UPDATE: The site has received a trademark violation from the Minnesota Department of Health due to it mimicking the logo, color scheme, and URL structure of the department. It has since moved to an offshore hosting provider at maskoffmn.org.
Type “maskupmn.org” into your web browser and you will be directed to a website that claims the COVID-19 pandemic as “a fraud.”
Created on Oct. 22, the deceptively-named website was originally using images and similar designs from the state’s official COVID-19 promotional materials, but had made some changes as of Friday. The site claims that “the COVID-19 crisis is a fraud,” with sections titled “Unreliable Tests” and “Padded Death Count.”
“The name of the site was really to just counter all of the ‘programming’ coming from the state of Minnesota and the Minnesota Department of Health,” said the anonymous creator of the site, who used an encrypted email to correspond with Alpha News.
“I became frustrated with the media and health departments spreading so much fear without any context,” said the creator. “Every day I see the people, families, and businesses in my community struggling to keep up with all of the senseless guidelines. It’s driving people insane and making life not fun for anyone.”
“Never before have ‘cases’ been based on flawed diagnostics without clinical evaluation. Never before have meaningless ‘cases’ been used to impose unconstitutional/unscientific lockdowns/restrictions. Never before has there been a catastrophic focus on one virus at the cost of ALL else,” the website creator continued.
The site encourages Minnesotans to do their own research and promotes ideas that contradict the state’s official coronavirus narrative. The CDC, the Minnesota Department of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci are all used as sources.
“It was important to not turn this into another conspiracy theory website as there are already a lot of those out there. I wanted this to be ‘un-debunkable,’ meaning all of the sources were from official/mainstream places,” the site creator told Alpha News.
When asked if they had experience in medicine, the anonymous creator said, “I have no experience in medicine. I’m just a citizen journalist/investigator.”
The Minnesota Department of Health did not respond to requests for comment on the site.
As of Nov. 2, the site has had 28,418 unique visitors, with most of them finding the site through social media.
“I hope by compiling all of this info into one place it makes it easy for people to do the research for themselves, which is why the site encourages you to visit each source to verify for yourself,” the creator told Alpha News. “All I know is this needs to stop as it’s becoming more and more clear that the lockdown itself is causing more loss in total years of life than the virus itself, and the only way it will end is if we all wake up and snap out of this hypnosis of fear.”
Judah Torgerud
Judah Torgerud is a freelance journalist working with Alpha News to keep the people informed and bring the truth to light. Contact him at whqnu@nycunarjfza.pbz.
