“Mask mandates caused higher COVID-19 death rates, according to the bombshell claims made in a new medical journal report analyzing fatality rates across the state of Kansas,” The National Pulse reports.
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Mask Mandates Caused MORE COVID Deaths, Study Alleges.https://t.co/f9gsbEqM8p
— Natalie Winters (@nataliegwinters) May 26, 2022
The observational study – “The Foegen Effect: A Mechanism by Which Facemasks Contribute to the COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate” – was published in Medicine in February 2022, authored by German doctor Zacharias Fögen.
The paper analyzed “whether mandatory mask use influenced the case fatality rate in Kansas” during the time period of August 1st, 2020 to October 15th. Kansas was used for comparison because the state allowed each of its 105 counties to decide whether or not to implement mask mandates, with 81 counties deciding against the measure.
“The most important finding from this study is that contrary to the accepted thought that fewer people are dying because infection rates are reduced by masks, this was not the case,” summarized the paper.
“Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates.”
The study also posited a potential reason for the disparity in risk ratio (RR) for dying from COVID-19:
“A rationale for the increased RR by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets, hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration.”
Dubbed the “Foegen effect,” the theory suggests that COVID-19 “virions spread (because of their smaller size) deeper into the respiratory tract.”
From the study’s discussion:
The mask mandates themselves have increased the CFR by 1.85 / 1.58 or by 85% / 58% in counties with mask mandates. It was also found that almost all of these additional deaths were attributed solely to COVID-19. Therefore, this number is most likely underestimated and depends to a large extent on the percentage of people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 but did not die with COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death. The study by Cobos-Siles et al[15] described that 15% of patients with COVID-19 infection died from decompensation due to other pathologies and the cause of death was unrelated to severe complications of COVID-19. The study by Rommel et al[16] describes that from 38.641 deaths with and by COVID-19 only 31.638 (81.9%) were reported with COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death. Correcting for this phenomenon (using the former value by Cobos-Siles) raises the RR for deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause to 2.10 (in configuration A).
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