About the Author
Dr. Philip Buckler, DDS
Dr. Buckler earned his doctorate from the University of Detroit Mercy School of Dentistry in 2010, and has spent the last decade earning his living by aerosolizing the contents of people's mouths into his face - otherwise known as practicing dentistry.
Before March 2020
Dr. Buckler's recreational reading prior to March of 2020 included history, fear, behavioral psychology, and actual plagues (including but not limited to The Black Death, smallpox in the New World, cholera, and the Great Plague of Athens), providing a form of intellectual inoculation against the excesses and non-sequiturs that quickly dominated public policy and discourse about COVID-19.
Any of the books in the small selection below are highly readable and will greatly repay the investment of time.
"The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Should Not, and Put Ourselves In Great Danger" - by Daniel Gardner
"The Black Death: A Personal History" - by John Hatcher
"Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human" - by Michael and Ellen Kaplan
"Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One" - by Thomas Sowell
"The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" - by Philip Zimbardo, author of the Stanford Prison Experiment
"Scared to Death" - by investigative journalist Christopher Booker and Richard North
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After March 2020
With a strong sense of urgency and the assistance of several very kind research librarians, Dr. Buckler embarked on an ongoing journey to comprehensively review and assimilate the scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of facemasks from the development of germ theory in the late 1800s to the present. More than 1,200 hours and hundreds of articles later, he had his answer: standard medical masks do not mitigate the spread of respiratory viruses, N95s show no statistically-significant improvement over standard medical masks, and cloth masks likely make things worse even when worn by trained clinical staff and washed on a daily basis. Politicians, bureaucrats, public health officials, and too many healthcare providers threw out decades of accrued scientific knowledge based on fear, malformed intuition, herd mentality, basic logical fallacies, and unexamined moral presuppositions.
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The term anaphylaxis is used to describe a life-threatening cascade overreaction by the human body. Similarly, societies may respond to perceived threats using measures which, themselves, are far more damaging than the original hazard. Universal masking has been a psychological lynchpin of the self-destructive response to COVID-19 which future generations will look back on with incredulity.