Day: 5 June 2020

Trying to write the daily update for Lockdown Sceptics when Caroline has left me in charge of the kids As regular readers of Lockdown Sceptics will know, there was no update on Tuesday or Thursday of this week. This led to all sorts of speculation, including that the site had been subject to a denial-of-service attack and that it had been shadow-banned by Google! In fact, I took Tuesday and Thursday off because I had to focus on preparing the Free Speech Union's legal challenge against Ofcom as well as pulling the papers together for next week's FSU board meting. I've also been neglecting my editorial duties at Quillette. That's my "day job", as it were, and doing Lockdown Sceptics has been more of a hobby. Continuing to do it every day just isn't sustainable – particularly if I want my marriage to Caroline to survive! So I'm going to be posting updates (and other material) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from now on, with weekend posts occasionally. I know a lot of you enjoy your regular dose of scepticism and I'm sorry I won't be able to provide it every day. But there's now a lot more of it about – in the Telegraph, for instance – and I'm confident that in due course even the Guardian and the ...

by David Crowe Masks are being widely recommended as protection against the COVID-19 virus, both to protect the wearer from infection and to protect others from those who do not know that they are infected. The trouble is that most of the scientific evidence and recommendations are against the use of masks by the general public, and some harms from wearing masks have been documented. Despite this, they are increasingly mandated. In some places you can’t walk around outside without a mask, and in others you can’t go inside a public space without a mask. Workers are often mandated to wear them – and now airline passengers, no matter the length of their flight. Evidence for the use of masks The strongest evidence for the use of masks is a Cochrane Collaboration review entitled “