COVID, there's really no benefit to

00:26:48.500 it because it's not going to prevent them from spreading it to other kids or from spreading it to

00:26:51.700 adults. It's not going to prevent adults from spreading it to them. So there's really no

00:26:55.800 justification for that line of thinking. And it's very frustrating that it's kind of continued on

00:27:01.580 into 2022. Yeah. And this illogic is continuing to affect policy. D.C., her mayor or its mayor 0.67

00:27:09.460 announced that they are lifting the mask mandate for bars and restaurants, but not for kids in

00:27:14.860 school. According to Fox News, California is leaving school mask mandate in place despite lifting

00:27:20.500 indoor mask mandates elsewhere. Now, I saw also Politico reporting. I'm guessing this is this

00:27:27.420 is true. This makes sense to me that Gavin Newsom actually wants to lift mask mandates for school.

00:27:33.520 Well, that part isn't necessarily what is what seems likely to me. The next part does. But that it is

00:27:40.420 the teachers unions who are pushing back against lifting mask mandates in schools. And we're actually

00:27:46.900 seeing that in a lot of places. We're seeing that in many states that it's actually not the it's not

00:27:51.960 the experts. It's not the scientists that are making these decisions. Even the CDC has said that they

00:27:56.660 want to defer to the governors in making these decisions. The governors are then saying that they're

00:28:01.500 deferring to the teachers unions. So is maybe that's what's behind it is really that the teachers

00:28:08.120 unions are kind of imposing this guidance of kids wearing masks, even though it's ineffective and

00:28:13.960 really has nothing to do with science at all. Absolutely. And I think that's been a consistent

00:28:20.380 problem where there were these emails that came out that teachers unions had influenced CDC guidance

00:28:24.820 on school reopenings and school masking. I mean, that's completely insane. And, you know, for the

00:28:29.720 people that claim that to be following the science so closely, the fact that they're being influenced by a

00:28:33.880 political organization, which is essentially what teachers unions have become in the last two years,

00:28:38.100 is is really depressing. And it's it's a very important point to bring up because these people

00:28:43.560 try to pretend for so long they've been pretending for so long that they are all their decisions are

00:28:47.900 being based off of recommendations from the experts. And that's just not true. It's clearly

00:28:52.200 that they're that they're being influenced by outside sources. And that can't be acceptable,

00:28:56.020 especially when this is part of the goal with the book was to try to destroy the arguments behind

00:29:00.260 masking entirely. Because if you believe that masks work, they're always going to be licensed for

00:29:05.640 organizations like the teachers unions to try to bring it back if cases go up again, which I'm sure they

00:29:10.980 will. And again, in 20 winter, 22, 23. So, you know, if you if you buy the premise that masks

00:29:16.560 work, there can they can never really permanently go away. But then that's that's the goal is to try

00:29:21.620 to present the data and show all the evidence that it hasn't worked and that we can't keep going back

00:29:25.620 to these things over and over again and listening to teachers unions that think these these measures

00:29:30.020 actually make a difference.

00:29:31.600 And the amazing thing is that the the very people who often say, oh, we have to listen to the science and

00:29:36.780 Republicans are the ones that are politicizing this. I'm not saying that there are no

00:29:40.280 Republicans who have wrongly politicized it, but they are, you know, they are the ones whether

00:29:48.500 they realize it or not, that are actually doing what they're doing for politics. I try to tell

00:29:53.260 parents is that your child is wearing a mask to school because of politics. I know that you love

00:29:58.600 your child and you think that you are doing what's best for them. Of course, I think all parents

00:30:03.480 believe that they are doing that. But the restriction, the rule that your child has to wear a mask to

00:30:10.020 school is not for their safety. It's not based on science. It actually is based on politics,

00:30:15.060 not the other way around. And I'm hoping that your book, I'm hoping that people who are not

00:30:21.400 conservative that have all different kinds of political backgrounds will read it and that it

00:30:26.100 will help them wake up to the logic that has diluted so many people over the past couple of years.

00:30:32.520 I think one thing that's really difficult is to admit that you've believed a lie,

00:30:36.700 admit that you've been lied to, admit that maybe you impose something on your child unnecessarily

00:30:42.400 that could end up harming them long term. That's going to be really hard for a lot of people

00:30:47.380 to admit, don't you think? It definitely is. I think one thing I would say to people that feel

00:30:53.720 like that is, you know, there's nothing, there's no reason to blame yourself for listening to people

00:30:58.100 that you trust. You know, you listen to scientific experts. That makes sense. In theory, they should be

00:31:02.960 telling you the truth. The problem is, is unfortunately, they haven't been telling the

00:31:06.160 truth. They've been kind of trying to promote a policy as opposed to maintaining this kind of

00:31:10.120 dispassionate, scientific, evidentiary based line of thinking. And one thing to bring up as well is

00:31:15.900 that, you know, one of the problems that I've tried to fight against and, you know, blaming

00:31:20.360 Republicans is something that we look like somebody like Ron DeSantis, who was one of the first people

00:31:24.420 in the country to push for opening schools. He got the schools open. He pushed for normal schooling

00:31:28.400 without masking. And he was fought every bit of the way. And now it's kind of universally accepted

00:31:33.460 that closing schools was a disaster. It was a terrible policy. Never should have happened.

