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.
After March 2020
With a strong sense of urgency, 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.
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.
Informed by his research and constant witness to the ongoing effects of compulsory masking, in January of 2022, Dr. Buckler’s sincerely-held religious beliefs compelled him to refuse orders to wear a mask even in the context of Active Duty military service. Dr. Buckler also publicly articulated his religious beliefs, reasons for refusal, and portions of his research while in uniform [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]. This resulted in adverse administrative actions, culminating in involuntary separation proceedings. In January of 2023, Dr. Buckler went before an Army Board of Inquiry, which recommended that he be retained in service. Dr. Buckler published The Book on Masks in November of 2023. The last adverse administrative actions were removed from his record in 2025, and as of this writing, Dr. Buckler remains on Active Duty.
