How might strong advocates of community masking – who happen to occupy positions within the hierarchy that provide opportunities to influence research activity – go about achieving their aims? I suggest it would include some combination of discouraging the undertaking of robust research about mask effectiveness and potential harms, impeding and delaying the publication of unfavourable findings, and undermining the value of rigorous empirical science. A look at the history of the Cochrane mask reviews seems to offer an illuminating case study of these insidious forces in action.
Cochrane reviews are widely recognised to provide the most authoritative and comprehensive evaluation of the scientific evidence regarding specific healthcare interventions, and their raison d’être is to inform the decision-making process. On January 30th 2023, the latest version of the Cochrane review of the effectiveness of physical interventions (including masks) in reducing the spread of respiratory viruses was published. In keeping with their earlier reviews, the overarching conclusion of the authors confirmed what we already knew: masks achieve no appreciable reduction in viral transmission. Arguably of more interest are the indications that powerful forces within the academic world were at work to obstruct the dissemination of this inconvenient truth.
In regard to the potential benefits of mask-wearing, the findings of the review were emphatic: after considering 12 research trials (ten in the community and two among hospital workers) the main takeaway message was that face coverings made “little or no difference to influenza-like or COVID-19-like illness transmission”. When only studies where respiratory infections had been confirmed in a laboratory were included in the analysis, the conclusion was even more stark: “Wearing masks had no effect on… influenza or SARS-CoV-2 outcomes”. Furthermore, the type of mask used – the surgical variety or the higher-quality N95/P2 respirators – made no difference to the outcome.
It is plausible to assume that the conclusions of the Cochrane scholars did not make easy reading for the pro-mask establishment. The Covid era has been characterised by extraordinarily high levels of censorship of views that did not tally with the dominant public health narrative, and this silencing of alternative perspectives has often been evident within the academic and research spheres. A close inspection of the two most recent updates to the Cochrane review – their development and content – suggests that these malign forces of suppression may have been targeting this initiative in an effort to dilute the impact of its masks-are-ineffectual message. There are five observations consistent with this premise.
1. Scarcity of robust studies
It is intriguing that, three years after the start of the Covid event, there is a dearth of prospective randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the type that provide the most robust kind of scientific evidence – to evaluate the efficacy of community masking as a means of reducing viral transmission. In the words of the Cochrane review authors, there was a “relative paucity” of such studies “given the importance of the question”. In a politicised environment, where Covid policy was often determined without recourse to empirical evidence, perhaps those in power did not want to fund research that would provide a definitive answer to the question of whether masks offered an effective viral barrier, particularly in light of the earlier discouraging results?
2. Unpublished research
In November 2020, the Danish mask study – the first RCT of mask efficacy specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus – found that masks achieved no significant benefit for the wearer. Despite this ground-breaking conclusion, the research was initially rejected by at least three prestigious medical journals. This publication bias is also evident in the current Cochrane review where the authors, when discussing the range of RCTs included in the analysis, state that: “We identified four ongoing studies, of which one is finalised, but unreported, evaluating masks concurrent with the COVID‐19 pandemic” (my emphasis). Why would a finalised RCT, on such a pressing issue as mask effectiveness, not be published? The most likely answer, in this censorial environment, is that it came to the ‘wrong’ conclusion.
3. A disregard of the harms of masking
Very few of the studies included in the Cochrane review addressed the potential harms of wearing masks; harms were “rarely measured and poorly reported”. When one considers the wide range of credible negative consequences (physical, social and psychological) associated with mass masking in the community, this is a glaring omission. Once again, the most plausible reason for this inattention to harms in mask research in the last three years is political pressure – Government policy makers urgently sought evidence to support their premature decisions to impose mask mandates, to demonstrate their effectiveness as a viral barrier, and were disinclined to investigate the potential harms.
4. Publication delays
A blatant indication of top-down censorial influence on the ‘masks don’t work’ message is the way that publication of one of the Cochrane review updates was delayed. The previous 2020 version, incorporating updates up until January 2020, had passed peer review and was finalised by April of the same year. Extraordinarily, its publication was delayed until November 2020 due to “unexplained editorial decisions“. According to lead author, Dr. Tom Jefferson, this extra scrutiny was “a very unexpected event in Cochrane, especially during a period in which the topic of the review and the setting of policy was of global importance”.
It is unlikely to be coincidence that this window of delay corresponds to the period when the U.K. and other Governments, under intense pressure from pro-mask groups, U-turned and imposed mask mandates on their populations. In the midst of this policy flip-flop, it would have caused considerable political embarrassment to our public health leaders should the Cochrane group – the source of the most authoritative and comprehensive scientific evidence – have broadcast its conclusion that masks are ineffective as a viral barrier. In the words of Dr. Jefferson, by the time their report was published in November 2020, “the advisers had changed their minds about the evidence, and the policies had been set”.
The latest Cochrane review update includes studies up to October 2022. Its publication three months later suggest that this edition was not delayed, presumably because, at a time when most of society is unmasked, its conclusions are likely to evoke less discomfort for policy makers.
5. Editorial interference
An explicit example of the top-down interference with the Cochrane review process (referred to above) is an editorial that accompanied the 2020 edition. Including statements such as, “Waiting for strong evidence is a recipe for paralysis”, the content of this commentary appears totally at odds with the ethos of the Cochrane initiative. Indeed, this decisions-before-evidence assertion mirrors the proclamations of pro-mask zealot Professor Trish Greenhalgh, who has previously stated that the rigorous search for empirical evidence is the “enemy of good policy“.
In the words of Dr. Jefferson, the 2020 Cochrane editorial “seemed to undermine our work” and had the effect of “completely subverting the precautionary principle”. The lead author of the editorial was Dr. Soares-Weiser (Cochrane’s Chief Editor) who is “responsible for ensuring that the Cochrane Library meets its strategic goals of supporting health care decision-making by consistently publishing timely, high-priority, high-quality reviews”. Clearly, the 2020 Cochrane mask review failed her ‘timely’ criterion and her trivialisation of the value of empirical evidence is at odds with the ‘high-quality reviews’ aspiration.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS consultant clinical psychologist and a co-founder of the Smile Free campaign that opposes mask mandates.
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Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!