Masks “Make Little or No Difference”
– By Howard Sierer –
My wife’s doctor hasn’t worn a mask for the last two years. When we asked him about it, he said they don’t do any good. He’s right, and here’s why.
A new review conducted by a dozen Cochrane researchers from six countries concludes that “wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like and COVID‐19-like illness compared to not wearing masks.” Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.”
So, who is this “Cochrane” outfit, and on what basis does it make this judgement? The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing clinical trials is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions.
Cochrane is an international network of reviewers headquartered in London. It’s funded by the National Institutes of Health – our nation’s medical research agency – along with other nations’ health agencies and has a partnership with the World Health Organization. Medical journals and the NIH have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.”
Cochrane’s findings are not new. Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed little or no benefit from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like flu and colds based on experience with the H1N1 and SARS pandemics. That was why our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization, and other nations’ public-health agencies did not recommend masking the public in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic.
On February 29, 2020, just as COVID-19 (a SARS variant) began to make headlines, then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted, “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS! They are ineffective in preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.”
A few days earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities, facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.”
On March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.”
But when COVID-19 swamped the nation in the spring of 2020, the CDC abandoned the science. Suddenly and contrary to its own findings, masks somehow became our first line of defense.
A CDC press release cited two case studies as justification. One of the two CDC “studies” consisted entirely of two masked Missouri hair stylists with COVID whose clients had not caught the disease. The second was far from a “randomized clinical trial.” Needless to say, Cochrane’s researchers weren’t impressed.
Why did the CDC ignore the science and its own pre-pandemic plans to justify mask mandates based on such flimsy evidence? It’s clear that the CDC intended to provide some reassurance to the frightened public that it was on top of the pandemic by giving us an illusion of protecting ourselves.
Taking the CDC’s lead, much of the media hyped face masks to the extent that anyone who questioned their use was accused of endangering the public with disinformation. As a result, what has turned out to be correct information was censored and silenced.
Among the silenced: the Great Barrington Declaration written by a distinguished panel of 46 epidemiologists and other medical professionals. The declaration made public health recommendations that would have saved thousands of lives and avoided the social, psychological, and medical problems foisted on millions of school children by the CDC and the media.
Governors and mayors felt obliged to respond to the media hype by shutting down public facilities, including schools, mandating masks, and even mandating vaccinations. None of these steps made a measurable difference in COVID’s spread: a graph showing new daily COVID cases per capita in mask-mandate states and in no-mandate states are virtually identical over time.
There you have it. You and I and millions of other Americans have been victimized by the CDC and the politicized media. In a recent Congressional hearing, the CDC’s current director refused to acknowledge the center’s now-obvious masking mistake and continued to advocate masking.
The CDC and, by extension, the rest of the federal government, along with their fellow travelers in the media, have mortgaged their credibility. The next time they cry “wolf,” many of us villagers will stay in town and leave them to their imagined wolf.
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The tone of Sierer’s piece immediately made me suspicious, so I did some checking on Cochrane. Please read the following article from Forbes to get a broader perspective on this.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2023/03/11/cochrane-says-review-does-not-show-that-face-masks-dont-work-against-covid-19/?sh=1da2cf061937
Bob,
The Forbes article is interesting but I’ll stick with the empirical results shown in the hyperlinked graph in the third to last paragraph that shows that mask-mandate states fared no better than those where masks were optional. I’ll also stick with the Great Barrington Declaration – censored and suppressed by the CDC, the mass media and far too many government officials – whose implementation would have saved tens of thousands of seniors from premature death.
Bob,
Two more points worth considering. First, when most masks are worn, users’ glasses fog up. Why? Because the “tiny aerosols” containing the COVID virus the CDC discovered in the spring of 2020 and were referred to in the Forbes article are readily leaked out. Hence, masks “make little or no difference.” Second, school children who were at vanishingly small risk of serious COVID complications, have fallen far behind in their educational process by being forced first to home school and then needlessly masked when school started again despite the fact that they could never be expected to wear masks properly.
Bob, more food for thought. As discussed in today’s Wall Street Journal, here are things that scientists wish they had known when COVID first broke out and what they wish had been done, all of which relate to how masking was handled at the time:
Covid-19 was transmitted by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.
We could have worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone. We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.
Lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.
The isolation took a heavy toll on mental health, especially of young people. Drug overdoses soared. Anxiety and depression spiked among children who missed friends and school and had to endure remote learning.
Current Covid Variant + natural immunity is an obvious game changer nowadays. Do N95 surgical grade masks properly worn + proper decontamination (ex. Washing hands thoroughly) reduce viral exposure and lower viral dosage if one is exposed to an infected person shedding said virus? Add to that what about enclosed spaces, poor ventilation etc, and human density relative to those factors? Do Halloween masks work? Do porous cloth masks work? Do plastic masks work? What about no mask and breathing openly on top of a mountain? Here’s the problem … what if a viral strain 10x more lethal than original SARs CoV 2 arises in the future? How many will refuse to take precautions especially at the beginning of the pandemic when data is not available to thoroughly convince the American public that the threat is real? Add biological warfare to that equation…. Not going to play the blame game. – just food for thought.
Sam Harris interview… Lex Fridman channel published today.. . 5h ago.
4 & half hour interview – At 1:42:40.
Seems I am not alone in my concern cited above.
Peace out