Authors: Enrico Trigoso The Epoch Times  June 3, 2022

During the Covid-19 pandemic, school and university administrators have dogmatically, and in many cases forcefully implemented mask and vaccine mandates with the intention to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV2, however, these policies haven’t had much effect, according to recent peer-reviewed studies.

A research paper published on May 18 underscores the deficiencies of current mask and vaccination mandates, as these policies did not contain the spread of SARS-CoV2 at Cornell University.

Despite the university having required masks on campus, isolation, and contact tracing within hours of any positive result, the paper recognizes that: “Cornell’s experience shows that traditional public health interventions were not a match for Omicron. While vaccination protected against severe illness, it was not sufficient to prevent rapid spread, even when combined with other public health measures including widespread surveillance testing.”

Another study found that secondary transmissions were “markedly lower in school compared with household settings, suggesting that household transmission is more important than school transmission in this pandemic.”

Toward the end of the semester in 2021, the almost completely vaccinated Cornell University shut down its campus due to a surge in COVID cases.

“Mask mandates have failed to control the spread of infection in schools, as this analysis of schools with and without mask mandates demonstrates. Prior studies have demonstrated that COVID vaccines do not prevent the spread of transmission,” Dr. Sanjay Verma told The Epoch Times, referring to the May 18 study.

Dr. Verma, a cardiologist practicing in California who has seen a spike in heart problems since mass vaccine implementation, thinks that the mask and vaccine mandates were not the best way to handle COVID.

“There was little, if any, emphasis on other more effective mitigation efforts: Ventilation-filtration, exercise, weight loss, and personal responsibility would be far more effective.”

“So these school and university mandates beg the question: what are they hoping to achieve?” he asked rhetorically.

Former Pfizer VP Michael Yeadon, a toxicologist and allergy/respiratory research expert, maintains that since the infection fatality ratio (IFR) of COVID-19 has not been high, the vaccines should not have been mandated, and that the masks were known to be useless in stopping respiratory viruses from previous scientific literature.

“It was known long before COVID-19 that face masks don’t do anything,” Yeadon said in a statement he sent to The Epoch Times.

“Many don’t know that blue medical masks aren’t filters. Your inspired and expired air moves in and out between the mask & your face. They are splashguards, that’s all.”

“This is a good review of the findings with masks in respiratory viruses by a recognized expert in the field. No effect,” Yeadon added. “Neither masks nor lockdowns prevented the spread of the virus. [Here is] a review and summary of 400 papers.”

“We know from recent research that COVID vaccines increase the risk of myocarditis, especially in males 16–29 years old,” Dr. Verma further noted.

“The putative and unproven benefits of such school and university policies need to be balanced with the very real risks (no matter how rare they may seem). Also, we must not forget that CDC data reveals zero excess deaths in 0–24 [year olds] in 2020 and 2021 compared to prior years. The overall hospitalization rate and IFR for this age group are very low and do not seem to warrant such mandates, which seem to be ineffective in stopping the spread anyway. Public health officials would better serve the public by emphasizing N95 masks for all high-risk individuals, ventilation-filtration improvements, exercise and weight loss, and isolating when symptomatic.”

Another study from May 25 found “no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates,” after replicating a “highly cited CDC study showing a negative association between school mask mandates and pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases,” with a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval.