Medical professionals continue to talk up masks – and not just Doctors Anthony Fauci (NIH), Rochelle Walensky (CDC), and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are saying that. Family doctors think masks are the way to go.
"There are much better solutions," says Stephen Petty, a certified industrial hygienist and president of EES Group, Inc. in Pompano Beach, Florida. "That's really in the domain of industrial hygienists whose job is to anticipate, recognize, evaluate, and control hazards – and part of that is to determine which way one goes to determine hazards."
In February, several individuals (including Petty) wrote the CDC saying that much of what it has been saying about masks is "at best misleading and at worse false."
"In industrial hygiene, we have what we call hierarchy of controls," Petty explains to AFN. "That's been around since 1950; it tells us how to control hazards – and masks don't even fit in that hierarchy."
According to Petty, personal protective equipment (PPE) – in this case, a respirator – is at the bottom of the barrel because people do not wear it properly.
"What you really want to use is engineering controls, which are, in the case of the virus, to either dilute it out by fresh air ventilation, filter it out with filters, or destroy it – and there's a number of technologies we've been advocating to do that," he adds.
Petty also points out there aren't many industrial hygienists at CDC who are making policy, which would account for the accusation of the CDC offering up "misleading" and "false" information about masks.
"I think what happened is the CDC got trapped between the politicians who wanted a quick and easy solution – and unfortunately, they bent the way of the politicians," he laments.
A concluding paragraph of the February 2022 letter to the CDC emphasizes that point:
"The CDC is doing enormous damage to science and scientists by allowing politics to dictate public health policy rather than actual science. Increasingly, and for good reason as we have stated, the public does not trust the CDC and its science; this must change."
