Anti-Face Mask YWNCR

What’s disgusting about it?

Honest about what? You’re asking a question. Based on pure garbage you have gleaned from the haters online mind you. If you wear a mask and social distance and manage to infect and kill someone anyway, ch”v, do you pretend that you didn’t and blame it on someone else? I’m just asking honestly. If you attend a protest and pretend it’s not a super spreader and you kill someone, ch”v, do you pretend it’s their own fault because the governors also said they weren’t super spreaders? I’m asking honestly about that one too?

Can we stop now?

rightwriter – a facemask is not a muzzle. And spreading comments like that online to suck people into that hype is wrong. If you don’t want to wear a mask, don’t wear one. But to make it out to be something it isn’t to validate your perspective is dishonest. We are in the middle of a pandemic, we need to be careful what information we spread anonymously with nothing to support it.

The real muzzle is not the piece of cloth itself, but rather the Facebook and Twitter driven culture of bullying and shaming anyone who dares ask a question about anything deemed an ikkar emunah of the corporate sponsored religion of capital-S “science.”

You didn’t hear there was a huge spike in Williamsburg after the wedding where no one was wearing masks?

I didn’t either

Dear @theprophet,

You are making a common error in your assumptions.

A mask won’t work to protect you if someone with COVID sneezes on you, that is right. But it protects others from your own sneezing COVID saliva by not allowing you to spread it.

Since we don’t know for sure who has COVID and who doesn’t, everyone should wear masks as a measure of Bein Adam LaChaveiro to make sure we don’t C”V accidentally make our friends ill.

Dear @yserbius123
Ok . No problem, if you wanna wear one wear a mask . But if you wear a mask I don’t need to wear one cause your safe .

Common- I’m not sure which of his posts you are referring to but what you wrote isn’t such a good answer because you would definitely take precautions in thise situations and he is talking about the precautions. If someone who drives drunk was only a danger to himself it would be on him to not do it, but he puts everyone else at risk. This is more in line with what they are asking of you. To stop seeing it as only your problem, and to be preventative (even tho that is the wrong use of that word)

First, the real question is why much (if not most) of the frum community tends to be skeptical of masks. That warrants a serious answer.

1. For the same reason many goyim are skeptical. The announced that Covid19 would be something similar to Ebola, Smallpox, Bubonic Plague, or at least the (misnamed) “Spanish Flu” of 1918. In terms of key factors the distinguish a serious public health threat, from what is a normal fact of life, Covid19 was a flop. It has almost no impact on children (i.e. less threatening than the annual flu). Antibody tests proved that over 90% of the cases don’t result in serious illness. The death rate increased (in the USA) from 0.8% to 0.9% (well within a “normal” range, note that Israel is about 0.5%, and many European countries are around 1%). And by counting people who test positive but don’t get sick as being “Covid19 cases” it looks like they are fudging the statistics. But this applies to goyim as well as Yidden.

2. Frum Jews are quite young since we have large families, and unlike real epidemics (and similar to normal diseases), Covid19 tends to kill older people. Look at the typical goy as someone almost ready for “assisted living”, and the typical frum yid as being someone in heder – they are dropping dead, and we aren’t.

3. Most Covid19 mortality is of the generation that is older than boomers, but too young to be the “qreatest generation” (i.e. who were children during World War II). These would be roughly those born between 1930 and 1946. Among us, these were the children of the holocaust, too young to work or hide or fight, and consequently unlikely to have survived the war. Most frum Jews who “should” be dying of Covid19 based on their age, never survived childhood. Among Americans, no children died due to hostile actions during World War II (e.g. so people like Joe Biden lived to be old and needing to worry about Covid19, a Jew born in Europe during the war, probably died in childhood).

4. Jews, like Blacks, have has long, very negative history, with public health figures. In the 20th century, in both Europe and America, public health “experts” believed in the then respectable and accepted science of Eugenics, which was the intellectual basis for such things as the holocaust, “Jim Crow” (and earlier, for slavery), immigration restrictions, and coercive family planning policies. Now the same public health community that thought that restricting the number of Jews was a necessary public health measure, are claiming that Jews davening, learning and doing mitsvos is a public health menace. We’ve heard that before.

Yserbius- if you will allow me to ask a sincere question that I have asked before but wasn’t given an answer to. According to your cheshbon, that the mask is only to protect others from you, why do thousands of people who have already had covid, have antibodies, and have bern told by their doctors they cannot get it again need to wear masks as well? Can we look at someone without who is following science without condemning them as uncaring and not complying with science?

So basically your answer is, ” no. I cannot answer your question. Instead i will insert my own dangerously angled lines of misinformation disguised as plain fact.
”
I’m really sorry to hear that. I was just hoping for an answer. All three times i asked.

Good shabbos

I’m just saying- whatever you do, don’t make a chillul Hashem.
I don’t care if you think it helps, it honestly doesn’t kill you to wear a mask even if it’s just a placebo, it doesn’t help
If somebody was seriously at risk and there was a .001 chance it would help would you wear a Mask?!?
if your glasses fog, wear a kids mask tried and true 😁

Yserbius123

What situations/locations are you referring to?

If masks are required, I agree, everyone should wear masks. If you are uncomfortable in a mask, go somewhere where they are not required.

If masks are not required, then you can’t be upset at those not wearing them. If you think you are unsafe there, go somewhere else.

I also don’t agree with your assessment of how easy it is to wear a mask. Speak for yourself, but some people have told me that it’s unbearable for them.

