John Tierney has written an excellent article in City Journal summarising the latest Cochrane review showing masks do “approximately zero” against Covid. Here’s an excerpt.
The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses.
This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask mandates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the rest of the public-health establishment to forsake ‘the science’ — and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as determined as ever to ignore actual science. 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. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic, the World Health Organisation, the CDC, and other national public-health agencies did not recommend masking the public. But once COVID-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed. Officials ignored the previous findings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked.
The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomised clinical trial, and the gold standard for analysing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organisation for evaluating health interventions. Funded by the National Institutes of Health and other nations’ health agencies, it’s an international network of reviewers, based in London, that has partnerships with the WHO and Wikipedia. Medical journals have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognised worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare”.
It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature on masks, including trials during the COVID-19 pandemic in hospitals and in community settings. The 15 trials compared outcomes of wearing of surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness.
This may seem counterintuitive, writes Tierney, but not if you understand what’s going on at a microscopic scale.
It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly — and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs. Whatever theoretical benefits there might be, in clinical trials the benefits have turned out to be either illusory or offset by negative factors. 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.”
This lack of evidence would be enough to keep any new drug or medical treatment from being approved — much less one whose purported benefits had not even been weighed against the harmful side-effects. As the Cochrane reviewers disapprovingly note, few of the clinical trials of masks even bothered to collect data on the harmful effects on subjects. Most public-health officials and journalists have ignored the downsides, too, and social-media platforms have censored evidence of those harms. But there’s no doubt, from dozens of peer-reviewed studies, that masks cause social, psychological, and medical problems, including a constellation of maladies called “mask-induced exhaustion syndrome.”
Tierney notes that, despite all the data showing that COVID-19 poses virtually no risk to healthy children, “the CDC continues to recommend masking all [schoolchildren] in communities where infection rates are rising” and even “cruelly recommends masking everyone from age two on up”.
Incredibly, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, when asked about the Cochrane studt at a congressional hearing, said: “Our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time. This is an important study but the Cochrane review only includes randomised clinical trials, and, as you can imagine, many of the randomised clinical trials were for other respiratory viruses.”
Tierney notes this is a statement “remarkable for its chutzpah as well as its scientific incoherence”.
One of the worst mistakes of the CDC and other lavishly funded federal agencies was the failure to conduct randomized clinical trials to determine whether their policies were effective. The Cochrane review had to rely on pandemic mask trials conducted in other countries — and now Walensky has the gall to complain that other countries didn’t do enough of the research that U.S. agencies shirked. She’s right that some of the trials involved other viruses, but why dismiss them as irrelevant to the coronavirus? And while one can always wish for more studies to include in a meta-analysis, that’s no excuse to ignore the best available evidence in favor of the shoddy science peddled by her agency to defend its policies.
Data analyst Ian Miller – author of Unmasked: The Global Failure of Covid Mask Mandates – prepared a graph for a previous City Journal article that Tierney reproduces in his article “because it’s a visual confirmation — from nationwide data, not clinical trials — of the conclusions in the Cochrane review”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson have written a post on their Substack about the reaction to the recent update of their Cochrane Review.
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Good article, although I still think the author finds it hard to cut himself loose from the past. The fact he always felt good to be part of the ‘centre left’ is also strange. What good has any left wing Government done anywhere?
Glad he made it to Texas and found sanity. Hopefully he will never vote Dumb again.
Finally did the author mix up log and splinter in 3rd para?
It is a start. You (we) can’t expect everything in one step. Nobody can cast off long-held views overnight.
Peter Hitchens would agree!
Come on you smug Rightists.. Whilst it is true that relatively less on the Right have fallen for the Virtuous Covid Hoax than the naive Leftists, that still doesn’t include most of the Conservative Party!
This is far more than shallow point scoring between Left and Right, this is about seeing through a scam/hoax, as promoted by the Establishment. Some of us can see it, but sadly most not.
