You were lied to again.

Oops, looks like the science has changed.

Remember a few years ago when they told everyone to wear masks and lock themselves inside? Not only that, but do you also remember how they put up hand sanitizers everywhere?

It seemed like every store you went to there was a bottle of hand sanitizer at the entrance with signs telling you to sanitize your hands.

In fact, I still see them everywhere. Almost every store I go to there is a bottle of hand sanitizer, but I rarely see anyone use them anymore.

Now it turns out that they probably never helped with protecting against covid after all. Norwegian state media even wrote about this.

They say that there is little that shows that the use of hand sanitizer has contributed to help us avoid getting sick from covid. Because the virus infects in other ways.

Because covid doesn't spread very effectively on surfaces, using hand sanitizer doesn't do much at all. Instead covid is spread mainly in droplets through the air, where hand sanitizer obviously doesn't help.

According to the Norwegian Health Institute (FHI) covid primarily infect people by breathing in droplets containing the virus.

"The experience and research done during the pandemic show that hand hygiene has a low effect on covid infection" says Mette Fagernes, senior advisor at the Norwegian Health Institute.

The virus can infect through surface areas, but the risk for it is very low.

I never used the hand sanitizers at all. Here's the thing they don't tell you about han sanitizers. They are pretty bad for your skin. When I have used them in the past, my skin has become so dry that it begins to crack and bleed. It's obviously not a very good thing to walk around with open wounds on your hands when you want to avoid disease. Open wounds on your hands can increase the risk for infection. So in fact, hand sanitizers can be counter productive.

However...

In Norway they are still recommending people to practice good hand hygiene, not to prevent covid, but to prevent other diseases.

Obviously having a decent hand hygiene is a good thing. Wash your hands after going to the toilet, or if your hands are dirty. But obssesively going around and using alcohol hand sanitizer every few seconds like a maniac is not a good idea.

I know of people who got problems with OCD after being pushed to use hand sanitizer. People have literally gotten mental health problems because of this insanity.

Think back 5 years ago. If you saw someone going around sanitizing their hands every few minutes, you would probably assume they had some problems. Now it has become normalized, and it was all for nothing.

So if they were wrong about hand sanitizer, where they wrong about anything else?