Nürnberg Health Department issues a novel outdoor mask recommendation to combat the nefarious threat of ... climate change-enhanced hay fever

Another day, another asininity from our public health overlords.

“We need an image for our press release. Quick, go outside Ulrike, and take a photo of something that’ll put our readers in mind of spring or pollen or whatever” – How this bafflingly terrible photo of a cherry magnolia tree outside the dismal Nürnberg Health Department came to be published on their website, probably.

Now that everyone has returned to his ordinary state of not caring what public health mandarins think about anything, the Nürnberg Health Department has decided to make a desperate pitch for continued relevancy and grab some headlines by asking the weary German public to dust off their masks once again:

It’s hay fever season, and one in five Germans suffers from a pollen allergy. To alleviate the symptoms, the Nürnberg Health Office is now advising people to wear masks outdoors. This is because FFP2 masks, as well as homemade ones, are good at blocking the small particles that cause allergies, which prevents the pollen from being absorbed via the airways.

Hay fever is the most common chronic disease in all industrialised nations and is associated with the blossoming of trees and woody plants … Many people are allergic to pollen and react with runny nose, scratchy throat, fatigue, shortness of breath and other allergy-related complaints. Climate change is extending the pollen season for some trees, grasses and other plants. This increases the length of time that people are exposed. Climate change also causes significant increases to the concentration of pollen earlier in the year.

You should think about masking to combat allergies now, even though you never did before, because of climate change, or something. That’s how stupid this is. It’s all based on the ravings of an allergist at Berlin Charité named Karl-Christian Bergmann, who is probably not smart enough to be a deep-cover mask sceptic secretly committed to depriving community masking of all credibility, and is in all likelihood issuing his obnoxious opinions on the continued use of public face coverings in all sincerity.

The recommendation comes just six weeks after the publication of a literature review in Heliyon, which surveys the existing experimental evidence to find that wearing a face mask for more than five minutes can increase the carbon dioxide concentration of inhaled air to as much as 3.2% – fully 80 times the concentration in fresh air, and perhaps ten times the toxicity threshold for chronic exposure. But, Bergmann and the Nürnberg public health lunitards think it might save you some sneezing, so really it’s all upside.