00:31:37.720 That masking in schools has had very little impact, if at all. And nobody kind of goes back and gives

00:31:43.140 him credit for being the first person to point that out. It's like, oh, Ron DeSantis is trying to

00:31:46.940 kill your kids. And it turns out, no, actually, he was right the whole time. And that's, so when you see 0.93

00:31:52.200 that people have been right, that were demonized, and they're telling you, this is what we should be

00:31:56.320 doing. That's kind of somebody you should be listening to more so than somebody who,

00:31:59.160 you know, didn't give you any evidence for why these measures were so important and has been

00:32:03.120 proven wrong over time. And good for him for abiding his time, because it can be really easy

00:32:07.880 to kind of acquiesce when there's a cacophony of voices that are calling you a killer and everyone

00:32:13.740 who supports you a killer. It can be really easy to either back down or kind of caveat or apologize

00:32:19.000 for your position. And he just kind of, he just knew that he just waited, that the spike that was

00:32:24.240 happening in all southern states in really the heat of the summer when people were inside was

00:32:29.360 going to go away. And it was going to switch geographically. And of course, that's what

00:32:33.700 happened. Now, what's incredible is that after a year of vaccines, mask mandates, January, we saw our

00:32:42.420 highest case rate ever, ever higher than at the start of this thing, higher than in January of 2021.

00:32:50.740 Now, the death rate, this is just according to Google, which compiled this data for the New York

00:32:56.100 Times and Our World in data, the death rate wasn't as high as it was in January 2021. But it was a lot

00:33:02.020 higher than it was over the summer when we had fewer vaccines going out. And so I'm a little bit

00:33:09.380 confused on that. And I'm not asking you to speculate about the efficacy of the vaccine. But don't you think

00:33:14.420 it's just a little strange that when 70 percent of the country has been fully vaccinated, a large

00:33:20.940 percentage has gotten their booster shot, we're seeing vaccine mandates and passports that's still

00:33:25.500 happening. Big employers are still requiring their employees to get this vaccine, that we had the

00:33:31.260 highest case rate ever in January versus a time when we had hardly any vaccines a year ago. That's just a

00:33:37.900 little strange to me. Yeah. And again, it goes back to the problem that the vaccines just don't stop

00:33:44.800 infections or transmission hardly, if anything at all, really. You know, we saw this kind of early

00:33:49.960 on where Singapore last summer was a much higher vaccination rate. The U.S. had their biggest surge

00:33:54.760 of the pandemic. So we should have known going into winter that this wasn't going to really stop

00:33:59.400 cases from happening. And clearly that didn't happen. And we can see this with Vermont. Vermont's numbers

00:34:04.220 had gone up. Iceland saw the same thing. All these very highly vaccinated areas that saw their biggest

00:34:09.000 surges of the pandemic. So trying to say that that would prevent surges, which is what a lot of experts

00:34:13.980 went on TV and did. They said, oh, if everybody, we just got a higher vaccination rate. And they would

00:34:17.580 set out these numbers, 80, 85 percent. And then they would ignore that areas that had that percentage

00:34:22.320 saw their highest surges of the pandemic before this. So I think it's been a very, it's very confusing

00:34:28.680 because it's so easy to just show. And I do this all the time where I'll point out, you know,

00:34:31.640 Fauci said if we get 70 percent of people vaccinated, we won't see surges anymore. And then,

00:34:35.860 of course, that's disproven just a few months later. So it kind of goes back to what I was

00:34:39.900 saying a minute ago about how, you know, when these people are wrong so often and so consistently

00:34:44.020 and so easily disproven, you got to stop trusting them at some point because it's clear that they're

00:34:48.680 kind of winging it. They're not really basing their mandates and their guidance on evidence. It's

00:34:53.520 just kind of political posturing. Yeah. And one of these days, I hope we can really

00:34:58.320 get to what is behind the motivation for what made Fauci and the public health bureaucracy

00:35:05.400 switch on masks. Because, yes, maybe it was just let's just do something. Maybe it was just,

00:35:11.300 hey, this is a political wedge to make it seem like Donald Trump doesn't care because he's kind

