1/ “WE CANNOT TEACH IN MASKS”-“Historically, the deprivation of the face & the refusal of contact with others (frequently in the context of virulent disease) have been the very first & most effective gestures of dehumanization https://lockdownsceptics.org/against-masks-and-distancing-at-university/

2/ “And yet, now we are asked to imagine a truly risible classroom in which the teacher, and perhaps eventually everyone, is faceless, masked, and spaced two metres apart,…”

3/ “…so that all chance of serious interaction, human interaction – between student and teacher, but, perhaps most ruinously of all, among students themselves – is ruled out in favour of the atmosphere of the operating theatre”

4/ “Masking smothers the breath, muffles speech, & hides the face. Distancing, including the refusal of contact altogether in the form of online teaching, renders the body so abstract as to be effectively, if not actually, virtual”

5/ “These measures, now mandated by the university, render higher education, and indeed all education, impossible, or at least greatly inferior to what it should be”

6/ “We strongly object to the prospect of teaching as an inscrutable, distant, faceless other, confronting a host of joyless and atomised learners”

7/ “In any case, risks from Covid are now very slight; and some things, like education, are worth risking something for; and risks can be calculated”

8/ “On May 10th this year, David Spiegelhalter of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University described the threat posed by the virus to the health of young people as ‘staggeringly low’”.

9/ “On May 5th, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine, Health Research and Policy, and Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, described the risks to those below retirement age as less serious than the risks involved in their daily drive to work.”

10/ “Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University, has repeatedly explained that she and her colleagues recommend exposure of the general populace to the virus so that immunity is allowed to develop…”

11/ “… a more medically effective strategy than the predominant response of isolation, distance, and protection, which is premised upon the expectation of a fully effective vaccine that can never be guaranteed to arrive”

12/ “Such scientific testimony is made irrelevant while the university renders its duty to educate 2ndary to its pursuit of the ‘safety’ of its staff & students, where ‘safety’ refers to feelings of safety rather than to actual safety, which is not in fact, now under any threat.”