I have antibodies or had them back in June when I was tested and wear a mask in public. I work with gentiles and everyone has to wear a mask so even when I don’t have to wear masks I do. In some shuls I am the only one wearing a mask and I also try to keep my distance from others. But if you are at a simcha and food is being served how are you supposed to eat with the mask on? Similarly davening is uncomfortable when wearing a mask, many who wear masks during davening uncover their nose.
Masks are not a cure they can only slow down the rate of infection. Compliance is only accomplished by peer pressure. Most shuls have signs asking people to wear masks but it is only those shuls who have a gabbi handing out masks to those who aren’t wearing them that have 100% compliance

@syag-lchochma What part about my answer did you find difficult to understand? In a sentence, everyone needs to wear masks because this is a situation that if you don’t have 100% compliance, you end up with close to 0% compliance.

It wasn’t psychological it was physical. And while that’s an extreme, it’s very uncomfortable for many.

I wear a mask when and where I need to.

Okay, I answered your question. Now will you answer mine?

@SyagLchochma I’m not sure how I can be clearer: you asked “Why do people who are immune to COVID have to wear masks?” I answered “Because of Lo Pluhg. If we allow exceptions, the rules become murky and allow for too many dangerous loopholes and mistakes.” Also there’s the precedent. Once you start allowing people to break the rules, there’s no precedent to follow the rules anymore. Oh you have antibodies, very nice. When did you get tested? Last week? Last month? Six months ago? What were your levels? There are too many factors and too many variables to allow for this.

My problem right now, is that you keep pushing this cheshbon of mask wearing as a personal choice. That it’s effectiveness is exaggerated and all those people like me who have issues with the anti-mask brigade are wrong.

Where am I correct scientifically? I can literally post a megabyte worth of links of YWN would allow it. Every health organization and doctor of any legitimacy has been saying the same things I have: Wear a mask to stop yourself from spreading COVID. Halachically? I don’t think that even needs to be explained. We are talking mamesh pikuach nefesh over here.

I am being to harsh? Oh boo hoo. Every sensible person I know is making huge sacrifices to make sure their families are living normal and safe lives. I know people who had to stay locked up like prisoners for two weeks in their family guest bedroom because they were exposed. I know Yeshivos that had to institute draconian policies to make sure no one gets sick. I know girls who went to Seminary in Eretz Yisroel where the first few weeks were little different than a prison. I know people who are scared to go outside because they are elderly or otherwise vulnerable. I know stores that are bleeding money because people are too afraid to do shopping. I know people who have gotten very very sick. And I knew people who are no longer alive.

This is a very harsh situation and every tiny thing we can do to help, we should. So even if masks only help to stop the spread by 50% it’s well worth it. And it’s well worth any criticism against those that refuse and those others who make excuses for them.

@Yserbuis123
Are you saying that we can’t let these people with antibodies or the ones that tested negative go without masks ?? But that’s like 70% of people ??

@Theprophet Where did you get those numbers from? And testing negative is kind of meaningless if you got tested a month, or even a week ago.

Yserbius123,

“I watched a room full of people, (including children as young as ten!) daven on Yom Kippur and wear a mask the entire ten hours they were in shul!”

A room full of people when regulations in most states require reduced capacity indoors? How were you ok with that? Also, if the virus is transmitted via aerosols and not just large droplets, the masks would’ve become useless by Yishtabach as breath escaping the increasingly saturated masks became well mixed into the room air.

A room full of people when regulations in most states require reduced capacity indoors?

Don’t be ridiculous. Obviously it was at reduced capacity in accordance with the health guidelines. I think there were 50 people when the shul held 250.

Also, if the virus is transmitted via aerosols and not just large droplets, the masks would’ve become useless by Yishtabach as breath escaping the increasingly saturated masks became well mixed into the room air.

It’s mostly transmitted by large droplets. Aerosol transmission isn’t nearly as common. Sure it’s possible, but still a low enough chance to risk it.

He said hatzolah almost was called on Yom Kippur.

Read our follow up conversation. There are very very few people who have such difficulty with masks that they cannot wear them. Those people should stay away from others. For everyone else, the issue is just being uncomfortable.

The level of protection given by a mask for the wearer or others around the wearer is largely unknown, especially in non-clinical settings.

It’s more well known than you are choosing to acknowledge. Like I said before, there isn’t a legitimate health department in the world today who says not to wear masks. If I have a question in halacha, I ask a Rov and don’t question his reasoning. If I have a question about health, I ask a doctor. In this case, the doctors are saying “Wear a mask”.

@avram-in-md Wearing masks isn’t 100% effective, it’s probably more like 75%. But that’s all we need to get COVID-19 to go from an above 2 transmission rate to below 1. Keep it like that for a few months, and we can all get back to our normal lives.

All of this fails to answer this big question originally posed: Why are you so opposed to people wearing masks?

A single person being uncomfortable is a small price to pay to potentially protect others from a dangerous virus.

He’s married, but anyhow it’s more common than you think.

Well, obviously all those shuls, schools, and simchas that chose to go ahead with no changes due to COVID-19 and didn’t push for their members to wear masks.

You made it sound like you were railing against individuals who don’t wear masks. So you still didn’t answer my question.

Can we acknowledge that this is a conversation about wearing masks to protect others? A mask only offers a small protection from getting a virus. But it offers a huge protection to other people if the mask wearer would Chas v’Shalom be infected. That’s why we can only have these discussions if we agree that wearing a mask is for the benefit of others.

Yes, but can we also acknowledge that just saying it’s easy to wear a mask for long periods of time doesn’t make it true for many, and that nobody is forcing anyone to attend a shul or simcha where masks aren’t worn?