Editors’ Note: This article previously misspelled Dr. Sun-Ha Hong’s name as “Dr. Sung-Ha Hong.” It has now been corrected.
Written by: Mahdi Dialden, News Writer
Anti-mask rallies have been organized over the past weekends in Canada, including a “mega rally” on October 17 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The event protested against the provincial health recommendations to wear a mask amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The rallies were hosted by Hugs Over Masks, an organization co-founded by Vladislav Sobolev. The Peak reached out to Sobolev for an interview for more information regarding his stance on the pandemic. He stated he was “pro-education and pro-science” and explained that he decided to kickstart the group when he attended an anti-mask protest in Toronto on May 2, with the objective of the rallies to educate and be “a place of compassion, of love, and positivity.”
According to Sobolev, the hugs in Hugs Over Masks “represents humanity in all its glory.” He added that masks are “a symbol of tyranny and fear because right now if you see anyone wearing masks in public, especially outside to me, [it] just shows that that person is very fearful,” he explained.
“When you have forced medical procedures happening — and a mask is a medical procedure — people don’t understand [that] when you’re wearing a mask, it alters how much oxygen your body gets.” Hugs Over Masks provided an academic source for this claim, however, it states that the cause behind the change in oxygen saturation is unclear, noting that the changes in oxygen found in the study “may be either due to the facial mask or the operational stress.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both state that masks are recommended to limit the spread of COVID-19 and that masks do not affect oxygen levels.
“Snapchat filters [ . . . ] was one of the ways [social media] indoctrinated and brainwashed children specifically to put things on their faces,” Sobolev explained. He uses this as an example of many ways that children have been influenced by social media to accustom them to “wearing masks on their faces, which is completely harmful and devastating to the growing, developing [of] a child’s body.” The WHO states that masks are not recommended for children under the age of five. They also note that evidence remains limited regarding harms and benefits for children wearing masks. The WHO maintains that mask-wearing depends on the extent of COVID-19 transmission in their area, the child’s ability to wear a mask properly, and recommend considerations regarding psychosocial development and children with disabilities.
The World Health Organization has labelled the surge in disinformation during the pandemic as an “infodemic” — a large consumption of information that leads to the spread of misinformation. Amongst other examples of mis/disinformation includes the claim that masks are detrimental to one’s health, according to multiple fact-checking sites. A study conducted by Cornell University evaluated 38 million English-written articles from traditional media worldwide and “identified over 1.1 million news articles that disseminated, amplified or reported on misinformation related to the pandemic.” Sarah Evanega, the lead author of the study and director of the Cornell Alliance for Science, said that “if people are misled by unscientific and unsubstantiated claims about the disease, they may be less likely to observe official guidance and thus risk spreading the virus.”
SFU Communication professor Dr. Sun-Ha Hong, who specializes in disinformation and conspiracies, says that it’s pivotal to go to the experts for any certain topic. “I am going to go by their best understanding of what is happening and what we need to do as a public to keep everybody safe.
“As a researcher myself, I know that it is often difficult to figure out exactly what a virus does or exactly what is known about a novel situation, so I understand that sometimes the advisories are going to change [ . . . ] or [that] there are certain margins of error. But I am not going to immediately believe that they must be lying.”
According to Dr. Hong, disinformation “creates an environment of doubt. So we find a lot of people that say, ‘I believe that the coronavirus is real. But I have my doubts about whether I need to wear a mask or whether I need to socially distance.’”
Dr. Hong added that attention does not directly correlate with credibility, and referenced Cornell University’s study which cited that politicians “are the single largest source of misinformation because they get amplified on television.
“[Politicians] tend to receive a disproportionate amount of media attention because they tend to be very good at strategizing on how to get that attention,” he said.
Dr. Hong wanted to highlight that every profession and job has an outlier — and that doesn’t compromise the truth. “99% of people who actually do this job, know what common sense is, but you will always find one person who works at a restaurant who has said something crazy about restaurants.” He added, “We are tricked into thinking the hundred other official sources must be wrong because there are two sources that say something different.
“A lot of the time, the most reliable sources tend to be boring sources. The truth is not always exciting,” Dr. Hong said. “You can find any argument you want on the internet if you look closely enough. So if you see something that does that, that’s got nothing to do with whether it’s true.”