00:35:15.720 of flouted the whole mask thing. And therefore, maybe he'll lose in November. Maybe they see it as

00:35:20.540 a right-left issue. Or maybe it's more nefarious than that. I don't know where the propaganda is

00:35:24.520 coming from. I don't know what the motivations are to mask two-year-olds when I don't know if

00:35:28.480 any other country in the world is doing it. But I really, maybe it'll be you. Maybe you will

00:35:32.940 uncover, excuse me, something for us that tells us where this propaganda and this craziness is

00:35:40.440 actually coming from. What do you think is behind these politicians that are now rolling back

00:35:46.740 restrictions, even though cases, at least in January and February, have been so high? Are

00:35:54.900 like, are you optimistic about that? Are you cynical about that? What do you think?

00:36:00.480 I think it's mostly political pressure. I think they've realized the polling numbers have showed

00:36:04.960 people are really fed up with it. They're tired of these measures. They're tired of their kids being

00:36:08.480 masked. And I think that they realized that they were going to get really hurt in midterm elections

00:36:14.020 coming up if they continue these policies for too long. And I also, I feel like there's,

00:36:19.420 my concern is that a lot of states, like you mentioned, California being a state of emergency,

00:36:23.540 they just extended that again. And Illinois, the governor, when he said, oh, we're going to enter

00:36:27.660 a mask mandate, said it doesn't mean that we won't bring it back again when the numbers go up.

00:36:31.340 So my concern is that they're going to kind of give this temporary respite for now. And then as soon

00:36:36.080 as there's another surge again, which inevitably will happen, they're going to go right back to the same

00:36:40.880 policies that we already know don't work. So I think it's, it's been mostly political. I'm

00:36:45.860 optimistic to an extent that a lot of states that had statewide mask mandates in 2020 didn't bring

00:36:51.580 them back in this winter with all the big numbers, one of the numbers went crazy in Ohio and West

00:36:55.360 Virginia and places like that, where the governors had praised masks and mask mandates didn't go back

00:36:59.680 to it. So I think they realized that, you know, people are tired of it and that, you know, they can't,

00:37:04.220 they don't have the political capital to keep mandating masks forever, at least in some of these

00:37:07.700 states. I'm concerned about New York and Illinois and California, but yeah, optimistic about most of

00:37:13.260 the rest of the country kind of committing to return to full normalcy. Yeah, it really is a battle

00:37:18.140 against misinformation, true misinformation, and propaganda and just this faulty mindset. I saw a

00:37:25.220 tweet by someone the other day that said, you know, why are we throwing up our hands and saying we're done

00:37:30.720 with mask mandates when cases are so high? I can't believe we're lifting indoor mask mandates. And this is

00:37:35.840 a point that you make a lot in your tweets. Oh, so cases are at an all time high, meaning the policy

00:37:41.600 that was put in place has been ineffective. Let's just double down on the policy that was completely

00:37:46.360 ineffective. That should probably work this time. I mean, a lot of people think that way, crazily

00:37:50.080 enough. Yeah, it's amazing how that logical consistency works there, where it's like, well,

00:37:55.900 this policy is so important to keep, even though we just had it and broke every record with COVID cases.

00:38:00.720 And another thing I try to point out as well is, it's not just that the masks don't stop the

00:38:03.980 surges is that when you remove mask mandates, there's no negative side effects at all. And

00:38:07.980 people forget, but back in March of 2021, when Texas lifted their mask mandate,

00:38:12.540 there was a huge outcry of criticism. I go, I devote a large section of the book to it as well,

00:38:18.120 where you point out all these people, these politicians saying that he was part of a death

00:38:22.000 cult and wanted to murder Texans. And then, of course, the numbers a couple of weeks later were

00:38:26.480 lower. They actually continued to drop after the mandate was lifted. So it's not just that they

00:38:31.460 don't stop infections and surges. It's that after you remove it, there's no difference. But they

00:38:36.520 never go back and update the story or update that, you know, the people on Twitter and never go back

00:38:40.840 and say, actually, we got this one wrong. Removing the mask mandate didn't have any negative side

00:38:44.660 effects. It's maddening, Ian. It's maddening. And I know it is to you, too, because you deal with this

00:38:49.640 data all day long. And you see just how honestly not to be rude, but just stupid people are about this. 1.00

00:38:56.980 People are very stupid about this. And it's kind of disheartening. But I think that you've probably 1.00

00:39:01.360 probably changed more mind than you realize just by doing a simple thing of compiling data. And I'm

00:39:06.800 thankful for that. Can you tell everyone a little bit more about your book? What can they expect in

00:39:11.400 reading it? Well, thank you. First of all, it's very kind. But the idea behind the book was to show

00:39:18.460 and I kind of mentioned this earlier, show what was the evidence before COVID on mask mandates and

00:39:23.300 or masking, I should say. And then what happened afterwards? Like what was the new once they

00:39:28.100 decided to say where everybody should wear a mask? What was the guidance on what we should expect to

00:39:32.280 happen from from wearing masks in the general population? And then present the data of what

00:39:36.700 were the results afterwards? And you can show that by looking countries like Sweden, where nobody wore

00:39:40.480 masks. So I highlight them significantly. I showed all of the U.S. states, a lot of international

00:39:46.500 locations as well, where, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, it hasn't worked in the U.S. because

00:39:50.340 like a lot of people will say, oh, people weren't wearing masks. That's the reason it didn't work.

