The mask mandate did nothing. Will we learn the lessons?
At the end of January, the Cochrane Library published “Interventions physiques pour interrompre ou réduire la propagation des virus respiratoires”[1], an analysis that completely invalidates the mask mandate. Bret Stephens, journalist and columnist at the New York Times, wonders whether everyone will acknowledge their mistakes and whether those who were treated with contempt will get the apology they deserve.
“The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
‘There is just no evidence that they’ — masks — ‘make any difference,’ he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. ‘Full stop.’
But, wait, wait. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?
‘It makes no difference — none of it,’ said Jefferson.
What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose the mask?
‘They were convinced by non-randomised studies, flawed observational studies.’
What about the usefulness of masks in conjunction with other preventive measures, such as hand hygiene, physical distancing or air filtration?
‘There is no evidence that many of these things make any difference.’
These observations don’t come from just anywhere. Jefferson and 11 colleagues conducted the study for Cochrane, a British nonprofit widely regarded as the gold standard for its reviews of health care data. The conclusions were based on 78 randomised controlled trials, six of them during the Covid pandemic, with a total of 610,872 participants in multiple countries. And they track what has been widely observed in the United States: states with mask mandates fared no better against Covid than those without.”
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“But when it comes to the benefits of masking at the population level, the verdict is in: mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ [...] were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would be incumbent on the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political cost.
Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, questioned the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomised controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools would not change. If she ever wonders why respect for the CDC keeps falling, she could look to herself, resign and leave it to someone else to reorganise her agency.
That, too, probably won’t happen: we no longer live in a culture in which resignation is seen as the honourable course for public officials who fail in their jobs.
But the price is higher. When people say they ‘trust the science’, what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.
The CDC’s increasingly blind adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it needs to function as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice of the real enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.
It also betrays the technocratic mind-set that has an unpleasant habit of assuming that nothing is ever wrong with the well-laid plans of the bureaucracy — provided nobody gets in its way, nobody has a dissenting point of view, everyone does exactly what it asks, and for as long as the administration demands. This is the mentality that once believed that China offered a highly successful model of pandemic response.”
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“But whatever the reason, the mask mandates were a fool’s errand from the start. They may have created a false sense of safety — and therefore permission to resume semi-normal life. They did almost nothing to advance safety itself. The Cochrane report ought to be the final nail in this particular coffin.
There’s a final lesson. The last justification for masks is that, even if they proved ineffective, they seemed like a relatively low-cost and intuitively effective way of doing something against the virus in the early days of the pandemic. But ‘doing something’ isn’t science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy. And the people who had the courage to say so deserved to be listened to, not treated with contempt. They may never get the apology they deserve, but acknowledgement should be enough.”
Read the full article here:
Opinion | The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BAM!
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Photo source:
screenshot from the New York Times
[1] Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses - Jefferson, T - 2023 | Cochrane Library