Oh, boy: right again.
Way back in May, 2020, I wrote that Wearing a Mask Is Useless Showing Off. For all the screeching from Pulpits of Truth about “harmful disinformation”, I was right. Especially about the “useless” bit.
It’s not that I’m any great sage, or “expert”, either. I’m just a moderately intelligent person who tries to read the evidence with an open mind. And the evidence was unequivocal, even in 2020: masks are useless in preventing a pandemic.
That was the clear conclusion of a meta-study by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, back in 2020. Nothing changed about the evidence. All that changed was that the CIDRAP felt compelled to alter its study with a preface that despite the lack of evidence they nonetheless supported mask mandate policies.
In other words, it had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics.
The clear evidence hasn’t changed. I was right about masks then, and the latest Cochrane Review — the gold standard in medical evidence — proves that I was right all along.
And the media and “experts” who were completely wrong? Silence.
In that context, a new, rigorous study that found masks did nothing to slow Covid-19 might have made the news. But no; a 305-page Cochrane analysis published globally on January 30 that assessed 78 high-quality scientific studies that included more than 610,000 participants has yet to rate a single mention in The Washington Post, The New York Times or on CNN, for instance.
Even passionate maskers, such as Baltimore epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo, conceded Cochrane reviews were the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine and its latest mask study “a very serious undertaking”.
So, what did Cochrane find? Exactly what we already knew but weren’t allowed to say, back in 2020.
Cochrane found that surgical masks, the kind doctors wear in operating theatres to avoid accidentally sneezing into an open wound, did nothing to stop Covid-19.
More embarrassing for Team Mask, those even more uncomfortable N95 masks made little to no difference either. Only hand washing seemed to work to prevent the spread of corona and influenza-like viruses.
“There is just no evidence masks make any difference. Full stop,” University of Oxford associate tutor Tom Jefferson, one of the study’s 12 authors, told Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi last week.
“There is just no evidence masks make any difference. Full stop.”
There never was.
This is not just an academic debate, either: the evidence-free mania for authoritarian mask mandates had very real and serious consequences.
“In the absence of evidence, you shouldn’t be forcing anybody to do so,” he said, describing advocates of forced masking as “activists, not scientists”.
It turns out the billions upon billions of masks that were manufactured in response to government mandates and now are floating in oceans or piling up at rubbish tips were likely to have been a colossal waste. American multinational 3M alone produced 4.5 billion N95 masks in 2020 and 2021, according to Statista; the mind boggles at what the global total for all masks might be.
Even more horrifying is the clear evidence that mask mandates have had a devastating effect on a generation of very young children. Effects that will take years, if ever, to recover from.
“Governments completely failed to do the right thing and demand better evidence,” Jefferson says.
Of course, they didn’t. Because if there’s one moral compass for governments, it’s power. Mask mandates delivered governments unprecedented power, along with the ability to identify dissenters on sight. They were one of the most sinister exercises in state power since the creeps in brown shirts made some people wear yellow stars.
Indeed, none of the findings in the latest Cochrane review should have been a surprise. The overwhelming consensus among scientists pre-Covid-19 was that forcing healthy people to wear masks, let alone outside, was pointless and potentially harmful.
The Australian
What makes it all so much worse is that they had to know it was all a lie. If a nobody blogger like me can weigh the evidence and reach a clear conclusion, then it’s not beyond the ability of the educated idiots in government and bureaucracy.
But governments and bureaucrats only heard what they wanted to hear — and what they wanted to hear was whatever handed them the most unelected, unaccountable power they could seize.