Just Facts Daily

Face Masks

Have any gold standard studies found that face masks save lives?

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No randomized controlled trial (RCT), which is the gold standard for clinical research, has ever found that face masks have clinically meaningful benefits, much less saved lives. Based on a widely cited RCT in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of its authors claimed in the New York Times that it shows mask mandates or “handing out masks” at public events “could save thousands of lives each day globally and hundreds each day in the United States.” In reality, the authors excluded the all-cause mortality data that could prove or disprove that very claim — in violation of their own pre-analysis plan. In addition to this breach of research ethics, they employed tenuous statistics and unrealistic assumptions to extrapolate the conclusion that masks save lives.

DocumentationFace Mask RCTs Bangladesh RCT Defining RCTs Defining Clinically Meaningful

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Welfare, Christianity & the Constitution

Pastor & U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock (D–GA) claims that “cutting a trillion dollars out of Medicaid” is a “war on Christianity” because Jesus “never billed” anyone for “healing” them.

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IN FACT, Warnock is contradicting the faith he professes and substituting the government for Jesus. Here are the specifics:

The Bible contains at least 50 passages about giving, and none of them involve government welfare but self-sacrificing generosity.
Jesus told people to give in “secret” instead of announcing it “with trumpets” to “be honored by others.”
Warnock has publicly bragged about his role in giving away other people’s money taken under the force of taxation and misframed such welfare as a “tax cut.”
The Bible says to “give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion,” as is the case with taxation.
Jesus’s famous parable of the Good Samaritan had nothing to do with government but an individual who sacrificed his own time and money to help someone in need. Jesus then said, “Go and do likewise.”
Prior to the advent of the welfare state, Americans widely served as Good Samaritans by caring for the poor and the sick, and Thomas Jefferson wrote of the effectiveness and efficiencies of this system.
In the 1830s, a French historian and political scientist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S. and wrote that what “I most admire in America” is how “private” citizens cared for the “welfare of society” without “cooperation of the Government” and that the “sum of these private undertakings far exceeds all that the Government could have done.”
Contra Warnock, the role of taxes and government in the Bible is to stop “those who do wrong,” like murder and stealing.
The Declaration of Independence, which was signed by people steeped in Biblical principles, affirms that the purpose of government is to “secure” God-given “unalienable Rights” like “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Constitution, which was enacted by people steeped in Biblical principles, forbids governments from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or denying to “any person” the “equal protection of the laws.”
James Madison, the father of the Constitution and primary author of the Bill of Rights, wrote that the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution only applies to the “particular powers” in the clauses that follow it, such as coining money, issuing patents, and regulating commerce with foreign nations.
Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that the federal government doesn’t have “unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated.”
Until Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened in 1937 to pack the Supreme Court with six added justices, the Supreme Court commonly ruled that the federal government doesn’t have the power to establish social programs.

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