Ugh. No. The masks didn't "poison people with carbon dioxide." Good Lord. I wore a surgical for extended hours for nearly a decade working in surgery before I changed careers. It was worn tight and fitted properly. There was no poisoning. Not to me or any of my colleagues. Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of surgical staff do this every single day all across the US without dying of some mythological "carbon dioxide poisoning."

This is just as ridiculous as the claims that CO2 is poisoning Gaia and we're all going to die from "climate change."

Did you bother to actually go down the rabbit hole, find the paper, and read it? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. Honestly. It's a lot of freaking work to chase this shit and the blogger you linked didn't bother. The article you linked doesn't mention it. I had to find the tiny-ass fine print at the bottom that told me this was scraped from another site, slaynews.com. A reputable source, no doubt! Slay Queen! Yaaaassssss! /eyeroll.

So, find the article, which to their credit actually does link to the actual research. It's a real paper and not a press release or some MSM "news" article. Bonus points for that. Even better is that it's a sub-journal from Cell. Cell's a legit biology journal and does good work, so there's hope!

Let's dig in and see what this paper actually says. Check the authors. "Independent researcher" and surgeon is the lead. Veterinarian. Ok. We're doing human medicine here, but vet training is no bullshit and the concepts are the same. Psychologist and two people whose professions I can't determine. Not a traditional team. Maybe they were students and this was a chart dive?

Check the methodology. Nope. It's a literature review of other chart dives. Meta-analysis can be useful, but if we're not dealing in RCTs, we're not dealing in high-quality evidence. Read further. Where's the connection between [CO2] and fertility? Found it. That's where the veterinarian comes in. They cite a US Navy study for submarines conducted on animals. Ethically, we'd never test on pregnant women. We work around that in medicine. Was hoping for a clever retrospective on women incidentally exposed to high [CO2], like, say, 100,000+ OR doctors, nurses, and technicians who wear these masks all day every day they're in the OR. That's the highest evidence you can ethically get here, but we've got extrapolation from animals and correlation. Correlation is not causation.

This is at best hypothesis-generating research. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not definitive, like the author claims and the OP is making out.

I'll forgive the OP for not knowing this. They don't teach it in schools. They don't teach people about levels of evidence and how to determine how we know what we think we know. I didn't learn it undergrad either, despite attending a very good program and double majoring in STEM. I only got this in grad school.

But, this is not what is claimed. It's bullshit.

The infertility issue is far more likely related to the vaccines. We have a lot of circumstantial evidence for that too. We're stuck working with post-vaccination birth rate data, and usually the European data, because God forbid NIH would actually fund a study that might call Pfizer on the carpet. Regardless of NIH stonewalling to protect the "safe and effective" narrative, when every nation that had high rates of vaccination for COVID is seeing record low birth rates, even lower than they were before, and the nations which didn't vaccinate are seeing no such change in fertility, that's "hypothesis-generating" too.