00:39:53.600 But when you go back and look at all these different locations, United Kingdom and France

00:39:58.220 and Italy and Spain, et cetera, you know, it's impossible to say that no one was wearing masks

00:40:02.540 there either. So especially because the enforcement in some of these areas was incredibly strict and

00:40:07.640 fines were very severe and police enforcement. So that was the goal to try to show, you know,

00:40:12.740 tell the story of like, what was science pre-COVID? What were the expectations? And then did the

00:40:16.880 results match the expectations? And I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but the results don't

00:40:21.300 line up with the expectations. Yeah. Wow. Well, thanks for the work that you do. And thanks for

00:40:25.920 working on this book. It's a bestseller on Amazon, which is really exciting. I think it just shows.

00:40:33.200 And there have been a lot of books like this that have told the other side of COVID. People are really

00:40:37.100 hungry for what's true. They're tired of the propaganda and they want to see the true side of it,

00:40:43.480 the other side of it. And so congratulations on that. I hope you sell lots and lots of books and

00:40:49.820 thank you for taking the time to come on the show and talk to us. Well, thank you very much. Thanks

00:40:55.340 very much for having me. Thank you. All right, guys, hope that you enjoyed that episode. Remember

00:41:05.260 tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow is my birthday. Today is my last day of being 29. Let me tell you just

00:41:14.960 like a really quick story about 29. So when I, and this is just so like you, I know whenever I meet

00:41:22.000 you guys, one thing that you say is I feel like I know you, I feel like we're friends. So, and I feel

00:41:26.580 that way too. So this probably isn't going to surprise you. When I was in first grade, we had like a local

00:41:32.420 news organization, like a local news station that we were visiting as, um, at a field trip. And one

00:41:40.020 of the anchors, I don't know how old she was, maybe like 45. Um, but it was her birthday. And so our

00:41:45.820 first grade class, we were all supposed to like write her cards. And I guess I had heard this. This

00:41:51.600 is what happens when you have like older siblings and you watch the things that they watch you, you know

00:41:57.120 things and you like no phrases, or, you know, things that people say that probably other six

00:42:02.280 and seven year olds don't. So the card that I wrote this woman that I don't know that she actually read

00:42:08.160 on air, or maybe I can find the tape somewhere. I said, I said, dear so-and-so happy birthday,

00:42:14.980 you 29 year old again. Why did I say that as a six year old, as a first grader, for some reason,

00:42:21.200 I just knew that when people get old, that they always want to say that they're 29 for a really long

00:42:26.500 time. Maybe that's what I'll do. Maybe I'll just continue saying I'm 29 forever. Not really.

00:42:31.900 I'm excited about turning 30 kind of, but I'm definitely going to milk it for the rest of the

00:42:36.700 day that I'm just in my late twenties. So for my 30th birthday tomorrow, it's going to be a bonus

00:42:42.120 episode. Make sure that you tune into that. It'll be out at the regular times. It'll be really fun.

00:42:46.960 We're going to listen to some voicemails from people giving some advice for twenties and thirties,

00:42:51.700 and I'm going to be doing the same thing. It's just going to be a really fun and reflective

00:42:55.660 and hopefully practical and maybe funny episode. And I'm excited about it. So make sure that you

00:43:03.640 tune in for that tomorrow. And also be sure to donate an item in my honor for my birthday. If

00:43:11.160 you want to know what you can do for me for my birthday, you can donate an item to Prestonwood

00:43:16.840 Pregnancy Center. It's a pregnancy center. It's a pro-life pregnancy center serving women and families

00:43:21.660 in crisis in Texas and they need baby items. And we've got an Amazon registry for them

00:43:29.260 in the description of this episode. Just click on that, donate what you can. It would be super

00:43:34.240 helpful. It's a way for us pro-lifers to put our money where our mouth is. So make sure that you do

00:43:38.880 that. And I will see you back here tomorrow on my 30th birthday.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - February 17, 2022

Ep 566 ｜ The Data Is In： Mask & Vaccine Mandates Don't Work ｜ Guest： Ian Miller

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