Mike Yeadon wrong again on lockdowns and face masks

Ex-Pfizer scientist turned lockdown sceptic Mike Yeadon appears in a video liked thousands of times on social media telling mistruths about the pandemic.

He first claims: “You don’t need masks, they don’t work.”

Masks do work. Masks have been shown in various studies to reduce the transmission of viral particles.

It may be the case that respirators work better than surgical masks, but surgical masks are still beneficial. There is a reason why they are used and have been used for decades in healthcare settings. 

Mr Yeadon then says: “Forget lockdowns, they never slow transmission which took place mostly in institutions like hospitals and care homes.”

The effect of lockdowns on reducing transmission has been covered by various scientific papers.

Theoretically, you would expect lockdowns, which limit the interaction of humans, to slow the spread of a disease which is spread by person-to-person contact. 

Circumstantial evidence also points to this conclusion. In England, there have been three lockdowns, in March 2020, in November 2020 and in January 2021. In each case, following the introduction of lockdown measures, cases and deaths which had been rising, then fell.  

It is worth noting that Mr Yeadon’s previous explanation for why cases and deaths fell in the spring of 2021 was that herd immunity had been reached which was evidently not true as tens of thousands of excess deaths were recorded over winter. 

As for the claim that transmission mainly happened in institutions, there isn’t enough evidence to say this. Some studies point to contact within households being responsible for the majority of infections.

We’ve written before on how it’s hard to know whether cases of Covid-19 in hospitals are actually due to hospital transmission.

Mr Yeadon then says: “You don’t need to be vaccinated by inadequately tested and somewhat dangerous gene-based spike protein-inducing proteins [sic].”

Three Covid-19 vaccines have been approved by the UK regulator for use at the time of writing: the Moderna vaccine, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Multiple stages of trials have proved that these three vaccines are safe and effective. Although a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and an incredibly rare kind of blood clot is still being investigated, the benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks for most people. 

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines both use mRNA “gene” technology which, once inside the body, provides the instructions on how to produce spike proteins like those found on the surface of the Covid-19 virus, prompting the body to generate antibodies. This is not dangerous.