Like the author, I would have regarded myself as Centrist or possibly slightly Leftist in terms of economy, but we can likewise see horse faeces for what it is!
Orwell observed that the real divide is not between Left and Right, but between authoritarians and libertarians.
Yes but most of today’s conservative party are not right of centre. It was Tories that gave us Net Zero after all in 2019. It is Tories who speak of things like “Social Justice”. It is Tories that have allowed people to roam about with knives and gangs of people with rucksacks to walk into stores and fill up. It is Tories who have allowed 750,000 people to enter the country with 100,000 of them just arriving uninvited. All these people will have to live somewhere and presumably that will be in a house, but where are all these houses? So no we don’t have a conservative party now, we have Labour and we have Labour Lite.
Which just shows the absurdity of the whole left-right paradigm when not discussing France circa 1790.
The laughably misnamed ‘Conservative’ Party is dominated by Blue Blairites (if you don;t believe me, look at the tax rates & observe what happened to Truss when she dared suggest a meaningful change of approach). People will be shocked when the soon-to-be-in-power Red Blairites just dial all the idiocy of the last 14 years up to 11, resulting in more of the same but faster.
I found solace with Left Lockdown Sceptics that now call themselves Real Left.
https://real-left.com/
Off topic but the DS boffins have fixed notifications
I’ve encouraged them to give those features a plug as I feel they enhance the experience, but if they don’t I’ll post about it tomorrow
Good article by Dr Bell. I hadn’t been a “lefty” since my youth but I realised my London “liberal” tribe abandoned me over Trump and Brexit so by the time “Covid” came I was not surprised.
Both David & Bell arose from The America™ and their total cluelessness of European history of the first half of the 20th century is only shadowed by their apparently indomitable desire to keep making stupid remarks about it both David & Bell from The America™ certainly believe to be profound.
As I’m not in the mute of trying to explain this history to boneheads again, what about a question instead: Is the reason that you always write fascism when you mean totalitarianism that the idea that Stalin really wasn’t a nice guy offends your communist sympathies?
David, you should ask these “superior” specimens whether they believe that epidemics grow exponentially. If they say yes you can tell them that are bad at both “Math” and basic literature reviews.
It certainly has been very interesting – if not very pleasant – seeing ill-liberalism take centre stage in the attitudes of quite intelligent friends and acquaintances. It suddenly became a real clear dividing line, though no doubt it was always there under the surface, in less ‘clarifying’ times.
Excellent article.
Comparing far-left and far-right (the actual far-right, not someone who thinks Bearded Bill perhaps shouldn’t be donning a frock, slapping on the makeup, and reading stories to schoolchildren) is like comparing a red apple to a green apple – peel away the skin and what you’ll find beneath is always an apple. Communism is bold, brash totalitarianism, fascism is quiet, shy totalitarianism. The green and red skins of your totalitarian apple. The reason why so many more on the left succumbed is, quite simply, because so many more on the left – particularly the modern left, which is now the party of the middle-class ‘educated’ – consider themselves superior. And if you ‘know’ you’re superior then you have a duty to control the inferior – for their own good of course. Superior opinion isn’t opinion, it’s fact. Fact, because all superior people hold the same opinion, and all superior people can’t be wrong. And, because it’s fact, any inferior people holding a contradictory opinion must be forced in line. Because, fact.
The last few years has laid bare how many people enjoy the idea of total authority; either enforcing it or being subjected to it. The biggest social experiment in history and the results are not only bloody depressing, but a clear window into what comes next. We, on this site, are in a minority. Buckle down the hatches.
Thank you for this article.
Overnight, the British Establishment turned into Tyrants and the vast majority of the population demonstrated that they are gullible idiots who have no common-sense, ability or willingness to think or take responsibility for themselves.
It was the most depressing revelation of my life.
Yes, but I believe even Texas is covering the place in thousands of turbines. I suppose no one is perfect.